Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom

This book aims to reorient thinking about how younger adolescents and their teachers, talking together, compose shared understandings that contribute to individual students' learning. Presenting a new conceptual framework that was derived from a study, the book argues that people learn not merely by being spoken (or written) to, but by participating in communicative exchanges. The book points out that dozens of schools and thousands of students participated in the study herein reported--a study which took place under the auspices of the National Center on Effective Secondary Schools. Sections in the book are, as follows: (1) "Dialogic Instruction: When Recitation Becomes Conversations" (Martin Nystrand); (2) "The Big Picture: Language and Learning in Hundreds of English lessons" (Martin Nystrand and Adam Gamoran); (3) "A Closer Look at Authentic Interaction: Profiles of Teacher-Student Talk in Two Classrooms" (Robert Kachur and Catherine Prendergast); and (4) "What's A Teacher to Do? Dialogism in the Classroom" (Martin Nystrand). Appendixes contain a sample literature familiarity test and scoring information for literature familiarity test. (NKA)