Using exploratory talk to promote children's dialogic identities

What are children's dialogic identities, you wonder? The word, dialogic, comes from the root word, dialogue and the term describes the way children see and position themselves and each other as meaning makers and inquirers of text. Discussion with one or more members in a group is carried out for children to build their dialogic identities. As mentioned in the reading, one significant feature of discussions in classroom contexts is that children can talk freely with one another, build onto one another's responses and ask questions with the teacher taking the role of a facilitator. It sounds very much like a learner-centered and social-affective (or collaborative) strategy that MOE will approve. This approach also encourages children to be active and maybe critical readers with multiple views while teaching them to be more than mere receptors of information passed down by the teacher.  

In a bid to address the question that teachers have with regards to using this approach, how do we scaffold an on-topic and rich discussion so students inquire collaboratively about texts, an exploratory talk framework was designed. Exploratory talk is defined as a kind of discourse where speakers follow a set of ground rules, share their knowledge and evaluate other's opinions or views in a fair and non-judgemental manner. When I consider the sets of ground rules designed by Mercer and Lisa to be used in my school context,  I feel that I will add in "be respectful to one another" as another rule because students, who tend to be more immature, still need to be taught and reminded to be kind to one another explicitly. Another thing that I picked out from this reading is that among the 5 boys involved in the exploratory talk, Trevor seems to be the least participative, so a potential issue with this approach is that less vocal or more reticent and shy students may not benefit as much from the discussion. While I see merits in this approach, motivating students to be interested in the texts before they can begin to talk about the texts, share their ideas with their classmates and accept any countering opinions appears to me, an important factor in how successful the lessons will be. And I believe motivating students is going to take more than just talk. 

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