Over the last two years in my role as an education consultant I have become increasingly concerned about students’ and teachers’ use of appropriate transactional language – that is the language of learning. Highlighting weaknesses in students’ ability to express their ideas in a structured way can seem pedantic in what may be a vibrant learning environment, but because I have the privilege of observing pupils in a vastly different range of schools and contexts, I can see the difference it makes.
This was brought into sharp focus last summer term when, in the space of a week, I reviewed two outstanding but very contrasting schools by dint of their location and intake. One was a girls’ grammar school in a very middle-class area, and the other an outer-city school in an area of very high deprivation and mobility. Both schools had excellent teachers, a commitment to the whole pupil and high aspiration for their students’ futures, and yet the challenges they faced were completely different.
In the former, the ability to express ideas and enter into a dialogue to extend learning was the norm – pupils were articulate and confident to challenge their teachers and each other – the language of learning was their everyday language. In the other, teachers had to address the lack of communication skills at every level – it was not that students lacked knowledge or ideas, but the ability to communicate those ideas in a more structured way was a real challenge because it was not their everyday language – it had to be learned alongside the subject content.
While these two schools provide the most recent examples, I have seen this contrast again and again, so it was refreshing to hear a government minister highlight this.
Right now 28% of children finish their reception year without the early communication and reading skills that they need to thrive. Most pressingly, it is a persistent scandal that we have children starting school and struggling to communicate, to speak in full sentences. That we have children who have hardly yet opened a book, or had the chance to discover all the worlds books introduce you to. This matters, because when you’re behind from the start you rarely catch up, because, of course, your peers don’t wait, the gap just widens and this has a huge impact on social mobility. On average, disadvantaged children are four months behind at age five. That grows by an additional six months by the age of 11, and a further nine months by the age of 16. Children with poor vocabulary at age five are more than twice as likely to be unemployed when they are aged 34. It’s command of language, being able to express ourselves effectively, that is the gateway to success in school – and later on into later life.¹
While applauding the observations within his speech and his proposals to invest more in early years provision and home learning for the most disadvantaged pupils, I believe that there is more we need to do to address the issues in school, because it is not just the lack of pre-school learning that is the problem.
Children’s home and social environments are changing very rapidly and this affects their learning at every stage. Increasingly, children are engaged in communicating via social media using acronyms and visual media, texting rather than talking, and this applies not just to children – whole families spend more time on their screens than they do talking to each other. You only have to walk down the street or stand at the school gate to see parents on their phones, or sit in a restaurant and watch a whole family with phones and iPads. In talking to friends and family about how they spend their time, it seems that even television is not a shared experience, and meal times are often serial events rather than a collective activity.
I believe we have not yet seen the full impact of these changes on pupils’ learning because the teenagers of today were not exposed to the same amount of technology when they were very young, but many children in Key Stage 2 were, so we need to start the conversation now about how schools can address the issue.
The importance of talk was highlighted by Robin Alexander as part of his work on the Primary Review and his publication on Dialogic Teaching. He noted: ‘Talk has always been one of the essential tools of teaching and the best teachers use it with precision and flair. But talk is much more than an aid to effective teaching. Children, we now know, need to talk, and to experience a rich diet of spoken language in order to think and learn.’² This obviously preceded more recent concerns about lack of talk within the home and social environment, and so it has an even greater resonance for teachers today.
There is a significant body of evidence to show how the development of language and thought are intrinsically linked, so if children do not develop their language skills, their thought processes will be impeded. Talking is not just a type of learning – it is the basis of learning itself – a thought or an idea we cannot or do not express is not developed and sustained. Learning requires both the words to articulate meaning and the opportunity to express them – a social interaction with a teacher or a peer. If language is the basis of learning, then a classroom where talk is not the norm cannot be a rich learning environment.
It is both the language itself and the social interaction that requires us to use it which are currently under threat within the home and society today. Even at its most basic level, if we don’t all watch the same TV programme, there is no debate of its relative merits, and no discussion about what to watch. If we don’t eat together, then the opportunity to catch up on the day’s events or even complain about the food is missed. If we walk along the road holding our child’s hand but are talking on the phone, then the opportunity to point out something of interest or listen to their chatter is lost.
While this seems to paint a bleak picture of society today, and yet again brings responsibility to address such issues into school, in understanding the issues, it also creates an opportunity to challenge the barriers to learning which have faced disadvantaged children for decades.
So what’s the solution?
I think it is important to say at the outset that the solutions are really simple and incredibly difficult at the same time. Like with much pedagogical practice, at a rudimentary level we need to engage in teaching which promotes the development of language and gives learners the opportunity to express their ideas and thinking. Most teachers will say that they do this and at a basic level, most lessons will involve students talking about their learning – through questioning, through talk partners or through group tasks.
The issue is the quality of the language used and the degree to which pupils are supported to engage in a genuine dialogue about their learning. If the language skills of the pupils are poor, then without support and input the quality of talk and the development of thinking will be weak. If the opportunities for talk are tokenistic, then the opportunity to explore ideas and work towards an understanding will be lost.
The approach which has been widely recognised as effective is ‘dialogic teaching’, which requires a more fundamental change in the way we teach. Because it cannot (and should not) be prescribed or systematised, it is very difficult to develop as a consistent mode of teaching. Furthermore, the approach requires teachers to have the confidence and subject knowledge to enable pupils to explore their ideas and pursue different lines of enquiry while sustaining the direction of learning to ensure the teaching of key concepts. Seeing implicit social learning and explicit teaching of higher order concepts as linked and mutually supportive processes.
So, if we agree with Alexander’s statement that ‘talk is one of the essential tools of teaching and the best teachers use it with precision and flair, the challenge is therefore to clarify what it is that these teachers do with precision and flair and find ways of helping others to develop those skills.
After decades of providing professional development for teachers, I am clear that dialogic teaching is not something that can be taught in a top-down training model. The change required is fundamental and difficult, and, like all changes to pedagogical practice, it is hard to sustain over time unless there is an absolute commitment to do so. Headteachers will all too frequently bemoan the lack of consistency in AfL practices, despite almost 30 years of focus.
I believe that the solutions lie in gaining ownership of the issues, making small incremental changes which can be frequently used and reviewed and using a dialogic approach – building teams that develop their ideas and thinking together – articulating their uncertainties and hopefully their successes, collaborating and supporting each other.
So what might these small steps be that will help create a climate where genuine talk for learning can begin to flourish and over time become a sustainable model?
Firstly, we need to redress the balance in the way we value oral work rather than written work so that what pupils say is as important as what they write and that we have the same expectations of quality and accuracy in their oral responses as we do in their written work. To do this we need to ensure that every day, in every lesson, we pay attention to the quality of spoken language.
This means focusing on precision in terms of the grammar, syntax and vocabulary used and the clarity and appropriateness of the answer to the context or subject. It is perhaps this step which most fully addresses the challenge of poor language skills and brings us closest to the precision and flair that the best teachers use.
But it is challenging and requires a lot of practice. The first step is to build in more time for oral learning, to plan for more interactive and collaborative oral learning activities, then we need to model and highlight effective and appropriate use of language and provide clear and developmental feedback on oral responses and signal our interest in what they think and know.
Secondly, we need to develop our approach to questioning and our repertoire of questions so that our questioning has a clear and specific purpose and engages pupils in a dialogue to extend their thinking rather than feeding back what we have told them. The term authentic questioning was coined by Nystrand, citing dialogic questions as those which signal to students the teachers’ interest in what they think and know and not just whether they can report what someone else thinks or has said.³
As well as formulating questions that encourage pupils to explain, speculate, hypothesise and justify their ideas, we need to develop a culture where risk taking and tentative thinking can be expressed and where time is allowed for pupils to construct a response. A process where answers are built and developed incrementally and ideas revisited. A climate where pupils can ask as well as answer questions and challenge each other and their teachers.
To start this process, I have developed some question stems which provide a starting point for progressively more complex higher-order questions. These are not intended to be exhaustive, but they provide a good initial repertoire that teachers can build on over time with subject-specific and age-appropriate alternatives.
Higher Order Questioning Stems
I know that many dedicated teachers will read this article with a sense of dread that yet another initiative is coming their way, but if the hypothesis set out at the start of this article about a decline in the amount of talk in the home and society is true, and we know that language is the key, not only to learning, but also to brain development, then we cannot afford to ignore our role in helping children develop the language of learning. By making small changes we can make a difference, and if these changes work, we can build our own skills and knowledge and capitalise on that difference.
To help you make a start, here are 5 quick wins for improving dialogue:
Use flipped or pre-learning and then plan a peer-to-peer discussion to check understanding with a core purpose of identifying gaps in understanding.
Use flipped or pre-learning with a key task to formulate a higher-order question to pose to the class, a group or a peer.
Plan group tasks where each member of the group has a pre-assigned role. This will require negotiation, delegation, compromise and a willingness to challenge each other – ensure that the tasks are carefully observed and offer feedback on the oral skills used (you listened, you challenged constructively, you summarised the ideas).
Start the lesson with a key higher order question, allow time for peer-to-peer discussion – this needs to be at least 3 or 4 minutes or longer, depending on the level of difficulty – then build a complete answer with contributions from different students.
Give a stimulus with no text. This might be a picture, an object, a mathematical formula, a graph or a map and have students work in pairs or a group and get them to talk about it using some key prompts – What is it? What is it for? What does it tell you? How might you use it? Make sure to include the caveat that in giving an idea, they have to justify their reasoning, ‘I think … because …’ The aim would be to agree on a collective viewpoint or present their differing views and the reasons for them. Observe and feedback on reasoning, logic and their willingness to challenge each other.
Further Reading
Halliday, M.A.K. 1993. “Towards a Language-Based Theory of Learning”. Linguistics and Education. 5, no. 2: 93-116.
Mercer, Neil, and Steve Hodgkinson. Exploring Talk in Schools: Inspired by the Work of Douglas Barnes. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2013.
Skidmore, David, and Kyoko Murakami. Dialogic Pedagogy: The Importance of Dialogue in Teaching and Learning. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2016.
Knowledge Trails
Learning to Talk, Talking to Learn
Can good conversation stimulate better thinking? Dr Rupert Wegerif and a team of teachers and researchers at the Open University think it can - and they can prove it.
https://library.teachingtimes.com/articles/learning-talk-ttc1
The Language of Discussion
Researcher Fiona Maine speculates about what happens in children’s brains when they have a discussion.
https://library.teachingtimes.com/articles/the-language-of-discussion
Fostering Deep Thinking in the Primary Classroom
Is it ever too early to teach children how to think? Researchers Russell Grigg and Helen Lewis say it’s not. Here they report on the strategies uncovered during an action research project in South Wales to extend and deepen pupils’ thinking – even from a very young age.
https://library.teachingtimes.com/articles/fostering_deep_thinking_in_the_primary_classroom