Editor: Viv Edwards (University of Reading, UK)
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Volume: 13 Number: 2 Page: 99–117
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Bakhtin in the Classroom: What Constitutes a Dialogic Text? Some Lessons from Small Group Interaction
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Avril Haworth
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At a time when powerful agencies in the UK are advocating whole class teaching as an element of successful classroom practice (particularly directed at primary classrooms in relation to the teaching of
numeracy and literacy), I seek in this paper to examine the potential of Small Group Interaction (SGI) to provide significant linguistic opportunities which, I argue, whole class teaching is less well placed
to deliver. To do this, I shall compare data of two groups of children from the same classroom engaged on the same small group activity. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin (and Wertsch's interpretations of
Bakhtin) I shall seek to identify both monologic and dialogic features in the children's discourse, tracing the origins of monologic discourse in the practices of Whole Class Interaction (WCI) - the dominant
genre of the classroom. Following Bakhtin's account of addressivity and speech genre, I shall claim a role for dialogic talk in any classroom based on sociocultural principles of learning.
© Multilingual Matters 1999
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