The Impact of Dialogic Teaching on English Language Learners’ Speaking and Thinking Skills

Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Volume 8. Number 4. December 2017 
The impact of Dialogic Teaching on English Language Elhassan &
Adam
Arab World English Journal
www.awej.org
ISSN: 2229-9327
56 
3. Instruction/exposition (teacher – class, teacher – group or teacher – individual): Telling the 
learner what to do, and/or imparting information, and/or explaining facts, principles or procedures. 
4. Discussion (teacher – class, teacher group or student – student): The exchange of ideas with a 
view to sharing information and solving problems. 
5. Dialogue (teacher – class, teacher – group, teacher – student, or student – student): Achieving 
common understanding through structured and cumulative questioning and discussion. 
• Dialogue seems to be emerging as a cornerstone for “organizational learning”. 
• Dialogue appears to be a powerful way of harnessing the inherent-organizing collective 
intelligence of groups of people and of both broadening and deepening the collective inquiry 
process. 
• Dialogue shows possibilities for being an important breakthrough in the way people might govern 
themselves, whether in public or private domains. 
• Dialogue shows promise as an innovative alternative approach to producing coordinated action 
among collective. 
From a Bakhtinian perspective (1981), dialogue is not merely a term for describing the 
structure of speech in discourse: it is a phenomenon that penetrates the very structure of words 
themselves. (Wegerif, 2008, p350) asserts that dialogue is every written or spoken word that filled 
with the voices of others and shows no “overcoming” or “synthesis”. 
The relationship between dialogue and pedagogy 
Smith and Higgins (2006) suggest that the focus of attention should be placed, not on the 
questions that teachers ask, but more on the way in which they react to learners’ responses; in this 
they share some commonality with Alexander’ notion of an ‘emerging pedagogy’ of talk as means 
of helping to shape and develop learners’ engagement with learning and understanding.