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

Promotion of pedagogic dialogue 
Moore (2004) believes that the discourse of the ‘charismatic’ teacher is a powerful myth 
founded on Burner‘s notion of ‘folk pedagogy’. He suggests that ‘charisma’, the characteristic 
regularly cited by students as paramount in a good teacher, might be better conceptualized as 
‘communicative’.
The power of dialogic approaches to learning and teaching can extend beyond whole class 
teaching. Indeed, it may argued that productive use of cognitively stimulating dialogue could be 
explored most fruitfully in small-group learning. This, however, does not appear to be widely 
recognized by teachers as practice that promotes thinking and understanding. As Baines et al. 
(2003, p.31) point out, “creating effective group-working tasks and conditions is harder and more 
time consuming than a traditional independent and didactic learning approach”. It may also be the 
result of a lack of understanding of ways to scaffold dialogue, and of what their talk role might be 
in promoting this. 
Fisher (2011) argues that if Gillies (2006) is correct in her supposition that teachers lack an 
understanding of how strategies for cooperative investigation may be embedded in the curriculum, 
then it is fair to suppose that the higher cognitive challenge of fostering ‘inter thinking’, or co-
learning through a social pedagogical approach remains a challenge too far for many.

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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
57 
Questioning 
The subject of classroom questioning has been the interest and concern of researchers and 
practitioners because of its long and venerable history as an educational strategy. In classroom 
settings, teacher questions are defined as instrumental cues or stimuli that convey to students the 
content elements to be learned. Questioning is effective when it allows students to engage with the 
learning process by actively composing responses. (Borich 1996; Muijs and Reynolds 2001; 
Morgan and Saxton 1994; Wragg and Brown 2001) suggest that lessons where questioning is 
effective are likely to have the following characteristics:
• Questions are planned and closely linked to the objectives of the lesson. 
• The learning of basic skills is enhanced by frequent questions following the exposition of new 
content that has been broken down into small steps. Each step should be followed by guided 
practice that provides opportunities for:
• Closed questions are used to check factual understanding and recall. 
• Open questions predominate. 
• Sequences of questions are planned so that the cognitive level increases as the questions go on.
• Pupils have opportunities to ask their own questions and seek their own answers. They are 
encouraged to provide feedback to each other. 
• The classroom climate is one where pupils feel secure enough to take risks, be tentative and make 
mistakes.