© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.

Engaging learners: conversation- or dialogic-driven pedagogy?

Philip Chappell

‘Conversation-driven’ ELT privileges classroom talk as a primary source of language learning, yet it is often unclear to what the term ‘conversation’ is referring. This article reports on an investigation responding to this problem in which a substantial database of language classroom recordings was analysed for the types of talk that were taking place. Activities in language lessons that were driven by conversation were analysed using classroom discourse techniques. Opportunities for language learning through the language emerging from these activities were identified, and a type of talk was specified in which learners were engaged more in exploring issues and possibilities, and less in transacting information and opinions. This study demonstrates the importance of teachers being aware of the types of talk occurring in their lessons, which they should be strategically managing. It provides teachers with a platform from which they can begin to analyse the talk in their own classrooms.

This class is so different than my last one. In last term we talk and talk but never feel to learn much. In your class we talk and think. I mean you make us think and tell us how to talk and we talk and think and talk. (EFL student, author’s data)

Dogme ELT (Meddings and Thornbury 2009) is a movement that began at the turn of the millennium in response to the perceived misgivings of teachers’ language lessons relying on materials rather than ‘genuine’ communication. Teaching materials are presumed to hinder such communication and take the focus away from learner language. Based on the overriding aim of foregrounding the language created by the learners during meaningful communicative exchanges, a Dogme ‘syllabus’ is more about this ‘emergent language’ and less about the content of coursebooks and other materials. Language learning episodes are claimed to have their beginnings in these social interactions, where there is a perceived or noticed need to develop the repertoire of a learner’s functional linguistic system. Together, these claims have generated significant interest among many English language teachers, yet they have undergone little empirical investigation.

Central to Dogme ELT is its ‘conversation-driven’ methodology (ibid.: 8), which is also central to the concerns of this article. Notably, the

IntroductionThe ‘conversation-driven’ movement

ELT Journal Volume 68/1 January 2014; doi:10.1093/elt/cct040 1

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concern is that, if we are privileging conversation, then what is it exactly that is being privileged? In later sections of the paper, extracts from language lessons representative of Dogme ELT are exhibited in order to address this question; first, however, a review of classroom talk as relevant to the themes of this article is presented.

Considerable efforts have been made by classroom researchers over several decades to understand the talk that takes place between teachers and students. A common finding in most, if not all, of these studies is the preponderance of the recitation script (Lemke 1990), which is characterized by teacher-led sets of questions that are often unrelated and require students to respond with factual answers and known information. The aim is for answers to be predictable and correct. A typical example is:

Teacher: So [R] you have children? Yes? How many children do you have?

R (student): Five.

Teacher: Five children. Yes. Five children.

An identifying feature of recitation is that it often ends at the teacher’s second turn. The teacher’s feedback on the student’s response stifles possibilities for further student talk. Although not always the case, while recitation can be a valuable pedagogic tool when aimed at specific goals (Wells 1993), if used repeatedly (and very often it is), it creates classrooms where guessing and remembering superficial facts and information can become dominant classroom routines.

Conversely, there is talk reflecting ‘natural’ conversation, characterized by spontaneous spoken language taking place in real time and in a shared context. It is interactive and therefore jointly constructed and reciprocal. One of its primary functions is to develop interpersonal relations; accordingly it is often informal and expressive of our ‘wishes, feelings, attitudes and judgements’ (Thornbury and Slade 2006: 8). By their nature, natural conversation and classroom talk do not normally co-exist. Classroom talk is a form of institutional talk, restricted by the goals of teachers and students and the power relations that determine what kind of talk is allowed to occur, by whom, and when (Heritage 2005). Clearly, classroom talk does not meet the above criteria for natural conversation.

If Dogme ELT is driven by conversation, yet natural conversation is not usually possible in the classroom, what kind of talk could best support its aims? Is it the talk of the strong communicative language teaching (CLT) syllabus, with the premise that you learn by doing: learners talk to learn rather than learn to talk? Certainly, many accounts of lessons and actual lesson plans available on teachers’ blogs suggest this is a distinct possibility, at least for parts of lessons. Yet given what we know about language teacher cognition, it is naïve to suggest that picking and mixing from a list of methods and approaches really drives classroom planning decisions, especially those focused on discourse patterns; rather, it is far wiser to acknowledge the teacher’s own knowledge and

Classroom talk and genuine communication

The conversation in Dogme ELT conundrum

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beliefs about what constitutes good teaching and learning practices, and the impact of these on learners in classrooms (Borg 2003). Thus, challenging teachers’ claims that conversation-driven lessons result in superior language learning, while at the same time providing them with a strategy for investigating their own implementation of such teaching, will hopefully result in greater theorizing about their teaching and more informed talk about talk in the classroom.

Data have been drawn from a variety of sources, though this article draws primarily on audio-visual classroom data from a larger study investigating pedagogic discourse in an EFL context and a related project (Chappell 2010). In addition, language lessons which others have made available on internet sites have been used for the analysis of additional talk or simply as exemplars of self-proclaimed Dogme ELT lessons.

Lessons that met the criteria for Dogme ELT were selected and subjected to repeated viewings in order to establish a coding scheme for classroom activity types and types of classroom talk. Selected lessons from a range of activity types were transcribed and analysed using principles from classroom discourse analysis, including speech function and mood grammar analyses (see ‘Speech functions and mood grammar’ below for further explanation).

To address the conundrum introduced earlier, it is has been fruitful investigating what is known about the kinds of institutional classroom talk that promote the development of language for our learners. In doing so, this article draws upon and applies recent innovations in educational linguistics and classroom discourse. The following taxonomy (see Table 1) has been developed from a review of selected literature on classroom talk, with modifications made based upon the language lessons analysed for this study.

The first three kinds of talk presented in Table 1 are well known and documented in the literature on classroom discourse. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a language classroom in which these kinds of talk are not present, which is, as it happens, the case for the many hours of language lessons in this study. Arguably, these kinds of talk have a role in many language teaching contexts, yet it is unarguable that they should be part of a larger repertoire of talk that contains more exploratory, information-seeking, and inquiry-based discourse. Transcripts from many lessons contained at the very least traces of what is being termed here ‘discussion’ and ‘inquiry’ dialogue. As will be shown, this is the crucial area for Dogme lessons: the area in which informed teachers, it is argued, can make a world of difference for their learners. At the same time, the balance between the two is one that needs to be strategically managed to avoid the problem that our EFL student in the opening epigraph encountered in her previous study period: ‘... we talk and talk but never feel to learn much’.

CLT, in its stronger or weaker forms, makes extensive use of discussion activities, defined here as the exchange of ideas with a view to sharing

Research methodologyData gathering

Data analysis

FindingsDiversity of classroom talk

Discussion

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information and solving problems. They are often conducted as small group activities in which the teacher takes a less direct and more facilitative role, leaving the groups to work without direct intervention. Talk from one such activity is exhibited below in Excerpt 1 (all participants are intermediate level, adult students in an EFL setting in Thailand):

Excerpt 1: Dangerous sports

1 S1: I think a really dangerous sport is a parachuting.

2 S2: Parachuting?

3 S1: Yes. Because when you’re chuting it depend on the the

4 S2: bungy

5 S1: on the what is it called the equipment. Like this if it’s not open you will die.

6 S3: (Nods) uh huh shark

7 S1: If you climb the mountain then the sky [inaudible] is the floor it means we can stop the [inaudible]

8 S4: On the mountain when you go very high they have less oxygen you cannot breathe well.

table 1 Kinds of institutional classroom talk (adapted from Alexander 2001, 2008; Lindfors 1999; Mercer 2000)

Type of talk Description

Rote The drilling of language items through sustained repetition.

Recitation and elicitation The accumulation of knowledge and understanding through questions designed to test or stimulate recall of what has been previously encountered, or to cue students to work out the answer from clues in the question.

Instruction/exposition Telling the students what to do, and/ or imparting information, often about target language items, and/ or explaining facts or principles about language, and/or explaining the procedure of an activity, and/or modelling the talk and behaviours of an activity.

Discussion The exchange of ideas with a view to sharing information and solving problems.

Inquiry dialogue Achieving common understanding through structured inquiry, wondering (playing with possibilities, reflecting, considering, exploring) and discussion that guides and prompts; build on each other’s contributions (cumulative talk), reduce choices, and expedite the ‘handover’ of concepts and principles.

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9 S1: Yes yes okay. Right.

10 Well, we just think about how we can stop.

11 When you climbing and [inaudible] you can stop, this is fine you can stop

12 S3: (Laughs)

13 S1: but if you’re jumping, wow [extended vowel] you’re gonna [inaudible] its mean you cannot finish. Its mean you’re [inaudible] gonna ground.

14 So the most dangerous I think is parachuting.

15 S4: Mountain climbing.

16 S1: Yes. And another thing its mean a bungy jump it’s okay.

In this activity, four students are exchanging ideas about dangerous sports. At face value, it is a typical episode that teachers are likely to be pleased to have occurring in their conversation-driven classrooms. It is based on a student-nominated topic capitalized upon by the teacher and turned into a group discussion activity for a class of 18 students, requiring no materials, and drawing upon the students’ lifeworlds. Without listening in directly or having access to transcripts, and with the simultaneous talk of four groups going on, teachers would most likely be satisfied that all students in this group are engaged and contributing. It begins with one student (S1 at Line 1) initiating the topic of parachuting. At S2’s prompt, S1 then proceeds to provide an explanation of why it is a ‘really dangerous sport’ (Lines 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, and 13). However, the remainder of the talk, beginning with S2’s unexpected and unsuccessful attempt to take the floor (Line 4), is simply S1 continuing his explanation and the others attempting to initiate their own topics (Lines 6, 8, and 15) with no follow up. Indeed, after S1 concludes in Line 14, he ignores the topic initiation of S4 at Line 15 and initiates his own second topic (Line 16).

This activity may be considered as fulfilling the aims of an information-sharing discussion. During the group discussion, all four students have nominated their dangerous sport, which enables the teacher to subsequently list their nominations, and those from other groups, on the board. This final phase of the activity (the teacher calling the class together and switching to elicitation) is a frequent pattern, or ritual, of this class.

Despite their shortcomings, information-sharing activities are a frequent kind of activity coded in the data for this study. They generally involve the students exchanging information, and at times, solving problems. Typical turns at talk involve stating facts or opinions, explaining or justifying an opinion, and clarifying a statement. These turns have quite a lot in common with the student responses to teacher’s initiations in recitation and elicitation. They are presentational in nature, more ‘final draft’ than ‘first draft’ (Barnes 2008: 5).

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The next anticipated phase of the lesson, a well-known classroom ritual, will involve the teacher nominating each student to present his or her information, or a spokesperson to do so on behalf of the group. In a sense, they are often preparation for a recitation activity, and although students are seated in groups, they are rarely working as groups. In an earlier study (Chappell op.cit.), group discussions were found to be productive when linked to text-based activities involving listening or reading, or during focus on form activities.

To present a brief example of a discussion related to a listening activity, consider the following excerpt (Excerpt 2) from a discussion between two students after listening to an extract from a radio play based on the famous H. G. Wells science fiction novel The War of the Worlds. Lek1 and Rin exchange their opinions using a two- or three-part exchange involving a referential question (where the answer is unknown to the questioner), followed by a response, and in the second exchange, a further feedback turn. While this fulfils the criteria for discussion, it displays striking similarities to recitation, exemplified earlier. The responses seem to close off opportunities for further talk rather than opening up possibilities for more inquiry. Both Lek and Rin have produced responses that are ‘final draft’ and ready to be presented to the class; further discussion is therefore unnecessary:

Excerpt 2: The War of the Worlds (L = Lek; R = Rin)

1 L: What do you think about the kind of program that is?

2 R: I think it a play. What do you think?

3 L: I think about maybe drama.

4 R: (Nodding head) Aah! Aha.

5 L: Drama.

6 R: Drama for radio show.

7 L: Aha.

8 R: OK Fine. Fine ...

Language learning should be much more than learning transactional language for relatively brief encounters. Effective language teaching activity stimulates students to create a vast range of meanings through spoken and written texts by exploring, sharing, and enquiring about things that matter to them in their lifeworlds. Learners’ linguistic systems develop as they are cognitively engaged in these pursuits while at the same time developing the intellectual skills for lifelong learning. This is the attraction of the Dogme ELT perspective, where classroom talk is the medium of instruction, the object of instruction, and the primary mode of communication accompanying learning and teaching activity.

The creation of joint discourse, where students are weaving together each other’s contributions, relating one to the other, developing ideas in a cumulative fashion is the work of inquiry dialogue, the final kind

Inquiry dialogue

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of talk presented in this article. The term ‘inquiry’ calls to mind the act of questioning, a staple of the second language classroom. There is a considerable body of literature on questioning, especially the benefits of referential questions over display questions (questions with an unknown answer, as noted above, versus those with a known answer). However, to move beyond the type of talk described in the previous section, there is a need to go beyond the form of questions and look more critically at the function of inquiry. To do this, another transcript of classroom talk is presented and analysed (Excerpt 3).

In this activity, the teacher and the students are sharing ideas about inventions; the teacher’s instruction is to ‘think about important inventions that might happen’. This instruction has followed a brief chat between the teacher and three students at the start of class about possible careers. The students were expressing interest in the topic of future inventions, and thus the teacher used this opportunity to start class with an activity in which talk of a student-nominated topic of interest would ensue.

The talk that follows is notable for its cumulative knowledge-building, in which the students and the teacher build on each other’s ideas and jointly construct shared and developing understandings of those ideas, rather than closing off the possibilities for inquiry. Jane suggests that new forms of energy will be found and Oat builds on that idea by suggesting ‘sun energy’. After the teacher works with this emergent language, scaffolding understandings of the concept of energy from the sun, and the lexical unit ‘solar energy’, the group proceeds to reflect, consider, and explore the viability of solar energy for the future. The activity is characterized by mutual respect for those contributing their ideas, and there are several instances of students offering up ideas for others to ponder over, to play with the possibilities, to reflect upon, consider, and explore (Lindfors op.cit.).

Excerpt 3: Inventions (T = teacher; J = Jane; O = Oat; B = Bee; A = Art)

1 T: OK then. Let’s think about important inventions that might happen.

2 J: We will find new kind of energy. (Looking at teacher) Energy. Like petrol and … oil.

3 O: In the last few years uh maybe a new kind of sun sun energy sunlight energy

4 or … nuclear nuclear nuclear energy that can be used instead of oil energy.

5 T: OK. There are two things you said there (goes to whiteboard and writes bullet point ‘nuclear energy’).

6 Everybody. Oat was talking about energy from the sun.

7 What do we call that?

8 B: Solar cell.

9 T: Solar. Solar energy, yep.

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10 Do you think that’s really important for the future?

11 A: Very important.

12 O and B: (Nodding heads) Yes.

13 T: Yes? I wonder why solar energy is so important.

14 B: Because oil is very expensive?

15 A: That’s true. That’s true.

16 B: Maybe because the [inaudible] is very expensive and the government will promote people to use solar energy.

17 J: But isn’t solar energy is high investment?

18 T: Yeah. Really, any kind of energy is going to be high investment first of all.

19 A: But actually people invent solar energy they they know about solar energy for a long long time but still not popular …why?

20 O: The energy from the solar is not strong enough to provide …

21 J: No power. Like … not enough power.

22 A: Hm. OK.

23 J: You see a solar car go slow (gesturing) like this.

24 T: Yeah. But maybe when the price of oil keeps going up more people will want to invest money to develop solar energy.

25 A: And stop more pollution.

26 J, O, and B: (Nodding) Yes (in chorus).

To grasp the significance of the qualitatively superior talk in Excerpt 3 above, it is essential to understand something of the relation between speech functions and mood grammar. These two constitute the relation between grammatical form and communicative function in interpersonal exchanges. This is an important relation, since the development of each is closely related when language is learnt during use (Halliday 1984). During interaction, students and teachers are exchanging information or goods and services through requesting and giving. The teacher requests information from a student who usually complies and gives it. Similarly, the teacher requests students to move

Speech functions and mood grammar

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into small group formation; they will usually comply and carry out that request.

These functions of social interaction are enacted linguistically through the grammar of mood, categorizing each turn in an interpersonal exchange as declarative, interrogative, or imperative. When Lek asks Rin for his opinion about the genre of The War of the Worlds, he uses an interrogative form ‘What do you think …?’. Lek gives that information in the declarative form ‘I think it [is] a play’. When the teacher instructs the students to talk about inventions, he uses the imperative form ‘Let’s think about important inventions that might happen’. These are canonical function–form matches and appear ubiquitously in ELT coursebooks. When activities occur that require students to participate in a discussion, these are the default mood grammar choices for requesting and providing information. Failure to exchange, that is, failure to take complementary turns at requesting and providing information or goods and services results in a qualitatively faulty interpersonal exchange (see, for example, Excerpt 1 above, Dangerous Sports).

However, analysis of the Inventions excerpt suggests something different is going on. While this is a rich, dialogic, inquiry-based activity, there are very few interrogative forms (only two, in fact, at Lines 7 and 10), which are used only by the teacher. Nevertheless, this is structured inquiry dialogue realized in two important ways.

The first of these is the preponderance of dialogic inquiry acts: ‘those language acts whose purpose is to engage another in one’s attempt to understand’ (Lindfors op.cit.: 31). Their function is not simply to request information, but to request the service of the other(s) to consider, reflect upon, and indeed, play with possibilities rather than to request information. This function is realized linguistically in different ways (see Table 2 on the next page). The teacher’s inquiry act (Line 13) is an act of wondering; rather than functioning to provide information, it functions to keep the topic open and ponder possibilities of why solar energy is important. Bee takes up the challenge (Line 14) and offers a tentative contribution as another act of wondering (whether oil’s expense is a possible reason), which Art builds upon (Line 15) by confirming his agreement. As Bee extends her contribution (Line 16), Jane takes a turn (Line 17) to develop this further by offering the possibility of solar energy being ‘high investment’. After the teacher agrees with this and builds upon the topic once more (Line 18), Art (Line 19) offers up another aspect of the topic for consideration in another act of wondering.

The second important aspect of such classroom talk lies not with the specifics of individual utterances, but with the activity as a whole and its overriding purpose. Within the framework of genre analysis, the overall purpose of a text can be determined through an analysis of its rhetorical stages; accumulating what happens at each stage of the text, one can deduce its social purpose. While the purpose of discussion activities in the data for this study appears to be to exchange information and opinions, the purpose of inquiry dialogue is to engage others in

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exploring and considering possibilities. The pedagogical implication here is that the objective of the classroom activity and the kind of functions and forms that will realize that activity are important features to make explicit to students.

The analysis of the data from this study has provided a rich background from which to make some useful conclusions about the kinds of talk that provide opportunities for language learning in lessons based upon Dogme ELT principles. While classroom talk is a hugely complex area, for second language classrooms it has been suggested that the balance of the kinds of talk presented in Table 1 should be skilfully managed by the teacher with a view to minimizing unnecessary rote, recitation, and elicitation. Discussion activities have their role in classroom activities, with the purpose of sharing information and opinions. Inquiry dialogue offers the potential to open up opportunities for language learning, where learners are engaged and therefore open to new and relevant linguistic features that emerge during interaction. It stimulates spontaneous spoken texts for teaching and learning, requiring teachers to be skilled at setting clear aims, modelling the functions and forms of inquiry acts, ‘idealising’ the process and the possible outcome, and providing a model for creative imitation (or appropriation) by learners (Chappell 2012).

Importantly, information seeking and sharing in groups can become unfocused and more akin to learners doing individual work while seated in a group configuration. This was a regularly occurring theme across the data, underscoring the need for teacher monitoring and for

table 2 Inquiry acts as acts of wondering

Utterance Dialogic inquiry act

Teacher: Yes? I wonder why solar energy is so important.

Extend topic of inquiry > build on other’s contribution (wondering).

Bee: Because oil is very expensive? (rising intonation)

Extend topic of inquiry > build on other’s contribution (wondering)

Gloss: ‘I wonder if it’s because it’s expensive’.

Art: That’s true. That’s true. Build on other’s contribution.

Bee: Because the [inaudible] is very expensive and the government will promote people to use solar energy.

Extend topic of inquiry > build on other’s contribution.

Jane: But isn’t solar energy is high investment?

Extend topic of inquiry > build on other’s contribution (wondering).

Gloss: ‘I wonder if it’s because it’s high investment’.

Teacher: Yeah. Really, any kind of energy is going to be high investment first of all.

Extend topic of inquiry > build on other’s contribution.

Art: But actually people invent solar energy they they know about solar energy for a long long time but still not popular ... why?

Extend topic of inquiry > build on other’s contribution (wondering)Gloss: ‘I wonder why it’s not popular after all these years’.

Conclusion and implications

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teachers’ own classroom-based research to see what kinds of talk are actually going on. Teachers favouring a conversation-driven approach would do well to at least once record, transcribe, and analyse the talk occurring in their classrooms for a deeper understanding of the obscured mechanisms that are ‘driving’ the ‘conversation’.

Final version received June 2013

Note1 All names of students used in this article are

pseudonyms.

ReferencesAlexander, R. J. 2001. Culture and Pedagogy: International Comparisons in Primary Education. Malden, MA: Wiley.Alexander, R. J. 2008. Essays on Pedagogy. London: Routledge.Barnes, D. 2008. ‘Exploratory talk for learning’ in N. Mercer and S. Hodgkinson (eds.). Exploring Talk in School. London: Sage.Borg, S. 2003. ‘Teacher cognition in language teaching: a review of research on what language teachers think, know, believe, and do’. Language Teaching 36/2: 81–109.Chappell, P. J. 2010. ‘Group work in the second language classroom: where teaching meets learning in pedagogic discourse’. Unpublished EdD thesis, University of Wollongong, Australia.Chappell, P. J. 2012. ‘A sociocultural account of the role of imitation in instructed second language learning’. Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching 3/1: 61–99.Halliday, M. A. K. 1984. ‘Language as code and language as behaviour: a systemic-functional interpretation of the nature and ontogenesis of dialogue’ in R. P. Fawcett, M. A. K. Halliday, S. M. Lamb, and A. Makkai (eds.). The Semiotics of Culture and Language (volume 1). London: Frances Pinter.Heritage, J. 2005. ‘Conversation analysis and institutional talk’ in K. L. Fitch and R. E. Sanders

(eds.). Handbook of Language and Social Interaction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Lemke, J. L. 1990. Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing.Lindfors, J. W. 1999. Children’s Inquiry: Using Language to Make Sense of the World. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.Meddings, L. and S. Thornbury. 2009. Teaching Unplugged. Peaslake: Delta Publishing.Mercer, N. 2000. Words and Minds: How We Use Language to Think Together. London: Routledge.Thornbury, S. and D. Slade. 2006. Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Wells, G. 1993. ‘Reevaluating the IRF sequence: a proposal for the articulation of theories of activity and discourse for the analysis of teaching and learning in the classroom’. Linguistics and Education 5/1: 1–37.

The authorPhilip Chappell is a Lecturer in the Linguistics Department at Macquarie University, Australia, where he convenes the Postgraduate Certificate of TESOL. His research interests are in classroom talk, sociocultural approaches to teacher cognition, dialogic pedagogy, and professional learning for English language teachers. He is currently working on a book on interaction and pedagogic discourse in the classroom, due to be published in 2014. He supervises research students at the Masters and Doctoral levels in TESOL-related areas. He is Editor of the English Australia Journal and actively supports ELT in Australia. @TESOLatMQ (Twitter).Email: philip.chappell@mq.edu.au

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