Preamble

It is now more than a quarter of a century since the study reported in the first edition of this book was completed. Nevertheless, to the best of my knowledge, no study of comparable scale has since been carried out that casts doubt on the original findings. I shall therefore retain most of the earlier chapter. However, I shall take the opportunity, in the final part of the current chapter, to say something about the collaborative action research with classroom teachers in which I have recently been engaged in the attempt to create richer opportunities for children to construct knowledge together through more dialogic forms of classroom interaction.

It has always been assumed that language plays a major role in formal education. And with good reason. Most of what is taught in schools is transmitted either through teachers' oral presentation or through textbooks and reference works, and when assessments of educational attainment are made they are typically made through the medium of questions and answers in either the spoken or the written mode. It seems self‐evident, therefore, that to succeed in school a pupil must have an adequate command of the linguistic skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Although correct as far as it goes, such a concept of the role of language in education is seriously misleading, since it leaves out of account the essentially interactive nature of linguistic communication.