Primary
National Strategy
Effective Talk in guided reading
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The Simple View of Reading
Looking at the handout
Can you place your children on this matrix?
What is it that you need to teach and that the
children need to learn to be secure in the top
right hand quadrant?
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Guided reading
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Introduction
Strategy Check
Independent Reading
Return to the text
Response to the text
Next steps
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Effective Talk
Preparing For the Learning Conversations
Nothing to be Afraid of!
Consider:
What is similar?
What is different in terms of the teacher’s talk
and the pupils’ learning?
What does the teacher do which makes the talk
more challenging/effective in version 2?
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The five types of teaching
talk
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Rote
Recitation
Exposition
Discussion
Dialogue
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Recitation
• The accumulation of knowledge and
understanding through questions designed to
test or stimulate recall of what has been
previously encountered or to help pupils to
work out the answer from clues provided in
the question.
Robert Alexander (2000) Culture and Pedagogy
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Principles and Characteristics of
dialogic talk
• Achieving common understanding through structured
and cumulative questioning and discussion. There
may, or may not be a right answer but justification
and explanation are sought.
• Pupils’ thinking is challenged and so understanding is
enhanced. The teacher is likely to share several
exchanges with a particular child several times in
order to move the thinking on.
• The pupil’s response is the the fulcrum of the
exchange.
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Recognising dialogic
teaching
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Collective
Reciprocal
Cumulative
Supportive
Purposeful
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Moving from recitation to
dialogue
Recitation
• Based on known or
partially known facts
• Recalling rather than
thinking through
• Relatively boring to
listen to
• Brief
• May involve responses
from lots of pupils
• Fails to develop thinking
and reasoning.
Dialogue
• Background of fairly
deep knowledge or
experience
• Thinking out loud
• A requirement of
justification/ explanation
• Interesting listeners
• Sustained with
individual pupils
• Aimed at improving
thinking and reasoning.
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Preparing for learning
conversations
• The repertoire of teaching talk and its
application
• Clear learning objectives
• The importance of ‘rich’ texts
• Questions/contexts that give rise to
thoughtful responses
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Basic questions/context
types
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Literal
Inferential
Deductive
Evaluative
Justification
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Transcript of ‘At the Zoo’
conversation
Teacher: Jack, please tell us which story you
preferred, and why.
Jack: I preferred ‘At the Zoo’ because it was
very mysterious and you didn’t find out what
was looking at what until the very end
because when I first heard the story I thought
there were some new arriving animals and
the children were looking at them for a school
project but at the end I found that these aliens
were actually looking at humans at the zoo
and the humans were the new arrivals.
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• Teacher: The story sounds very confusing.
When did you understand that the children
were in cages?
• Jack: Oh, not until the very end. In fact, the
first time I read it I didn’t get it at all. It took
two readings and then I thought, “Now I know
what’s going on!”
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• Teacher: But on out list of ‘what makes a
book worth reading’ that we wrote earlier, we
put “Easy to read”. ‘At the Zoo’ doesn’t sound
like it was an easy story if you had to read it
twice to understand it.
• Jack: Yes, but the words were easy. The
story wasn’t. The story was a mystery, and I
like mysteries, so that is why I like ‘At the Zoo’
better.
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• Teacher: So Jack prefers ‘At the Zoo’. What
about you Karen?
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Dialogue
• The pupil’s response is the fulcrum of the
exchange
• The conversations have cognitive challenge
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