Working Talk: Developing a framework for the teaching of collaborative talk

This paper draws on the findings of an ESRC and British Telecom funded study which explored the teaching of collaborative talk. A teaching intervention was designed which adopted the principles of dialogic teaching, but which, drawing on educational linguistics, particularly emphasised the role of metatalk in developing students’ awareness of the interpersonal processes of collaborative talk. To facilitate the development of this metatalk, a framework was devised which described collaborative talk as a process of participating, understanding and managing. The research project was a rich qualitative study based in two secondary English classrooms in two different schools, capturing group interaction through video and audio data capture. 90 hours of synchronised audio and video data from 5 groups in each class were coded first deductively, informed by the framework for collaborative talk, and then inductively. Substantial episodes of talk were subsequently transcribed to illustrate themes which emerged through coding. Drawing on the findings, this paper will present transcripts from one group in each school to describe how the strands, participating, understanding and managing, appeared in students’ collaborative talk. It will illustrate how these strands may develop in talk over time, visible in the increased ‘attunement’ of students’ turns. It will explore how the framework facilitated the development of students’ collaborative and metatalk, and how it can be used to foster effective dialogic talk about language. The framework for collaborative talk represents an original contribution to research which conceptualizes effective educational peer dialogue, and its use as a scaffold for metatalk draws attention to the role of metalinguistic understanding in talk development.