Children's talk and reasoning

Mercer, N., Wegerif, R., & Dawes, L. (1999). Children’s talk and the development of reasoning in the classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 25(1), 95-111.

Background

Language has three important functions – cognitive, social/cultural and pedagogic. However, the writers suggest that teachers rarely explicitly help students with classroom talk and, as a result, its developmental potential is lost. As there is a belief that children’s thinking is shaped by social contact with their peers and adults, this is a cause for concern.

Aims

The aim was to test whether using exploratory talk would help children to reason together more effectively, whether the children’s use of exploratory talk in joint classroom activities could be increased by using specially-designed activities and whether using exploratory talk for joint reasoning would help children to individually develop better ways of using language as a tool for reasoning.

Sample

The sample consisted of 60 Year 5 children (9-10 years old) in four classes in three middle schools in the UK. They were divided in groups of three. These were matched against four control classes with 64 children, also divided into groups.

Method

While the control groups followed their usual lessons, the experimental groups were taught to use exploratory talk to carry out group tasks. Exploratory talk emphasises involving all group participants in the discussion with participants challenging suggestions with justification and offering alternatives until a group conclusion is reached. Students were trained to do this using materials specially designed by the writers. The materials emphasized these group skills. There were pre- and post-tests using group and individual tasks.

Findings

The results indicated that group talk that had the language features of exploratory talk (long turns and frequent use of ‘because’, ‘I think’ and ‘Agree’) tended to be more successful. There was also a significant increase in these features for the experimental groups using the special training package. However, while there were some gains on tests of reasoning for individuals, the average gains for groups were not significant.

Implications

The researchers felt that the scale of the experiment had been too small to come up with significant results in some areas, and that they needed to find out more about the varied performance of students (and teachers) in using the special materials. With the feedback received from teachers, the researchers planned to take these into account in future research.

Original article retrieved from Taylor & Francis Online.