Dialogic Inquiry

Origins

The importance of dialogue with more competent others for children’s linguistic and intellectual development was one of the more important findings of a large-scale longitudinal study of preschool children’s spontaneous talk carried out by Gordon Wells in the Bristol Study (1969–84). Children who experienced more conversation with their parents and older siblings were more likely to make accelerated progress in learning to talk and more likely to be successful in school, as measured by tests conducted at ages 7 and 10 years. The reasons for their more rapid development can be attributed to two features of their linguistic interactions. First, as Michael Halliday observed, children naturally develop language to perform interactional functions that are important to them and, second, when others take up and help children to extend their ability to talk about topics that interest them, they are receiving assistance in what Lev Vygotsky called the ‘Zone of Proximal Development’.

When a subsample of the children in the Bristol Study were regularly observed in their first 5 years in school, it was found that they rarely experienced the sort of linguistic and intellectual support they had received in their preschool years. They rarely asked questions about matters that interested them, and when they did originate a topic of conversation with a teacher, the teacher frequently diverted the conversation to a matter that she or he considered more important. In sum, in most cases, the education the children received was directed by their teachers, who followed a predetermined curriculum that did not, for the most part, build on their interests and life experiences.

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