CRITICAL DISCUSSION

Critically Discuss Dialogic Book Talk Relating It To The Teaching And Learning Of English

Critically Discuss Dialogic Book Talk Relating It To The Teaching And Learning Of English

Part A

Dialogic book talk is talking about the book as it unfolds, allowing children to spend time on one page discussing the pictures or words and connecting them to their own lives. It gives practitioners the opportunity to develop language and thinking and not be concerned about finishing the story. It is a group activity in which adults and children together develop shared understanding of a book through talk.

Through dialogue, teachers can elicit students' everyday, 'common sense' perspectives, engage with their developing ideas and help them overcome misunderstandings. Dialogue can be used to lead students on a meaningful intellectual journey through a series of activities and lessons, so that they become able to demonstrate new, scientific forms of understanding. Given opportunities to contribute to classroom dialogue in more extended and varied ways than providing brief answers to teachers' 'closed' questions, students can explore the limits of their own understanding and practice new ways of using language as a tool for constructing knowledge.

Competing meanings of learning Discussions of teaching, learning, and assessment in the context of the UK at the present time have to recognise that these are controversial and contested topics. Within the broad context of education as a whole, the increasing political attention paid to what teachers actually do in classrooms, as well as the charged debates about the increasingly selective processes by which learners in schools transfer between primary and secondary schooling, secondary and tertiary phases, and between tertiary and university or the world of work, have brought ideas about assessment onto the centre stage of political and media discussion.

Recent research on teaching and learning in schools has raised powerful objections to these narrowly-focussed political goals for education and the current methodologies for assuring the quality of provision in schools, on the grounds that they do not work as well as viable alternative approaches to both pedagogy and to performance measurement and accountability to the taxpayer (Black and Wiliam, 1998, Black et al., 2002). The key concept in this critique is Formative Assessment (FA), sometimes described as„assessment for learning. as distinct from „assessment of learning.:

Assessment for learning is any assessment for which the first priority in its design and practice is to serve the purpose of promoting students. learning. It thus differs from assessment designed primarily to serve the purposes of accountability, or of ranking, or of certifying competence. An assessment activity can help learning if it provides information to be used as feedback, by teachers, and by their students, in assessing themselves and each other, to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. Such assessment becomes .formative assessment.

when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching work to meet learning needs. (Black et al., 2002).

Since the publication of Black and Wiliam.s 1998 paper, attempts have been made to address their critique in relation ...