Thinking through talk: Using dialogue to develop students' critical thinking

Abstract

This study adopts a dialogic instructional approach to explore the relationship between teacher talk and students' critical thinking. Through a fine-grained analysis of a teacher's dialogic moves against evidence of students' critical thinking in a 15-week dialogic instructional programme in a Chinese university, we found that three directionally oriented discursive moves, ‘opening up’, ‘branching out’ and ‘tossing back’, are productive in drawing out students' critical thinking. Our findings can help educational practitioners and researchers deepen their understanding of the discursive mechanisms by which classroom dialogue facilitates the development of students' critical thinking skills.