Becoming a meaning maker: Talk and interaction in the dialogic classroom

The book aims to provide core understandings that allow educators to say definitive things about talk and interaction in classrooms so as to bring about changes to their practices. Here we introduce key elements of the approach that underpins our thinking and guides the ways we address talk and interaction in the rest of this book. We intend that this chapter provides a brief introduction to the reasons that we have focused on talk and interaction, meaning making and the dialogic (literacy) classroom. We particularly want the book to speak to pre-service teachers and teacher educators; literacy educators who seek to go beyond recipes for literacy learning; experienced teachers who still question their own practices and capacities to change the literacy outcomes of their learners; those who are particularly interested in the forgotten oral language aspect of literacy, and; researchers who might find our work in action research cutting edge and consider the results important for moving literacy education forward.