Teaching and Teacher Education 125 (2023) 104068

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Teaching and Teacher Education

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Research paper

Thinking through talk: Using dialogue to develop students’ critical

thinking
Ruiguo Cui a, Peter Teo b, *
a
School of Foreign Languages, Taizhou University, No. 605, Dongfang Avenue, Linhai, Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province, 317000, China
b
National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

h i g h l i g h t s

 A program was implemented in a Chinese university to examine how dialogic instruction can foster students' critical thinking.
 45 h of lesson transcripts were coded to identify teacher's dialogic moves and students' critical thinking.
 3 discursive actions e opening up, branching out and tossing back e proved productive in eliciting students' critical thinking.

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This study adopts a dialogic instructional approach to explore the relationship between teacher talk and
Received 30 November 2022 students' critical thinking. Through a fine-grained analysis of a teacher's dialogic moves against evidence
Received in revised form of students' critical thinking in a 15-week dialogic instructional programme in a Chinese university, we
23 January 2023
found that three directionally oriented discursive moves, ‘opening up’, ‘branching out’ and ‘tossing back’,
Accepted 4 February 2023
Available online 15 February 2023
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.
Keywords:
Dialogic instruction
© 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Critical thinking
Dialogic moves
Classroom dialogue

1. Introduction The disjuncture between the premium placed on critical

Critical thinking is regarded as a key 21st century competency
that enables people to manage the proliferation of information and
rapid social changes in contemporary society (Angeli & Valanides,
2009; Halpern, 2014; Paul, 1993; Rear, 2019). In many countries,
critical thinking is deemed an important goal of education,
including higher education (Wilson, 2016) and citizenship educa-
tion (Frijters et al., 2008). Despite the widespread recognition of the
importance of cultivating critical thinking in students, there is little
evidence that this prized goal has been achieved with a high degree
of success or consistency across various educational contexts (Arum
& Roksa, 2011; Gunawardena & Wilson, 2021; Pilgrim et al., 2019;
Schendel, 2015; Zhang et al., 2020).
* Corresponding author. English Language and Literature Academic Group, Na-
tional Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk,
637616, Singapore.
E-mail addresses: cuiruiguo97@tzc.edu.cn (R. Cui), peter.teo@nie.edu.sg (P. Teo).
thinking and students' ability to display or demonstrate critical
thinking, regarded as one of the “major unsolved problems of
pedagogy” (Kuhn & Dean, 2004, p. 269), has likewise been observed
in China. Despite the call of governments and experts for critical
thinking education, Chinese students' critical thinking ability is still
in question (Zhang, 2017; Zhang et al., 2020). This can be attributed
to a long-standing respect for teachers in China which seems to
have encouraged students to adopt a deferential stance towards
authority (Tian & Low, 2011), power imbalance between teachers
and students in classrooms (Yu, 2016), teachers' limited under-
standing of critical thinking and how to teach it (Li, 2016; Yuan &
Stapleton, 2019; Zhang et al., 2020) and students' ambivalent and
conflicting views of critical thinking (Chen, 2017; Lucas, 2019). This
raises the question of whether, and how, Chinese students’ critical
thinking can be fostered in teacher-centered classrooms that
respect authority and value harmony, which may then inhibit
debate and stifle critique (Li et al., 2012; Li & Wegerif, 2014; Turner
& Acker, 2002).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2023.104068
0742-051X/© 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
R. Cui and P. Teo
Among the varied approaches aimed at cultivating critical
thinking in the classroom, dialogic instruction has been identified
as potentially effective (Liang & Fung, 2021; Mercer & Littleton,
2007; Wells, 1999). However, much is yet unknown about how
this form of instruction, which engages students in meaningful and
substantive classroom dialogue, contributes to the cultivation of
students' critical thinking. To address this research lacuna, the
present study was designed to explore and examine the role of
classroom dialogue in developing students' critical thinking. Spe-
cifically, it sought to investigate the ways in which teacher talk
could facilitate students’ critical thinking in the context of China.
1.1. Critical thinking in education
Critical thinking has been broadly construed as “reasonable
reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or
do” (Ennis, 1987, p. 10), and is widely believed to be manifest as a
disposition and a set of thinking skills (Ennis, 1987; Facione, 1990;
Paul, 1993; Watson & Glaser, 1980). Ennis (1987), for instance,
identified 12 dispositions of a critical thinker as someone who is
open-minded and well-informed, someone who pursues clarity,
precision and sound reasoning, and uses credible sources and ex-
plores alternatives. Facione et al. (1995) listed seven scales of crit-
ical thinking disposition: inquisitiveness, open-mindedness,
systematicity, analyticity, truth-seeking, self-confidence and
cognitive maturity. Critical thinking theorists have also proposed
varied critical thinking skills, including interpretation, analysis,
evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulation (Facione,
1990).
Following Fisher and Scriven (1997), we conceptualise critical
thinking to be the “skilled and active interpretation and evaluation
of observations and communications, information and argumen-
tation” (p. 21). This conceptualization of critical thinking as a set of
cognitive skills reflects our interest in the observable traces of stu-
dents' critical thinking as seen in and through classroom dialogue.
Among the various critical thinking skills proposed by theorists,
analysis, inference and evaluation are widely acknowledged to be
central (Dwyer et al., 2014; Facione, 1990; Paul & Elder, 2012)
alongside comparison and synthesis, which are often regarded as
important too (Jacobs et al., 1997; Moon, 2008; Phillips & Bond,
2004). Critical thinking is often closely associated with metacog-
nition or described as a metacognitive process as it is believed that
students who can monitor and evaluate their own thought pro-
cesses are more likely to demonstrate high-quality thinking that
increases the chances of producing a logical conclusion to an
argument or solution to a problem (Daniel et al., 2005; Dwyer et al.,
2014). Thus, the skill of evaluation can be seen as a manifestation of
metacognitive thinking, which necessarily encompasses reflection
since metacognitive thinking is “reflecting about oneself's or an-
other's thoughts” (Daniel et al., 2004, p. 301). Thus, reflection, a key
element in metacognition, is subsumed in our study within eval-
uation. Comparison and synthesis are pertinent in the context of
the reading class within which our study was situated as students
are expected to compare and synthesize the different in-
terpretations and diverse opinions arising from the reading pas-
sages. In sum, critical thinking in this study is operationalized as the
skills of analysis, comparison, evaluation, inference and synthesis.
Although some sceptics question if critical thinking can be
explicitly taught (e.g., Willingham, 2008), many have argued that
appropriate instruction can strengthen individuals’ critical thinking
disposition and sharpen their critical thinking skills. Two major
models of critical thinking instruction exist: separation (teaching
critical thinking directly as a course) and infusion (embedding
critical thinking as part of a content course) (Ennis, 1989). Although
some researchers (Ennis, 1989; Sternberg, 1987) have proposed a
2
Teaching and Teacher Education 125 (2023) 104068
hybrid combining separation and infusion, teaching practice tends
to fall within either of the two models. While there are those that
adopt the separation model (e.g., Twardy (2004), which uses an
argument map to directly teach students critical thinking skills),
the majority seem to favour infusion since “thinking is always
thinking about something and the subject matter instruction pro-
vides that something” (Barnett & Francis, 2012, p. 203). This
approach is also aligned with the goals of educational institutes
that endeavor to instill critical thinking throughout the whole
school curriculum (National Education Goals Panel, 1991).
Despite the perceived advantages of the infusion approach,
critical thinking does not “readily develop as a spontaneous by-
product of standard content area instruction” (Halpern &
Nummedal, 1995, p. 82). To develop students' critical thinking
abilities, teachers must engage students in some carefully designed
instructional activities (Astleitner, 2002), and adopt certain teach-
ing strategies to solicit students’ active involvement in the class-
room (Simpson & Courtney, 2002). In response, educational
researchers and practitioners have devised various instructional
activities and strategies, such as using higher order questions,
analysing journal papers, and engaging in reflective practices to
instill critical thinking in students (Barnett & Francis, 2012;
Swanwick et al., 2014; Vieira et al., 2011). Using classroom dialogue
to promote critical thinking is yet another strategy (Daniel et al.,
2005), the use of which is epitomised by and embodied in an
approach to teaching known as dialogic instruction.
1.2. Dialogic instruction
In contrast to a transmissionist approach in which knowledge is
unilaterally transmitted from teacher to students, dialogic in-
struction stresses the value of providing opportunities for students
to think and participate in knowledge construction (Alexander,
2006; Lefstein & Snell, 2014; Nystrand et al., 1997). According to
socio-cultural theory (Vygotsky, 1962), language mediates between
the social and psychological planes enabling children to develop
cognitive skills through social interaction. In other words, social
interaction, which is realized in and through dialogue, can facilitate
children's cognitive development (Vygotsky, 1962). This is corrob-
orated by Bakhtin's (1986) notion of the dialogic nature of language
where an “utterance is related not only to preceding, but also to
subsequent, links in the chain of speech communication” (p. 94).
When using language, we are participating in a dialogue in which
“our thought itself … is born and shaped in the process of inter-
action and struggle with others' thought” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 92).
Therefore, dialogue is said to be “related to our capacity for thought,
especially our ability to solve problems, to think sensibly toward
conclusions, to weigh competing considerations, and to choose
reasonable courses of action” (Burbules, 1993, p. 11).
Dialogic instruction as a broad pedagogical approach has been
encapsulated in various forms such as dialogically-organized in-
struction (Nystrand et al., 1997), thinking together (Mercer, 2000),
dialogic teaching (Alexander, 2006, 2020), accountable talk
(Michaels et al., 2008) and quality talk (Wilkinson et al., 2010). In
spite of the diversity of theoretical underpinnings, concepts and
methodologies, dialogic instructional practices share in common
their recognition of the value of classroom dialogue in facilitating
students’ thinking and learning (Mercer et al., 2020). They all seek
to engage students in participation and to imbue and permeate
classroom dialogue with the following qualities:
1. Equality: equal treatment of participants (Burbules, 1993)
2. Collectivity: with participants working together to address
learning tasks (Alexander, 2020)
R. Cui and P. Teo
3. Supportiveness: where participants are encouraged and helped
by one another to express their ideas (Alexander, 2020)
4. Reciprocity: where participants listen attentively to one another,
sharing ideas and considering alternative viewpoints
(Alexander, 2020)
5. Deliberation: where participants discuss and evaluate different
opinions towards reasoned positions (Alexander, 2020)
6. Cumulation: building on one another's ideas (Alexander, 2020)
7. Purposefulness: with classroom dialogue revolving around
particular educational goals (Alexander, 2020)
8. Accountability: where participants are accountable to the
learning community, standards of reasoning, and knowledge
(Michaels et al., 2008).
In such a dialogic environment, students are able to freely ex-
press their viewpoints and reflect on their own and others' opin-
ions, thereby developing their cognitive capacities (Lefstein & Snell,
2014; van der Wilt et al., 2022). Dialogic instruction is therefore
construed as a viable approach that can not only facilitate students'
academic development in a range of subject areas, such as science
(Mansour, 2020; Mortimer & Scott, 2003), mathematics (Kiemer
et al., 2015; Lehesvuori et al., 2021) and literacy (Davidson &
Edwards-Groves, 2020; Edwards-Groves & Hardy, 2013; Lisanza,
2014), but also foster students’ critical thinking in and through
classroom interactions (Davies & Esling, 2020; Frijters et al., 2008).
To facilitate teachers' implementation of dialogic instruction in
classrooms, the multifarious ideas and themes of dialogic instruc-
tion have been assembled and consolidated into a set of repertoires,
features of talk, and dialogic moves. Repertoires encompass the
judgements and choices that teachers exercise in advance or in the
moment of teaching to maximize the power of classroom dialogue.
They are aimed at helping the teacher engage with key aspects of
classroom culture and organization and the appropriate forms of
student and teacher talk and their associated moves in the areas of
questioning, extending, discussion and argumentation (Alexander,
2020, p. 126). Features of talk are those elements in talk that have
the potential to foster substantive classroom dialogue, such as
authentic questions, uptake questions, high-level-thinking ques-
tions, elaborated explanations, exploratory talk and the use of
reasoning words (Davies & Meissel, 2018). These talk features have
been utilised to address the issue of teacher domination of class-
room talk (Hennessy & Davies, 2020) and precipitate higher-level
student interactions (Davies & Meissel, 2018). Finally, dialogic
moves are discourse strategies or tools that can be used to open
classroom dialogue (see Chapin et al., 2009; Hennessy et al., 2016;
Mercer, 1995, 2000; Nystrand et al., 1997), which include questions
that seek to elicit contributions, clarification or elaboration,
encourage participation, and prompt students to evaluate and even
challenge one another's contributions.
Most of the extant studies on dialogic instruction are concerned
with the effectiveness of classroom dialogue in developing stu-
dents' learning and co-construction of knowledge (e.g., Boyd &
Markarian, 2011; Einfalt et al., 2022; Howe et al., 2019; Mercer
et al., 1999), with relatively less attention being paid to the spe-
cific ways in which classroom dialogue can facilitate the develop-
ment of students' critical thinking especially in an English as a
Table 1
Phases of the critical talk programme.
Phase Purpose
I Establishing and reinforcing dialogic ground rules to foster a safe and supportive learning environment
II Implementing the use of specific dialogic moves to promote an open, collaborative and critical learning environment
III Teacher reflection and consolidation of student learning
3
Teaching and Teacher Education 125 (2023) 104068
second or foreign language context (Davies & Esling, 2020; Liang &
Fung, 2021). In view of this, the present study was designed with
the aim of examining and illuminating the process of how class-
room dialogue can foster students’ critical thinking in the context of
China.
1.3. The study
In the present study, we adopted dialogic instruction as a
pedagogical approach to encourage critical thinking in an English
reading course taught by the first author at a university in China.
The class comprised 39 freshmen (10 male and 29 female) whose
English proficiency ranged from A2 to B1 level in the Common
European Framework of Reference (CEFR). To protect the interests
of these participants, research ethics approval was obtained
(Reference number: IRB-2016-11-026) before the data collection.
Participants were informed of the aims of the study and were
assured that they could decline participation or withdraw at any
time for whatever reason without any adverse consequence and no
data from them would be collected or used. All 39 students con-
sented to participate in the study and the signed consent forms
were collected before the first lesson. To ensure confidentiality, all
the students were assigned a pseudonym and the pronouns used to
refer to them do not necessarily reflect their gender.
The overarching objective of the study was to explore and
examine the ways in which classroom dialogue can develop the
students’ critical thinking. Specifically, we ask the following
questions:
1. What dialogic moves are made by the teacher?
2. What evidence of critical thinking, if any, do students display?
3. To what extent, and in what manner, do the teacher's dialogic
moves contribute to students' critical thinking?
2. Methodology
2.1. Research design
To address our research questions, we designed a dialogic
instructional programme known as “Critical Talk” by integrating
the principles and practices of dialogic instruction into an English
reading class. Informed by the ideas and practices of dialogic in-
struction, this 15-week programme was aimed at developing stu-
dents’ critical thinking skills by infusing critical thinking into a
reading course through three phases as shown in Table 1.
The dialogic instructional programme was taught by the first
author (referred to as ‘the teacher’ hereafter) who assumed the role
of both researcher and teacher. This allowed the teacher to view the
teaching programme from the perspective of an ‘insider’ who was
familiar with the context of teaching while simultaneously allow-
ing him to bring his expert knowledge and understanding of dia-
logic instruction and critical thinking to bear on the lesson design
and implementation. Moreover, as their course instructor, he was in
a good position to build rapport with the students in order to create
an open, equal and democratic environment, the sine qua non for
dialogic instruction.
Duration
6 weeks
6 weeks
3 weeks
R. Cui and P. Teo
In the first phase, the teacher introduced the notion of dialogic
instruction and explained the value of an open, collaborative and
critical learning environment before negotiating with the students
to establish, and subsequently reinforce, a set of ground rules
conducive to engendering a safe and supportive classroom envi-
ronment (Dawes et al., 2000; Mercer & Littleton, 2007). Examples
of these ground rules included “everyone participates”, “always
give reasons for ideas and opinions”, and “respect others through
active listening and responding”. In the second phase, the teacher
made use of specific dialogic moves in whole-class discussions in an
attempt to foster an open, collaborative and critical learning envi-
ronment. In the third and final phase, the teacher reflected on the
effectiveness of the first two phases in establishing and reinforcing
a dialogic environment to encourage students’ critical thinking
before consolidating what students had learnt about critical
thinking.
2.2. Data collection and analysis
The 3-h weekly lessons of the 15-week programme were video-
recorded, which produced a total of 45 h of lesson recordings. These
recordings were transcribed verbatim in the “play script” method
based on Johnstone (2000, p. 115) to foreground the individual
turns made by the teacher and students. This method of tran-
scribing classroom talk “makes it look as if one person had spoken
at a time, waiting to start until the last person has finished”
(Johnstone, 2000, p. 115) when in reality there was much over-
lapping talk. Grammatical errors were left intact to retain the
authenticity of the classroom talk. Pauses and sentence-final into-
nation were captured as they might reflect a speaker's thinking
process and whether he/she was asking a question or making a
statement. Sentence-final intonation was indicated by corre-
sponding punctuation marks, for example, a question mark for
rising sentence-final intonation and a period for falling sentence-
final intonation. The focus of the transcription was therefore
more on the function than the form of the talk. This aligns with our
unit of analysis, which is a discourse move “defined as a single
utterance or string of uninterrupted utterances with a common
function” (Lefstein et al., 2015, p. 870). To ascertain this function,
analytic focus was extended to the context within which the move
was situated to include talk turns both preceding and following the
utterance in question.
The analysis of the lesson transcripts is in line with the meth-
odology used in sociocultural discourse analysis, which views
language as “a social mode of thinking d a tool for teaching-and-
learning, constructing knowledge, creating joint understanding
and tackling problems collaboratively” (Mercer, 2004, p. 137). As it
analyses language within the social context in which it is used,
sociocultural discourse analysis enables researchers to expose the
contextualized and dynamic nature of dialogue and the way in
which people use talk to think together (Mercer, 2004). Sociocul-
tural discourse analysis can employ both qualitative and quantita-
tive analyses of talk. Qualitative analysis of talk involves the fine-
grained analysis of specific episodes of dialogue so as to under-
stand how people make and negotiate meaning, while quantitative
analysis entails counting the occurrence of certain words used by
participants (Johnson & Mercer, 2019; Mercer, 2004). In our study,
the quantitative aspect involves assigning utterances to pre-
determined categories and ascertaining their relative frequency.
Though it shares similarities with thematic analysis in terms of the
iterative nature of the coding, the quantitative analysis here focuses
on the function of teacher talk instead of the meaning of teacher
talk (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Johnson & Mercer, 2019). Rather than
“provid[ing] a concise, coherent, logical, non-repetitive and inter-
esting account of the story the data tell d within and across
4
Teaching and Teacher Education 125 (2023) 104068
themes” in thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 93), the
quantitative analysis undertaken in the study was aimed at pro-
ducing a broad picture of the dialogic moves employed by the
teacher. The qualitative aspect involves the detailed analysis of
classroom talk between the teacher and students so as to examine
the quality of the teacher dialogic moves in terms of the teacher's
influence as a ‘discourse guide’ (Mercer, 1995) in the process of
encouraging critical thinking and joint construction of knowledge.
A close reading of the lesson transcripts was done by both au-
thors before a coding scheme to identify specific dialogic moves
made by the teacher was developed (see Table 2). This coding
scheme was informed by our data as well as existing work on
teacher discourse moves, including Hennessy et al. (2016), Mercer
(1995), Michaels and O’Connor (2012) and Nystrand et al. (1997).
For instance, the dialogic moves of extension were adapted from
Mercer's (1995) concept of “elaboration” and Nystrand's (1997)
notion of “uptake”. However, our coding scheme differs from extant
coding schemes as it focuses specifically on teacher discourse
moves aimed at opening dialogue and eliciting students' thinking
rather than general teacher moves such as clarifying learning ob-
jectives. The development of the coding scheme was also informed
by the particular teacher-student interactional patterns observed in
our data. For example, the category of support was divided into
various sub-categories based on the specific forms of teacher sup-
port evident in the data, such as acknowledgement, affirmation, or
proffering a possible answer.
A parallel coding scheme was developed to capture and examine
the students' display of critical thinking in terms of the five skills of
analysis, comparison, evaluation, inference and synthesis (see
Table 3). This coding scheme was grounded in the extant literature
including Facione (1990) and Paul and Elder (2012). It is noteworthy
that other researchers, such as Hennessy et al. (2016), have used
similar codes that we have used for critical thinking to label
communicative acts of comparing, evaluating or synthesizing ideas
and opinions. This convergence of the codes used for critical
thinking and classroom dialogue is largely due to the aim of our
study to examine the link between teacher talk and students'
critical thinking. In developing our coding scheme for dialogic
moves, we were focusing on specific moves made by the teacher to
expand classroom dialogue and elicit students' critical thinking; in
formulating the critical thinking coding scheme, we were aiming to
capture and identify specific critical thinking skills displayed by the
students. As such, there would be some degree of overlap between
the two coding schemes we formulated. For instance, readers
would notice that the dialogic move of Integration in Table 2 in-
cludes the sub-category of “Requesting one student to evaluate
another's contribution” (In4), which overlaps with the critical
thinking category of Evaluation in Table 3. This overlap results from
our sharp focus on the specific teacher discourse moves aimed
expressly at opening the classroom discursive space which could
elicit students' display of critical thinking, which in turn reflects our
intent on exploring the relationship between teacher talk and
students' critical thinking.
To ensure inter-coder reliability in our coding process, the first
author and a second coder specializing in applied linguistics and
classroom discourse analysis independently coded the transcripts
of three randomly selected lessons out of the 15 lessons using the
above-mentioned coding schemes. The two coders achieved sub-
stantial agreement for both dialogic moves and critical thinking,
with kappa values of 0.86 and 0.74 respectively (Landis & Koch,
1977; McHugh, 2012). After discussing and resolving minor dis-
crepancies between the two coders, the first author coded the
remaining 12 transcripts.
After coding the teacher's dialogic moves and students' critical
thinking, we juxtaposed the two sets of coding results to examine
R. Cui and P. Teo Teaching and Teacher Education 125 (2023) 104068

Table 2
Coding scheme for teacher dialogic moves.

Category Definition Sub-category

Elicitation Eliciting or stimulating students' contribution using authentic or exploratory questions El1 (Eliciting students' repetition/rephrasing
of their contribution)
El2 (Eliciting students' confirmation of their
contribution)
El3 (Eliciting students' ideas or opinions)
Support Encouraging or facilitating students' participation in classroom dialogue Su1 (Supporting by acknowledging)
Su2 (Supporting by affirmatively repeating)
Su3 (Supporting by positively evaluating)
Su4 (Supporting by providing a cue)
Su5 (Supporting by giving a possible answer)
Integration Encouraging students to explain, add to, evaluate or otherwise respond to one another's contribution In1 (Requesting one student to answer
another's question)
In2 (Requesting one student to explain
another's contribution)
In3 (Requesting one student to add to
another's contribution)
In4 (Requesting one student to evaluate
another's contribution)
Extension Extending the dialogue by adding to students' contribution, requesting for elaboration or explanation Ex1 (Building on a student's contribution)
from students, or presenting a different scenario Ex2 (Requesting further elaboration or
explanation)
Ex3 (Presenting a different perspective or
scenario)
Challenging Deepening students' thinking by expressing disagreement or pointing out problems/flaws in students' Ch1 (Expressing disagreement)
thinking Ch2 (Highlighting problems)

Table 3
Coding scheme for student critical thinking skills.

Category Code Definition

Analysis Ana the ability to break down information, issues, ideas, opinions or arguments into their organic constituent elements or to identify/establish the
relationships among information, issues, ideas, opinions or arguments
Comparison Com the ability to identify similarities or differences among different information, issues, opinions, ideas or arguments
Evaluation Eva the ability to judge the credibility, validity, value or significance of information, issues, opinions, ideas or arguments
Inference Inf the ability to draw logical conclusions from information, observation, experience, judgement, theory or hypothesis
Synthesis Syn the ability to draw on information, opinions, ideas or arguments from diverse sources to create a new opinion, idea or argument

possible relationships between them, paying particular attention to three most frequently used teacher dialogic moves were El3 (elic-
the teacher dialogic moves preceding student turns that contained iting students' ideas or opinions), Su2 (supporting by affirmatively
traces of critical thinking. It needs to be clarified that we did not repeating) and Su1 (supporting by acknowledging) (see Table 4).
merely look at the dialogic moves immediately preceding student Conversely, the least frequently used dialogic moves were In1
turns that exhibited critical thinking. Rather, each student turn (requesting one student to answer another's question) and In2
with critical thinking had to be situated more broadly within the (requesting one student to explain another's contribution), which
chain of communication in the classroom dialogue to gauge the were not used at all in the lessons. This suggests that the teacher's
causal relationship, if any, between teacher dialogic move and dialogic moves were mainly aimed at eliciting and supporting
student critical thinking. Specifically, we examined three turns
before and after each student turn with critical thinking to establish
causality. Where necessary, turns further away from the locus of Table 4
critical thinking were also scanned to ascertain causality. This Frequency of teacher dialogic moves.
process led to the identification of particular dialogic moves that
Teacher dialogic move Frequency
seemed to precipitate critical thinking. Based on this microanalysis
of the data, we identified three main ways in which the teacher's El3 (Eliciting students' ideas or opinions) 305
Su2 (Supporting by affirmatively repeating) 249
dialogic moves appear to have contributed to students' critical Su1 (Supporting by acknowledging) 246
thinking. Su3 (Supporting by positively evaluating) 220
In the following, we first illustrate with lesson excerpts the Ex2 (Requesting elaboration or explanation) 122
teacher's use of dialogic moves and the evidence of students' crit- Ex1 (Building on a student's contribution) 116
El2 (Eliciting students' confirmation of their contribution) 93
ical thinking before illustrating and discussing the ways in which
Su4 (Supporting by providing a cue) 29
the teacher's dialogic moves seem to have led to evidence of stu- In4 (Requesting one student to evaluate another's contribution) 24
dents' critical thinking. El1 (Eliciting students' repetition/rephrasing of their contribution) 17
Su5 (Supporting by giving a model answer) 15
Ex3 (Presenting a different perspective or scenario) 10
3. Findings Ch2 (Highlighting problems) 5
Ch1 (Expressing disagreement) 3
3.1. Teacher's dialogic moves In3 (Requesting one student to add to another's contribution) 1
In1 (Requesting one student to answer another's question) 0
In2 (Requesting one student to explain another's contribution) 0
The coding results of the teacher's dialogic moves show that the
5
R. Cui and P. Teo
rather than integrating student talk.
Elicitative moves were mostly enacted in the form of questions.
Although some of these questions were about the texts used in the
reading class, the texts were regarded as “thinking devices” rather
than simply “a means for transmitting information” about meaning
or language use (Nystrand et al., 1997, p. 9). These questions
enabled the teacher to work together with the students to negotiate
and co-construct an understanding of the texts. This is illustrated in
Excerpt 1 taken from a lesson based on a text about the friendship
between a French boy and an American soldier in the Second World
War. The excerpt begins when the teacher asks the class about the
implication of a sentence in the passage “it was in essence a dream
come to life” when the boy, Luis, noticed an American military
camp set up near his home in Normandy.
Excerpt 1.
1 T: It was in essence a dream come to life. A dream come to life. What dream? What kind of dream here?
2 S1: A camp has sprung to life on the empty field just below his home.
3 T: OK. So what does it imply? A dream come to his life. What does it imply? What does it imply?
4 S2: It implies he is glad in there, and he never, had never seen some people.
5 T: Some people. What kind of people?
6 S2: Soldier.
7 T: Soldiers.
8 S2: So he is very interested in them and he, every day, he stand on the beach, overlook the beach, and maybe he want to find them and maybe to make friends with
them.
The teacher used the dialogic move of El3 (eliciting ideas or
opinions) in Turn 1 to elicit students' understanding about the
implication of the word ‘dream’. S1's reply, a mere repetition of a
sentence from the text, seemed to suggest that the boy's dream was
the appearance of a military camp near his home. S2, in contrast,
interpreted that the boy's dream was to make friends with the
American soldiers by pointing out the boy's joy at seeing the
American soldiers, thereby showing his ability to read between the
lines. It could be argued that it was the teacher's elicitation in Turn
1 together with his repeated prompts in Turn 3 that elicited this
display of the thinking skill of inference.
3.2. Students’ critical thinking
The coding of students’ critical thinking skills displayed in the
classroom dialogue shows that they were not equally distributed
across the five categories. As shown in Table 5, analysis is the most
commonly instantiated skill while synthesis is the least common
across the fifteen lessons.
The following excerpt shows how a student demonstrated her
critical thinking skills in a dialogue on the positive effects of fear.
Excerpt 2.
1 T: Does psychological fear produce any positive aspects in people's life? If yes, what are they? Any opinions?
2 S: I think yes because if we are afraid of something, we will reduce the possibility of getting close to the deadly situation. Besides, if we are afraid of something,
we'll do some preparation to overcome it. Some people also can make profit from fear.
In this excerpt, the teacher used the dialogic move of El3 (elic-
iting ideas or opinions) to elicit students' view of the positive effects
of fear. In response, the student displayed her skill of analysis by
recognising the relationship between fear and self-protection
through precautionary measures, which would not have occurred
without the teacher's elicitative move. While it is arguable if
profiting from fear is positive, it does show the student's analytical
6
Teaching and Teacher Education 125 (2023) 104068
Table 5
Frequency of student critical thinking.
Category Frequency
Analysis (Ana) 78
Inference (Inf) 40
Evaluation (Eva) 28
Comparison (Com) 23
Synthesis (Syn) 1
ability to recognize relationships between ideas.
By mapping the instantiations of the various teacher dialogic
moves against students' display of critical thinking, we managed to
isolate the teacher dialogic moves that tended to elicit students'
critical thinking. This process led to the identification of specific
El3
Su1
El3
Ex2
Su2
dialogic moves that seemed to precipitate critical thinking (see
Table 6). From the data, it appears that only five dialogic moves
have elicited some aspect of students' critical thinking. Among
them, Ex3 (presenting a different perspective or scenario) (60%),
In4 (requesting one student to evaluate another's contribution)
(50%) and El3 (eliciting students' ideas or opinions) (39%) seemed
to have the greatest propensity to elicit students' critical thinking.
What Table 6 indicates is merely the types of dialogic moves that
seem to have a stronger tendency to draw out students' display of
critical thinking. However, it sheds no light on the actual discursive
mechanisms by which these dialogic moves stimulate students'
critical thinking. In order to probe into the ways in which certain
dialogic moves elicited students' critical thinking, a fine-grained
microanalysis of the classroom transcripts was undertaken. As a
result of this close examination, three main ways by which the
teacher's dialogic moves seem to have resulted in students' display
of critical thinking were identified.
3.3. Ways in which dialogic moves elicit critical thinking
3.3.1. Opening up
One main way in which the teacher's dialogic moves seemed to
El3
Ana
have stimulated students' critical thinking is by simply opening up
the discursive space for critical thinking through moves such as
eliciting students' ideas or opinions (El3) and requesting students
to add to others' contribution (In3). We observed that a question
that elicited students' thoughts or views regarding an issue often
paved the way for students to demonstrate critical thinking. An
effective dialogic move that opens up the space for students' critical
thinking is El3 (eliciting ideas or opinions), which tends to be in the
R. Cui and P. Teo Teaching and Teacher Education 125 (2023) 104068

Table 6
Dialogic moves that elicited critical thinking.

Dialogic move Dialogic move (freq) Critical thinking (freq) Percentage

Ana Com Eva Inf Syn

Ex3 (Presenting a different perspective or scenario) 10 5 0 0 1 0 60

In4 (Requesting one student to evaluate another's contribution) 24 3 1 7 1 0 50
El3 (Eliciting students' ideas or opinions) 305 55 14 19 30 1 39
Ex2 (Requesting elaboration or explanation) 122 14 5 2 7 0 23
El2 (Eliciting students' confirmation of their contribution) 93 1 3 0 1 0 5
El1 (Eliciting students' repetition/rephrasing) 17 0 0 0 0 0 0
Su1 (Supporting by acknowledging) 246 0 0 0 0 0 0
Su2 (Supporting by affirmatively repeating) 249 0 0 0 0 0 0
Su3 (Supporting by positively evaluating) 220 0 0 0 0 0 0
Su4 (Supporting by providing a cue) 29 0 0 0 0 0 0
Su5 (Supporting by giving a model answer) 15 0 0 0 0 0 0
In1 (Requesting one student to answer another's question) 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
In2 (Requesting one student to explain another's contribution) 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
In3 (Requesting one student to add to another's contribution) 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Ex1 (Building on a student's contribution) 116 0 0 0 0 0 0
Ch1 (Expressing disagreement) 3 0 0 0 0 0 0
Ch2 (Highlighting problems) 5 0 0 0 0 0 0

form of an exploratory question.
An exploratory question “[i]nvites response with no pre-
determined answer, often opinions, suggestions, ideas and hy-
potheses” (Teo, 2016, p. 51) and therefore enables students to
express themselves with freedom and agency. With an exploratory
question, a teacher signals a desire to find out not merely what
students know but what and how they think, focusing on reasoning
rather than knowledge. As such, the dialogic move of El3 makes it
possible for students to manifest their thinking without worrying
about whether their answer is one that is correct or expected by the
teacher, thereby opening the space for critical thinking. This is
illustrated in Excerpt 3 where the teacher is asking a student if she
would still work if she were rich.
between working and not working instead of verbalising her
thinking and reasoning process in order to justify her response to
the question. In other words, the teacher's dialogic move of El3
(eliciting students' ideas or opinions) only provided the opportu-
nity, and not the cause, for the student to exercise and display her
critical thinking.
3.3.2. Branching out
Besides opening up the space for critical thinking, in some cases
the teacher ‘branched out’ from one perspective or standpoint to
another by offering alternative scenarios or counter arguments and
playing the devil's advocate so as to prompt students to think
divergently. ‘Branching out’ moves include Ex3 (presenting a

Excerpt 3.

1 T: You choose not to work. So you will not work anymore if you are very rich. Right? El3
2 S: When we have no money, we work for money. And we don't have time for life. However, if we have a lot of money, we'll have more time for our life, like Ana
reading, drawing and other activities. Objectively speaking, money is very important. If we have a lot of money, we can give our family or ourselves a good Com
life. What we are working for? We are working to earn money. But if we have enough money, we can do what we want to do. Inf

different perspective or scenario), Ch1 (expressing disagreement

In this excerpt, the student is seen to exhibit her critical thinking
skills of analysis, comparison and inference. When voicing her ideas
on whether she would still work after getting rich, she breaks the
question down into two opposing but related issues, work and
leisure, before identifying the relationship between the two: we
work to get rich but work deprives us of the time for leisure, for
living life. Thus, if she were rich, she would not want to work as she
already has the money to enjoy life. In displaying her analytical
skills, she also shows her ability to compare two scenarios of time
needed to work versus time needed for leisure where less time for
work means more time for leisure and vice versa. She also exhibited
the inferential skill in drawing conclusions: if people have enough
money, there is no necessity for them to work (assuming that
money is the only reason why people work).
It should be noted, however, that the teacher's dialogic move
only elicited the student's thought without any explicit request for
critical thinking, such as ‘Can you compare the scenario of having
no money and the scenario of having money before concluding if
you would continue to work after becoming rich?’. This indicates
that the student could have responded by making a simple choice
with a contribution) and Ch2 (highlighting problems with a
contribution). By using the dialogic move of Ex3, the teacher pre-
sents a student with a new or alternative situation, while Ch1 and
Ch2 challenge or problematise the student's ideas or opinions.
‘Branching out’ questions prompt students to reflect and re-
evaluate their initial position, which stretches their thinking and
develops their critical thinking. By inviting students to consider
alternative scenarios or possibilities that they might not have
otherwise entertained, the teacher stimulates students to consider
and compare different perspectives of an issue with their own
perspective before deciding if they would maintain or revise their
initial position. This is conducive to the development of students'
critical thinking since critical thinkers should be open to different
opinions and always reflect on their thoughts (Ennis, 1987; Facione,
1990; Paul, 1993). This is illustrated in Excerpt 4 taken from a dis-
cussion on Chinese versus American parenting styles. The excerpt
begins with a student's response to the teacher's exploratory
question “What were your parents' reactions when you got a low
score at school?”.

7
R. Cui and P. Teo Teaching and Teacher Education 125 (2023) 104068

Excerpt 4.

1 S: When I come home, if my mother see and said, maybe she will know what I think. So many times she doesn't say anything. Tell me just study harder and
have a good grade in the next exam. For my father, maybe he will say many things. Because he thinks if he said to me, I would know him better. And he
wants me to be a good student. So he will say many things to me.
2 T: So which one do you like better, your mother's reaction or your father's? El3
3 S: I think these two all OK. For my mom, I could feel she was encouraging me and she wants to give me more time to think for myself. And my father wants to Ana
speak more to let me know better from communication. So it's OK. Eva
4 T: But your father just talked, not saying something harsh to you. El2
5 S: Yeah. But I know my father had a lot of hopes on me.
6 T: Hmm. Just have a lot of expectation of you. Right? El2
7 S: Yeah.
8 T: So you feel comfortable and you were not angry with your parents at that moment for having this kind of conversation. Right? With your father. El2
9 S: For sometimes, I feel uncomfortable. But I am not angry. I know they are saying something good for me. They don't want to hurt me. Just sometimes they Ana
don't have a good way to solve these problems. So I think I can understand them.
10 T: Yes. OK. Good. You know in the future you'll get married and you'll have own children. And imagine if one day your child comes home with a score B, what Su1
would you do? Doing the same thing as your parents did? Su3
Ex3
11 S: For me, I think I don't say to him.
12 T: You will remain silent? El2
13 S: I think if my child have a bad grade, maybe he will feel sad, feel sad for himself. So at this time if I say too many things to him, maybe he will be negative and Inf
I don't want to see that. I want to solve this problem by himself.
14 T: OK. Su1
15 S: And in the future I think, it's a long time, he will solve any problem by himself, not by me. So it's better to do it in his childhood. Inf
16 T: So in that way you are actually very similar with the American mothers. Right? Just let the child do something on their own, control their own fate. El2
17 S: Yeah. Just a beginning.

In this excerpt, the student displays her skill of analysis in Turns
3 and 9 by analysing the reasons behind her parents' differing re-
actions to her low score. On the basis of her analysis, she realises
that though their reactions were different they stemmed from good
intentions. This act of appraising her parents' parenting styles from
a daughter's perspective reflects her skill of evaluation. To probe
further, the teacher uses the dialogic move of Ex3 (presenting a
different perspective or scenario) in Turn 10 to ask her to consider
how she would react as a mother if her own child were to obtain a
poor grade at school. By asking her to adopt the role of a parent
rather than a child, the teacher puts the student in a position to see
the issue from a different perspective. This elicited the student's
response in Turns 13 and 15, where she reasons that saying too
much to her child would not only make him feel worse but also
deprive him of the opportunity to take ownership of, and thereby
solve, a problem on his own. This new line of reasoning would not
have emerged and a firmer position on which style of parenting she
prefers would not have developed if the teacher had not ‘branched
out’ by inviting the student to consider a different scenario.
tossing has a three-part structure comprising (1) a student state-
ment or question, (2) the teacher's question, and (3) further re-
sponses by the student or other students (Chin, 2007; van Zee &
Minstrell, 1997). In our study, we narrowed the scope of ‘tossing
back’ to other students so as to differentiate it from ‘opening up’,
which includes asking a student to elaborate or explain a response
(Ex2: Requesting elaboration or explanation).
‘Tossing back’ is mainly realized through the dialogic move of
In4 (requesting one student to evaluate another's contribution).
Instead of the teacher taking on the role of evaluating or com-
menting on a student's contribution, the teacher (re)assigns this
responsibility to the rest of the class. This not only gives them the
opportunity to develop their thinking skills but also increases the
level of engagement and participation as students would have to
listen attentively to, and engage actively with, what their class-
mates say in class. This is illustrated in the following excerpt about
the difference between the Chinese and American parenting styles.
The excerpt begins with S1 presenting her group's response to the
question of which parenting style they prefer.

Excerpt 5.

1 S1: As a parent, we will choose the Chinese parenting style because children now cannot make choices by themselves. They are too young and are not Eva
experienced to choose the right thing. So we as parents are responsible for making choices for our children.
2 T: So just now this group thinks as a parent, we'd better adopt the Chinese parenting style because children are not mature. Sometimes or most of the time, In4
they are unable to choose on their own, make choices on their own. So as a parent, we need to give them a helping hand. We need to be there, beside them
all the time. In other words, we shouldn't give them much freedom. We should be there giving them guidance, supervision. Do you agree, S2?
3 S2: I think if we support the Chinese style, I think we always be the guidance for the children. And she [i.e., the child] only follows us and she cannot know the Ana
world. She only acts I follow you, don't experience anything else. And in my opinion, I will let the children to do what they want. Whether or not they don't Eva
know how to choose the road, I think, yeah, they don't know how to choose the road. But he chooses the road, he is right. And whether he success or fail, he Inf
will get that experience by himself. I think if you come across the problems, I admit I have met this problem before. I think it's wrong, so won't do it again.
And I think if we do the Chinese style, I think that road is good, but I don't know whether this road is good or not. I only choose to take this road. I don't want
to explore anything because my mom and my dad ask me to do that.

3.3.3. Tossing back
Being a practice of productive classroom discourse, tossing is a
way of questioning with which a teacher can extend students'
thinking “by catching the meaning of the student's prior utterance
and ‘‘throwing’’ responsibility for thinking back to the student and
all those present in class” (Chin, 2007, p. 818). This means that
In Turn 3, S2 demonstrates her critical thinking skills of making
logical conclusions based on observation, experience and judge-
ment. First, she is able to evaluate and identify the flaw in S1's
reasoning: if parents make decisions on behalf of their children
simply because they are deemed too young and immature to make
their own decisions, it would lead to children's continual

8
R. Cui and P. Teo
dependence on their parents' guidance (“we always be the guid-
ance for the children”). This over-dependence on their parents
would stifle their growth which comes from experience (“only
follows us and she cannot know the world”). Furthermore, she
draws from her own experience to make the point that children
could learn from their mistakes (“I admit I have met this problem
before”).
These vital skills of critical thinking would not be displayed by
S2 if the teacher had taken it upon himself to respond or critique
S1's contribution instead of tossing the responsibility back to the
class by inviting S2's critique through the dialogic move of inte-
gration (specifically, In4). It is noteworthy that the teacher paved
the way for this by first revoicing S1's contribution in Turn 2,
without which students like S2 might be caught unawares and be
unable to produce the substantive turn that resulted.
4. Discussion
Our study has shown a vital link between teacher's dialogic
moves and students' critical thinking. Specifically, three direction-
ally oriented discursive moves, ‘opening up’, ‘branching out’ and
‘tossing back’, are shown to be productive in drawing out students'
critical thinking. By ‘opening up’, the teacher's dialogic moves
might not directly elicit students' critical thinking but merely
provide opportunities for students to spontaneously exhibit their
critical thinking; by ‘branching out’, the teacher's dialogic moves
serve to widen students' perspectives and prompt them to reflect
on and, where necessary, revise their thinking; by ‘tossing back’,
the teacher's dialogic moves shift the important responsibility of
evaluation to the class. Together, they represent concrete ways
which may help teachers better tap the potentials of classroom talk
and dialogue to develop students' critical thinking.
These moves typically unfolded in a particular sequence in our
study, beginning with ‘opening up’ and followed by ‘branching out’
and ‘tossing back’. This could be due to the fact that the classroom
dialogue in our study revolved mainly around reading passages.
Very often, a whole-class dialogue would begin with a question
from the teacher to elicit students' comprehension of the passages,
which then opened the space for dialogue and critical thinking. To
some extent, this aligns with Fisher's (2007) method of using a
series of questions to progressively engage students in higher levels
of thinking. For example, one can start with literal (factual) ques-
tions to elicit comprehension such as ‘What is this about?’ before
moving to analytic questions to encourage critical thinking such as
‘Do you agree with this?’ and ‘What reasons can you give?’.
Though similar to other dialogic strategies in the extant litera-
ture, such as ‘dialogic bid’ (Nystrand et al., 2003), ‘extending’
(Alexander, 2020), ‘toss’ (Chin, 2007; van Zee & Minstrell, 1997), the
three terms, ‘opening up’, ‘branching out’, and ‘tossing back’,
highlight the direction of the teacher's dialogic moves and signal
the turn-taking sequence, thereby imbuing some degree of direc-
tionality and purpose to the unpredictable and intractable nature of
classroom dialogue. They may also serve as a metaphor to reify the
structure of classroom dialogue and track the divergent trajectories
of the heteroglossia in dialogue (Bakhtin, 1986).
The three dialogic moves can be seen to be materialised through
specific question forms of ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘why’, ‘what if’ and ‘what do
you think of that idea’. This is compatible with the findings of van
Booven (2015) who observed that extension questions like ‘What
would happen to X if Y?’ or ‘how’ questions enabled teachers “to
push students to speak more …, think about different aspects of
scientific concepts …, and move beyond simple recall (toward
higher order cognitive processes)” (p. 1198). However, one should
be cautious in making a deterministic link between the linguistic
form of teacher dialogic moves and their function of eliciting
9
Teaching and Teacher Education 125 (2023) 104068
students' critical thinking. For example, opening the space for
critical thinking can be achieved through various forms of elic-
itative questions. Not only do open-ended questions have the po-
tential of eliciting students' critical thinking (Burbules, 1993;
Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013; Splitter & Sharp, 1995), close-ended
questions may also be effective (Boyd & Markarian, 2011).
Despite the widespread perception that close-ended questions
would narrow the dialogic space and stifle students' thinking, Boyd
and Markarian (2011) found that Michael, the teacher they
observed, was able to open dialogic space and stimulate students'
higher order thinking even by means of close-ended questions.
However, Boyd and Markarian (2011) also revealed that Michael's
talk “has functioned all year to invite and support their contribu-
tions for developments, explorations, and applications to concep-
tual understandings” and the students “are thus predisposed to
perceive Michael's utterances within this socio-historical pattern of
functioning” (p. 530). In other words, the dialogic environment, or
“talk culture” (Michaels & O’Connor, 2012, p. 6), has already been
cultivated and is recognised and accepted by the students. Only
within such a “talk culture” can teacher talk, regardless of its form,
achieve the function of opening the space for dialogue and hence
critical thinking. This seems to suggest that the priority in using
dialogic instruction to promote critical thinking is in building such
an environment although “[i]t takes time, practice, and effort to
induct students into this kind of “talk culture”” (Michaels &
O’Connor, 2012, p. 6).
Another noteworthy point is that critical thinking consists of a
personal voice (Mehta & Al-Mahrooqi, 2015; Xu & Grant, 2017).
Thus, a prerequisite for developing students' critical thinking is to
make sure students find their voice which “involves (a) opportunity
to speak, (b) expressing one's own ideas, (c) on one's own terms,
and (d) being heeded by others” (Segal & Lefstein, 2016, p. 3). In this
light, although not all teacher dialogic moves would provoke stu-
dents' critical thinking as seen in our study, they are nonetheless
important in contributing to the engendering of a dialogic envi-
ronment conducive to encouraging student talk and thinking.
5. Concluding remarks
As an exploratory study on the relationship between teacher
talk and students' critical thinking, our study has a few limitations
which should be highlighted. First, the findings were based only on
data collected from one intact class taught by the first author.
Therefore, the evidence of the effectiveness of dialogic instruction
in developing students' critical thinking in this study can hardly be
assumed in another classroom taught by another teacher or even by
the same teacher in the same context. Future research may trial
similar teaching programmes of dialogic instruction in more
classrooms and in different contexts so as to further consolidate our
knowledge and understanding of the effectiveness of dialogic in-
struction in developing students’ critical thinking in classrooms,
taking into account various factors such as educational background,
academic ability, and language proficiency.
Secondly, since this study was situated in an EFL class, English
was the medium of instruction and hence only English was used as
the language of interaction and index of the students’ critical
thinking skills. As their level of English proficiency ranged from
elementary to intermediate in the CEFR, the students in this study
might have difficulties in displaying their critical thinking in En-
glish, which could mean that the classroom data collected might
not accurately reflect their critical thinking abilities. In future
studies, researchers may wish to consider allowing EFL students to
switch to a language familiar to them, which would give them
greater confidence and capacity to think and express their thoughts
in a more precise and more profound manner (García & Li, 2014; Lin
R. Cui and P. Teo
& Lo, 2017; Luk & Lin, 2015).
Finally, our study only focused on whole-class teacher-student
interactions and did not examine student talk in a small group
setting. As a study to explore the role of teacher talk in developing
students' critical thinking, our focus was trained on how the
teacher engendered and sustained a whole-class dialogic environ-
ment and how this might influence the development of students'
critical thinking. Consequently, student talk generated in the
context of group work was not examined. Since talk among stu-
dents in a small group is one main type of interaction in dialogic
teaching (Alexander, 2006) and a key locus where students may
exhibit their critical thinking (Davies & Esling, 2020; Mercer, 2000),
a close analysis of it might be rewarded with insights into students'
uptake of the teacher's dialogic instruction and the degree of their
spontaneity and ownership of thinking and learning in a dialogic
environment.
Although based on only one EFL classroom situated in China, it is
hoped that the findings of our study would help teachers, teacher
educators and educational researchers beyond EFL contexts and
beyond China to deepen their understanding of dialogic instruction
and how it can facilitate the development of students' critical
thinking. The findings may be used as a reference or resource for
teachers in different subject areas in different contexts to reflect on,
and hopefully enhance, their own classroom practices so that stu-
dents’ thinking can be developed and made visible through talk.
Data availability
The data that has been used is confidential.
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by Zhejiang Universities’ “Fourteenth-
Five-Year” Teaching Reform Project (Grant Number: jg20220562).
This work was also supported by the Higher Education Teaching
Reform Project of Taizhou University in 2022. It was also funded by
Nanyang Technological University Research Scholarship.
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