Language and Education

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Dialogic teaching: talk in service of a dialogic

stance

Maureen Patricia Boyd & William C. Markarian

To cite this article: Maureen Patricia Boyd & William C. Markarian (2011) Dialogic
teaching: talk in service of a dialogic stance, Language and Education, 25:6, 515-534, DOI:
10.1080/09500782.2011.597861

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Language and Education
Vol. 25, No. 6, November 2011, 515–534

Dialogic teaching: talk in service of a dialogic stance

Maureen Patricia Boyd∗ and William C. Markarian

Department of Learning and Instruction, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA
(Received 26 January 2011; final version received 7 June 2011)

We consider what it means to be a dialogic teacher as characterized by Paulo Freire and

Robin Alexander, and utilizing discourse analysis, we explicate how one elementary
teacher’s talk reflects these characteristics. We provide context for and analysis of a
seven-minute discussion selected as a cumulative achievement the focal nine-year-olds
are capable of after a year’s exposure to dialogic teaching. These students explored
many authors’ stereotypical treatment of orphanages as a common setting in children’s
literature and considered how it impacted character development and the readers’ predis-
position toward characters. We explore the role the teacher played to mobilize students’
everyday knowledge, listen attentively as students grappled with ideas, and then anchor
his questions and comments in students’ contributions. Using talk in this way, he was
able to negotiate school knowledge, specifically literate talk, and effectively connect it
to what his students already knew. We highlight the concept of dialogic stance and argue
that it is not isomorphic with the way a particular utterance is syntactically structured. It
is rather a function of how patterns of talk may open up discourse space for exploration
and varied opinions, and how teacher- and student decision-making about content is
presented and discussed.
Keywords: classroom dialogue; dialogic teaching; instructional stance; questioning;
elementary school education

I think most learning starts with the learners and goes from there. And so to start with their
reading logs or what they are talking about and try to expand on that and to bring other things
into that . . . when they say something it might be the perfect opportunity to slide something
in. (Michael, third-grade teacher)

Somewhere in central New York, in June, in the midst of a third-grade classroom,

Michael sits surrounded by his students. He had started this day like all the others during
this school year – in Morning Meeting – asking his nine-year-old students about the books
they have read outside of school and have written about in their reading logs. One of
the most formidable tools Michael employs in his classroom is his understanding of talk.
However, those familiar with talk theory might be surprised if, when eavesdropping on
this particular conversation, they would hear Michael ask closed questions such as, ‘So
there’s an orphanage involved?’ and a student’s subsequent minimal response, ‘Yeah, uh
huh.’ ‘Closed’ questions, after all, are those that demand little elaboration on a student’s
part, just as ‘Yeah, uh huh’ suggests. For this reason, they have grown synonymous with
poor, not extraordinary, teacher practice.

∗
Corresponding author. Email: mpboyd@buffalo.edu

ISSN 0950-0782 print / ISSN 1747-7581 online

C 2011 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2011.597861
http://www.tandfonline.com
516 M.P. Boyd and W.C. Markarian

However, we would argue that Michael is a dialogic teacher and as such uses talk
effectively. In his defense, it is completely inappropriate to evaluate a turn of talk so
completely decontextualized as the one above, let alone hold it up as a model for all
of Michael’s use of talk. But this particular exchange between Michael and the student,
structurally in the form of a closed question and a succinct answer, breaks expectations.
It initiated a seven-minute conversation that covered 86 turns of talk and opened up an
intertextual discussion about many authors’ stereotypical treatment of orphanages as a
common setting and considered how it impacts character development and the readers’
predisposition toward characters. Fourteen third-grade students (three quarters of the class)
and their teacher reference nine books (all above a fourth-grade reading level), despite the
teacher’s frequent use of closed questions, inauthentic questions, and didactic statements.
In this paper, we argue that closed questions – those traditionally associated with
monologic talk – nevertheless yield elaborated and substantive student contributions in this
classroom because the teacher talk is in service of a dialogic stance. Moreover, we assert
that dialogic stance is independent from and not isomorphic with any particular language
form. Rather, a dialogic stance permeates the talk to such an extent that it informs the
illocutionary force of the talk and the discourse space. In other words, it is not just how we
say it, but also how we are predisposed to receive it.
The socio-historical patterns of talk that elucidate dialogic stance can open up discourse
space; these patterns request students to elaborate even if individual utterances do not appear
to do so. This elaborated student talk offers an attentive dialogic teacher the everyday
language and knowledge his students currently value and find relevant that he in turn
can purposefully link with the language and knowledge the school values. Adopting a
dialogic stance thus affords the teacher more opportunities to negotiate as a more informed
‘knowledgeable other’. Therefore, it is not the overt structures of Michael’s talk but the
purposes of his and his students’ talk in the classroom that demonstrate his pedagogical
talk expertise.
Herein, we illustrate the concept of dialogic stance and explicate how one elementary
teacher reflects the characteristics of a dialogic teacher as characterized by Paulo Freire
and Robin Alexander. Through a close discourse analysis of one seven-minute extended
conversation, we consider:
RQ1: In what ways do Michael’s patterns of talk reflect the characteristics that Freire and
Alexander consider as those of a dialogic teacher and a dialogic stance?

RQ2: In what ways does Michael negotiate the everyday language of his students and
the formal language of schooling – specifically the literate talk that he is asking them to
learn?

Theoretical review
It has been suggested that teaching is a chain of decision-making, and the degree to which
the teacher or students get to make the decisions frames the parameters for instructional
stance (e.g. the open question is associated with student contributions and a collaborative
reasoning stance; Chinn, Anderson, and Waggoner 2001). Certainly, a teacher’s instructional
stance, or teaching ontology, has coherent, recognizable interactional patterns informing
how students read the moment and respond, and determining the degree to which decision-
making reflects joint purposes (Boyd forthcoming; Renshaw 2004). Instructional stance is
made visible in the patterns of talk – turn-taking norms, types of questioning and response,
and time students have to talk; the subject of talk – who gets to select and control it and
 Language and Education 517

who has interpretive authority; and illocutionary force – the degree to which the intentions
of the speaker are taken up into the stream of discourse (Linell and Markova 1993).
Student discussion stance to literature has been associated with particular instructional
decisions. In their study of two fourth-grade discussion patterns (recitational and collabo-
rative reasoning), Chinn and colleagues describe three stances for discussing literature. The
first two are based on Louise Rosenblatt’s (1978) transactional theory of reading, which
asserts meaning-making is dialogic – in-the-moment understanding in anticipation of and
in response to the reader and text. An efferent stance is adopted when students read for
information, and an aesthetic stance is adopted when students inhale the narrative as a
‘lived-through experience’. The third stance described is critical-analytic, a stance adopted
by ‘educated adults’ and associated with high-level comprehension. The decisions a teacher
makes are key to shaping these student stances, as for example, expectations for particular
types of answers are signaled in teacher questions. Building on these three stances, Soter and
colleagues (2008) identified teacher discourse features (authentic questions, questions that
elicit high-level thinking, questions that elicit extra-textual connections, uptake) to serve
as proximal indicators of students’ high-level comprehension, as evinced by students’
elaborated explanations and exploratory talk.
Much discussion regarding effective teacher talk today suggests that the function of
talk can be determined by its form (Nystrand 2006; Soter et al. 2008). But this increasingly
inflexible belief in and adherence to the privileging of one linguistic syntax over another –
such as teachers employing ‘open’ questions over ‘closed’ questions – has demonized the
research regarding the effectiveness of teacher talk. In this paper, we elucidate how our focal
teacher successfully uses a variety of talk structures and patterns of use – including those
with closed questions and didactic statements – in service of a dialogic stance that guides
students to think and talk in elaborated, authoritative, and analytic ways. In other words,
Michael demonstrates that it is the perceived function of the talk in a situated, social context,
not its decontextualized form, that determines its effectiveness. Form follows function, not
the other way around.
Over at least the past 40 years, researchers of classroom and teacher talk (e.g. Barnes,
Britton, and Torbe 1969; Cazden 2001; Dillon 1984; Nystrand et al. 1997; Wells 1999)
have come to note that classroom talk is marked by a domination of teachers talking
and students listening, and teachers posing questions in ways that seem to perpetuate
these imbalances. For example, much has been noted of teachers who favor transmitting
knowledge via monologic lecture and who ask questions in IRE (teacher Initiation, student
Response, teacher Evaluation) or IRF (teacher Initiation, student Response, teacher Follow
up) recitational format. In this monologic stance, questions that are closed and inauthentic
function only to succinctly display how well a student’s recall aligns itself with the message
the teacher is disseminating, how well he or she can ‘perform’ knowing.
Recent research (Alexander 2006; Aukerman 2007; Boyd and Rubin 2002, 2006;
Kachur and Pendergast 1997; Linell and Markova 1993; Mercer and Littleton 2007) has
come to recognize, however, that the outward appearances of particular instances of talk
structures in a classroom are not necessarily the best indicators of the underlying dynamic
of the learning of the classroom (e.g. instructional stance or student talk predispositions
shaped by socio-historic patterns of classroom talk). It is, in other words, feasible for
a question to appear ‘dialogic’ yet in the service of a teacher with a monologic stance;
the responses to such questions will function monologically – in other words, such a
teacher may use an open, authentic question, utilizing cues such as ‘why’ and ‘do you
believe’, but only truly care about how closely the student’s response aligns with some
school-sanctioned or teacher-predetermined position. Conversely, it is just as feasible for a
518 M.P. Boyd and W.C. Markarian

teacher to ask an outwardly ‘bad’, closed question that is functioning within the context of
a dialogic classroom and in the service of a dialogic teacher stance. Such a question in such
a context, despite its outward appearances, may nevertheless produce extended discussion,
elaborated talk, and a joint construction of knowledge among class participants.
Thus, it is clear that the way talk is syntactically structured is not the significant measure
of how well it will produce dialogically oriented classrooms. Certainly, the surface values
of talk mediate and shape how and what is learned – but other forces must also be at
work, shaping what talk means and does within the context of the classroom. We argue
that socio-historical patterns of delivery, shaped by the epistemological and ontological
stance of the teacher, inform and predispose students as to what kind of response and
classroom interaction is valued and expected. Students can hear talk structures vocalized,
but they determine the meaning of a turn of talk as they heed other unspoken forces, such
as illocutionary force of the speaker and the context as they are understood through socio-
historical classroom patterns. Thus, when we examine a conversational turn, we must also
be mindful of its responsive and initiatory relationship to what has been said and what is
said next (Bakhtin 1981; Linell and Markova 1993). To engender student talk that is truly
dialogic – that is elaborated and engaged as well as contingent and reflective of the talk
of others in the class – two theorists have proposed similar ideas regarding the hallmark
qualities of a dialogic classroom.
The first is by Paulo Freire, who summarized his beliefs regarding pedagogical stance in
an interview with Ira Shor. Freire (Shor and Freire 1987) technically called this a ‘liberating
teaching’ in a ‘dialogical class’. The dialogic teacher, according to Freire, acts as follows:

(1) Modulates his tone of voice to conversational tones rather than didactic.
(2) Listens intently when students are speaking and asks other students to do the same.
(3) Does not begin a reply after the student ends her or his first sentence, but asks the
student to say more about the question.
(4) Delays a response when students request the teacher’s opinion, instead defers to
other student opinions.
(5) Starts next class with answers to questions/comments he could not answer during
the current class.
(6) Signals (as in Step 5) the importance of student statements.
(7) Uses humor.

In 2006, Robin Alexander similarly outlined the qualities of dialogic teaching. He

named the following five talk descriptors as indicators of a dialogic classroom:
Collective: Teachers and children address learning tasks together whether as a group or as a
class, rather than in isolation.
Reciprocal: Teachers and children listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative.

Supportive: Children articulate their ideas freely, without fear of embarrassment over ‘wrong’
answers; and they help each other to reach common understandings.
Cumulative: Teachers and children build on their own and each other’s ideas and chain them
in coherent lines of thinking and enquiry.

Purposeful: Teachers plan and facilitate dialogic teaching with particular educational goals in
view. (2006, 28)
It is important to note that in neither Freire’s nor Alexander’s work is a specific type
of speech syntax required. Instead, both emphasize a teacher’s generalized stance over
 Language and Education 519

a scripted type of talk. Alexander, in fact, argued that a teacher should draw instead
on a ‘repertoire’ of talk strategies so long as these strategies worked in the service of
establishing and maintaining a dialogic classroom. Indeed, to limit a teacher to a certain
type of questioning pattern would be ‘too simplistic’ (Mercer and Littleton 2007, 35).
There are many arguments currently being made for why a dialogic approach is more
effective than the traditional monologic approach that is still dominant in today’s class-
rooms; the majority of these arguments cite improvements to student critical thinking and
retention. In the UK, ‘dialogic teaching’ has become a curriculum goal (Fisher 2011) and
dialogue in the classroom is viewed as an explicit educational end in itself (Mercer et al.
2010). This growing body of literature on dialogic teaching (Alexander 2006) ascribes var-
ied labels: dialogic instruction (Nystrand et al. 1997), dialogic learning (van der Linden and
Renshaw 2004), dialogic pedagogy (Skidmore 2000) and dialogic inquiry (Wells 2001), but
the consistent message is for supportive and substantive opportunities for engaged talk with
content – to explore, challenge, reconsider, and extend ideas in ways that enhance student
learning. What distinguishes dialogic teaching is its orientation to knowledge and knowing
(Wells 2006). The focus is on students’ growing understanding – growing knowing – as they
bring their current experience-based knowing to bear on school-sanctioned contexts and
ideas such as literature provides and engage in literate discourse practices. Complementary
classroom research in the US explicitly argues for student purposes, judgements, and con-
tributions to be woven into real-time instructional decision-making and talk. For example,
we see this in Aukerman’s (2007) explication of a shared evaluative pedagogy (SHEP) in
a fifth-grade setting, and Boyd and Galda’s (2011) framework for real talk emanating from
their study of four elementary classrooms. This paper adds to this body of literature as
we argue that central to the notion of dialogic teaching is a dialogic stance that is evident
through both patterns of instructional delivery and purposeful decisions about how content
is presented and discussed. That is, teachers adopting a dialogic stance encourage students
to articulate what they know and position them to have interpretive authority. There is
purposeful negotiation of the discourse of ‘everyday’ knowledge that students bring with
them to school, and then when students are readied, there is connection to the discourse
of formal education, ‘school’ knowledge. Along these lines, a key mutual component to
both Freire’s and Alexander’s dialogic teaching is that the teacher is necessarily a sincere
listener. In Figure 1, we represent how both Freire’s and Alexander’s characteristics of
dialogic teaching are grounded in teacher listening.
We would argue that attentive listening is a necessary prerequisite for instructional
dialogue and discussion. Good teachers listen to, follow, and support student ideas, purposes,
and lines of reasoning. If they listen to and outwardly value students’ real voices – the
everyday discourses and experiences students bring to class – in order to better understand
how everyday and school learning come together and heed illocutionary force – uptake on
the speaker’s intent (Linell and Markova 1993), they can lead students from behind and
alongside, harnessing real talk (Boyd and Galda 2011) toward insightful, educational, and
educated discussions (Rubin 2011; Wells and Chang-Wells 1992). Negotiating unfolding
talk is ‘an artful performance rather than a prescribed technique’ as the teacher must
‘follow and lead, to be responsive and directive’ and must ‘require both independence
and receptiveness’ from students (Renshaw 2004, 7). Classroom talk patterns illuminate
how teachers can support students as they learn through talking: to talk-to-know, to connect
information to real contexts, and to reason, grapple, and argue together. But unpacking these
patterns requires more than a focus on decontextualized form or content; it necessitates
an understanding of decisions to mobilize (or foreclose) students’ everyday knowledge,
the knowledge they bring with them to school, in ways that ready them conceptually to
520 M.P. Boyd and W.C. Markarian

Figure 1. Dialogic teaching as characterized by Freire and Alexander.

understand, acquire, and eventually apply the school knowledge a teacher is responsible for
teaching them.
Many talk theorists (e.g. Barnes, Britton, and Torbe 1969; Bruner 1986; Gee 1996;
Moll et al. 1992) have made clear distinctions between this knowledge a student brings to
school and the knowledge a student is asked to learn by the school. For Vygotsky (1986,
1998), a teacher’s task is to negotiate a path between a student’s everyday knowledge – what
a student knows on his or her own (spontaneous concepts), and the school knowledge –
what he or she is required to know for academic success (scientific concepts). The teacher
(or the more knowledgeable other) mediates this path, as working within the student’s
zone of proximal development (ZPD), he or she negotiates between these two types of
knowledge. This is now commonly referred to as scaffolding (cf. Aukerman 2007; Mercer
and Littleton 2007; Renshaw 2004). But for Vygotsky, a student could only be capable
of truly understanding and acquiring school knowledge when such knowledge is closely
aligned to similar conceptual understandings over which the student already held control
(grammar, experience with characters in novels) in his or her everyday knowledge. In
other words, a successful ‘scaffold’ is built from the conceptual knowledge and language a
student already possesses; it utilizes general knowledge, school knowledge, and language
already controlled within the student’s everyday knowledge and guides them toward a path
that leads to appropriating this new ‘school knowledge’ through its careful, purposeful
 Language and Education 521

association with what the student already knows. In fact, Dyson (1990) and Aukerman
(2007) prefer the term ‘guided participation’ to scaffolding as they too argue that the
building blocks of the scaffold must come from the student. A teacher’s job is to discern
what those blocks are and cull them together for future association with school knowledge
and to cultivate intersubjectivity (Dyson 1990) and practice illocutionary uptake. In other
words, joint purpose, an awareness of what the other is doing, and contingent responding
are essential ingredients of a dialogic instructional stance.
Herein lies an important distinction. A monologic stance upholds the primacy of school
language often through rote utilization of terminology (consider Freire’s banking metaphor).
This develops little conceptual awareness for the teacher’s students and fails to explicitly
make meaningful connections with what those students already know (foreknowledge) and
what they are being asked to learn. In this case, the teacher’s scaffold is teacher imposed
and remains detached from the edifice of a student’s everyday knowledge, and is therefore
less effective in supporting student-internalized construction of real concepts. The dan-
ger in utilizing only top-down approaches is that if the student is left only with shallow
pseudo-concepts that are not further developed, these pseudo-concepts may be quickly
pruned from memory like neurons lacking synaptic connections. However, if the scaf-
fold is anchored in student foreknowledge and co-constructed with student contribution,
a teacher, and classroom talk, it can offer guided participation toward exploring, ventril-
oquating, rehearsing, and more successfully appropriating the language and constructs of
schooling.
What makes a dialogic stance so powerful, then, is that by listening and providing
space for student voices, the teacher can have far greater awareness of his or her students’
everyday knowledge, and this awareness may allow him or her (through his or her talk) to
harness, scaffold, and guide the foreknowledge required for a particular lesson much more
effectively. A major distinguishing feature between teachers with a monologic stance and
teachers with a dialogic stance lies in this. A teacher adopting a monologic stance expects
that the transference of ideas is merely a matter of the student listening (receiving) and
takes as a priori that if a student listens carefully enough to the dissemination of school
knowledge, he or she should be able understand, retain, and apply what the teacher has
transmitted. There is limited expectation that the student might provide feedback on how
accessible the transmission was or that the teacher might adapt what is being transmitted.
Failure in this system comes when the student simply has not listened well enough.
Conversely, a teacher adopting a dialogic stance adds the onus of listening on himself or
herself and assumes that a student’s lack of comprehension is more often related to a student’s
inability to comprehend what he or she has heard, not that he or she has not physically heard
or even remembered the teacher’s message. A dialogic teacher considers that this lack of
comprehension could be a result of poor connectivity between the conceptual awareness a
student currently has in his or her everyday knowledge and the school knowledge a teacher
is asking the student to learn. Rather than telling the student to listen ‘harder’, teachers
with a dialogic stance will try to listen better and seek out more appropriate foreknowledge
in their students in order to offer more meaningful and lasting connections between what a
student knows and what he or she is ‘coming to know’.
When we examine how Michael uses talk during Morning Meeting talk about books,
we see that the profile of a dialogic teacher is complex, principled, and context dependent.
Michael’s talk is at times superficially monologic and closed, but nevertheless, he stimulates
the very embodiment of a dialogic classroom, cultivating students’ foreknowledge to readily
receive school knowledge and dispositions. He negotiates between the everyday knowledge
522 M.P. Boyd and W.C. Markarian

students bring with them from home and the knowledge they are expected to learn and value
at school. What unfolds is a talk of considerable complexity and substance as conversants
exchange roles of listener and speaker.

Methods
We employed a micro-analysis of classroom discourse, closely examining a short, purpose-
fully selected excerpt to allow for adequate contextual detail and in order to look beyond
the surface structures of talk to elucidate what actually occurred in terms of teaching and
learning in the moment. While a short excerpt cannot illustrate the full repertoire of teaching
practices and techniques that characterize dialogic teaching, micro-analysis can unpack the
culminating and richly embedded complexity of densely layered communications while ex-
plicating both the linguistic characteristics of dialogic teaching and the particular discourse
moves that instantiate instructional stance.
We purposefully selected this seven-minute talk about orphanages from the reading log
component of the June 7 Morning Meeting not as representative of a seven-minute slice
of class but to illustrate a cumulative achievement these students are capable of after a
year’s exposure to dialogic stance. This excerpt is an intact ‘time on floor’ for one of the
four students scheduled for that day. As such, it is remarkable, as it almost entirely consists
of a collaborative, though not entirely harmonious, extended topical exchange involving
14 students. While as a group they move toward a co-constructed consensus, dissenting
voices and even student challenges are a customary part of the process (Linell and Markova
1993; Renshaw 2004). During this shared learning moment, these nine-year-olds employ
literate terms and display thinking in an authoritative and analytic way as they discuss
a sophisticated literacy construct with ease. These seven minutes were also selected to
showcase instructional in-the-moment, contingent decision-making. This teacher converts
a less than auspicious beginning to this focal reading log share into an engaged, collective,
substantive discussion during which students activate foreknowledge and apply conceptual
knowledge, and together they function as a literate community. In another context with a
different class history, Michael’s monologic talk structures might have shut down student
participation. Thus, this excerpt was also selected to demonstrate the critical importance
of interpreting utterance function in relation to preceding and subsequent responses and
across the socio-historical patterns of talk, and not limiting interpretation to surface syntactic
features (Bakhtin 1981; Linell and Markova 1993).
The unit of analysis for the micro-analysis is the conversational turn of talk (TOT). Each
turn of talk was coded for speaker and communicative function (e.g. types of questioning,
revoicing, prompting, didactic statements, explication; see Cazden 2001; Chinn et al. 2001;
Nystrand 1997). Sometimes, turns of talk were coded for more than one category as we
considered the Janus-like functions of a turn to respond and initiate. For example, TOT 3 –
‘Pass it over. Why is it that you don’t want us to read it?’ – is coded as a directive statement
in response to Teresa’s reluctance, and an initiating authentic question and an open question.
Tables 1 and 2 provide full coding. Charts and annotated transcripts supported analysis.
Summary descriptive statistics (timing and number of utterances, ratio of teacher talks
and student talks), turn-taking sequences, and positioning of interpretive authority added
to the profile of the seven-minute exchange. As context for this seven-minute exchange,
we describe the third-grade classroom community, the role student talk about books plays
across literacy events in this elementary classroom, and the reading log component of the
daily Morning Meeting literacy event.
 Language and Education 523

Context
Our focal classroom is a mainstream third-grade classroom (eight- and nine-year-olds) in
Hillyside Elementary (a pseudonym, as are all names in this study), a small college town
in central New York state. There were 10 boys and eight girls; over half of the students had
at least one parent born in a country outside of the US. While their socio-economic status
(SES) ranged widely, most families were associated with the local university and valued
schooling. Their teacher, Michael Bain, had been teaching for over 31 years. Maureen, the
first author, informally observed this class for a year and then formally gathered data for
just over three weeks in June, during which she took field notes, interviewed Michael, and
audio- and video-taped, and then transcribed, the classroom talk during two daily literacy
events: the Morning Meeting and the Chapter Book Read-Aloud (for further details on the
read-aloud event, see Boyd and Devennie 2009). Reading and talking about books were
established and honored daily practices in Michael’s classroom. During data collection, it
was common to see students finish an activity and, without prompting, pull out a novel and
read until further guidance was given. (See Appendix 1 detailing the nine books and one
movie referenced in the focal seven-minute excerpt.)
This third-grade classroom community started each morning with Morning Meeting.
Typically, this lasted 20–30 minutes, during which Michael took care of housekeeping (e.g.
student notes from home) and made time for any special sharing of home events. But the
defining structure of Morning Meeting in this classroom was the sharing of reading logs
written at home about books the students were reading independently. At the very beginning
of the school year, Michael had assigned particular days for each student when the log would
be due. On any particular day, the same three or four students thus shared their reading logs.
Michael and the rest of the class took active listening roles and freely asked questions from
the individual students, who were positioned to have interpretative authority since he or she
had read the focal text. Michael then collected the student’s exercise book containing the
reading logs and responded in writing before handing it back the next morning. Routines
were well established, and as a classroom community, members were familiar with and
appeared interested in the books individual students were reading independently. It was
common practice for students to loan books to other students and Michael.
In interviews, Michael explicitly expressed the purposefulness of his time spent in
exploratory talk about books during Morning Meeting read-aloud time: ‘It’s the books, and
it’s a way of communicating, it’s a way of sharing, and to then continue that sharing from
the author to the reader to other kids is just a really exciting thing’. He was also conscious
of his role to provide concrete feedback and support students’ identities as readers and, by
extension, their willingness to explore and share: ‘If they are getting feedback from the
other kids and from me that they’re good readers, they’re going to want to do it more’.
Thus, he viewed his role as listener as critical:
I need to make sure that I’m listening ‘cause I think a lot of what I do is a reaction to what the
kids are saying . . . So I have to really listen and I hope the kids are really listening too and they
really are especially when you notice that, you know, when somebody starts saying something
and another kids says ‘Ohhh! Me too!’ or ‘I read that book!’ and sometimes it’s so wonderful
‘cause the enthusiasm really gets so high that, you know, you got kids like being rude all over
the place because they got to get their two cents in, which is kind of a nice problem.
Furthermore, Michael understood how literate talk leads to literate writing: ‘If we talk
about antagonists one day the next week’s letters [reading logs] will all have antagonists
mentioned in them or a lot of them often will . . . it’s often a good way to know whether that
idea got through’. And getting the idea through – deep conceptual understanding – was a
purposeful learning objective in this classroom.
524 M.P. Boyd and W.C. Markarian

Analysis
In this seven-minute exchange (seven minutes, one second; see Appendix 2 for the complete
transcript), there were 86 turns of talk, about half (38 or 44%) of which were made by
Michael, the teacher. Fourteen out of the 18 students in this class also participated. To
be sure, sharing the floor with students for almost half the time is not too dissimilar to
traditional classrooms – Michael is involved in most exchanges (Applebee et al. 2003;
Cazden 2001), so we look at indicators such as decision-making for patterns of talk (turn-
taking norms, types of questioning and response) and content of talk (determining scope of
talk, positioning for interpretive authority, illocutionary uptake) to illuminate instructional
stance.
One of the four students sharing their reading logs during the June 7 Morning Meeting
was Teresa. We look closely at Teresa’s ‘time on floor’, beginning with what could have
been an awkward teaching moment: Teresa did not want to read her journal to the class nor
did she want Michael to read it out loud (a service he offers when students do not want to
read). Michael paused to scan Teresa’s reading log and provide a short running commentary,
‘taking a break from The Witches . . .’ Teresa interjected to explain she ‘got back to Molly
Moon’, possibly sanctioning Michael’s reading on. Michael continued, positioning Teresa
as the authority, ‘so there’s an orphanage involved?’ [Teresa had written in her journal
that ‘[Molly] lives in an orphanage’ and that ‘the orphanage was a bad place back then’.]
Michael apparently recognized this as a powerful, recurring theme in the literature with
which his students were familiar and commented out loud to the class:
Orphanages seem to be a place where authors like to put kids when they . . . and they usually
are terrible places and everybody’s mean to them and that sort of thing. (Michael, TOT 12)

This observation, emerging from Teresa’s reading log, sets up an extended collaborative
conversation where students reference independent and shared readings involving orphans
and orphanages as they explore how orphanages are more than local settings as they color
expectations of how characters will develop and their placement is part of author craft.
When we closely examine the unfolding talk, we have a basis from which to then discuss
in what ways Michael’s patterns of talk reflect the characteristics of a dialogic classroom
(RQ1) and in what ways he negotiates between students’ everyday knowledge and the
school knowledge – the literate talk – he is asking these third graders to learn (RQ2).

Examining the talk

Table 1 provides summary statistics of Michael’s language. A complete transcript is included
at the end of this paper (Appendix 2). In his 38 turns of talk, Michael actually asks a
total of eight closed questions and two inauthentic questions and makes six somewhat
extended didactic statements and a rebuttal versus only three questions we might typically
designate ‘open’ and four authentic questions. Research has long aligned these statistics
with monological exchanges doomed to limiting student participation to nothing more than
mechanical recitation of ‘correct’ answers, answers that demonstrate they were listening
and recalling by rote while their teacher was disseminating information (see, e.g., Cazden
2001; Nystrand et al. 1997).
As we would expect, Michael’s closed questions do indeed often meet with succinct
one or two phrases in response. In addition to our opening example of a closed question,
‘So there’s an orphanage involved?’ (TOT 9), Michael asks several ‘treasure hunt’ closed
questions including, ‘Does anybody know anyone who was in an orphanage in a book they
 Language and Education 525

Table 1. Analysis of teacher (Michael) language.

Code Explication Turn(s) of talk Frequency

Closed questions Closed questions technically seek a succinct, 9, 14, 17, 20, 8
specific response. 27, 37, 39,
50
Direct speaker Direct speaker nominations occur when a 14, 17, 20, 41, 7
nominations teacher names a particular student to take 56, 67, 80
the next turn of talk.
Didactic Didactic statements are teacher talk designed 12, 30, 34, 67, 6
statements to deliver direct instruction on a particular 69, 86
topic, often part of school-sanctioned
knowledge.
Revoicing of Revoicing of student language occurs when a 17, 52, 59, 67, 6
student language teacher echoes either directly or indirectly 69, 78
what a student has offered in the previous
turn of talk.
Feedback Feedback comments are genuinely engaged 5, 41, 63, 75, 6
with a student’s statement, offering the 78, 82
teacher’s opinion on that student’s statement.
Interthinking Interthinking reveals teacher language that 32, 43, 45, 47, 6
directly builds upon/extends/completes an 50, 80
unfinished student thought.
Authentic Authentic questions are moments when the 3, 71, 73 3
questions teacher is genuinely unsure of the answer to
his question.
Open questions Open questions are those that have multiple 3, 65 2
acceptable answers and often overtly seek a
student’s opinion.
Closure of Closure occurs when the teacher uses his talk 14, 56, 86 3
turn/topic to abruptly end a student’s talk thread or the
talk thread in general.
Inauthentic Inauthentic questions are ones to which the 20, 65 2
questions teacher already knows the answer and is
apparently seeking to evaluate student
understanding.
Redirecting Redirecting occurs when a teacher moves the 25, 65 2
conversational focus away from one topic to
another.
Tie-ins Tie-ins occur when a teacher takes student talk 43, 84 2
that may seem off topic or tangential and
maneuvers it into the theme of the general
discussion.
Directive statement Statements used by teacher to direct student to 1, 3 2
perform a certain classroom task.
Back-channeling Listener vocalizations such as ‘Uh huh’ and 7, 54 2
‘Hmmm’ that signal listening and
encouragement.
Direct prompting Direct prompting occurs when a teacher begins 22 1
a statement and expects the student to
respond by completing the statement.
Explications Explication occurs when the teacher tries to 52 1 (partial)
explain something that may have been
unclear in a previous student turn of
talk.
Rebuttal Responds to student challenge of teacher 30 1
statement with a counter-argument.
526 M.P. Boyd and W.C. Markarian

read?’ (TOT 14). Hussni fills in the required student blank, ‘The girl in The Thief Lord’
(TOT 15), but another student, in addition to Michael, completes the evaluative third turn
for an IRE discourse norm. Moreover, Michael’s subsequent request for another example
is supplied by Sean and evaluated with a choral student response (TOTs 17–19). A few
turns later, an unsuccessful prompt for Suzie results in elaborated response by Herbert, and
Michael’s follow-up question is answered by Suzie, who is then challenged by Herbert,
who subsequently agrees with and counters the rebuttal offered by Michael (TOTs 24–34).
We note that students’ turn-taking is not constrained by the IRE discourse structure and
that Michael’s closed questioning both is contingent on what students have contributed and
pushes for more information as he raises awareness of recognizing cues and predicting
future outcomes. After these students reason together, Michael weighs in with a didactic
statement guiding from the specific example to the general discussion about orphanages.
Clearly, Michael’s display questions are not shutting down these students. In fact, short
answers are subsequently followed by more elaborated responses, providing information
not explicitly required in order to answer Michael’s question. For example, in TOTs 37–41,
Michael begins his response to Maeve with a clearly closed question: ‘Uh huh, and how
is the orphanage for her, is it a nice place?’ At first, Maeve responds with the succinct
response we would expect – a simple ‘No’. But after Michael responds with a rhetorical
‘See?’, which in another context might indicate that their discussion is closed, Maeve then
goes on to elaborate: ‘See, they won’t let the other girls and the littler girls see each other.
And the two sisters are the littler girls.’
While Michael’s questions may be structured as closed, his students at this point of the
year appear savvy enough to read Michael’s questions as prompts, expectations for more –
not intended to curtail conversation. These third graders treat a question as a personalized
request (as opposed to a generic invitation) to share their personal knowledge about the
topic at hand – this has been their experience in Morning Meeting throughout the year, and
this predisposition, rather than the closed nature of the school-like question, shapes their
response. Michael can simply call on a student by name with an interrogative inflection,
such as ‘. . . Herbert?’ (TOT 25), and that student, in this case Herbert, will launch into an
elaborated example: ‘Uh, Sophie-e-e-e escaped from the orphanage with the help of her,
her sa . . . of her new oo, oo, traveling buddy-e-e, the BFG – the big friendly giant’ (TOT
26). These students respond as part of a community of learners who are trying to build
a more complete, communal knowledge of, in this case, how orphanages as topoi are a
repeating theme in the literature they read and how orphanages are often used to convey
a threatening environment. But it is not the case that ideas are left unchallenged. Students
feel authoritatively empowered and are willing to negotiate – from their disparate readings,
experiences, and opinions – and the resulting cacophony – ‘sometimes it is so wonderful,
cause the enthusiasm really gets so high you have kids like you know being rude all over the
place’ – is viewed as positive – Michael mediates this wonderful cacophony into dialogic
learning.
Student listen, share, and consider alternative ideas – but while this talk signals a
collaborative-reasoning stance, remember Michael’s frequent use of the ubiquitous and
oft-disparaged closed questioning. Clearly, we should not judge Michael’s talk by its decon-
textualized, outward appearance. Instead, we should examine it in context and understand
how it actually functions in regards to its interaction with student talk. Doing so, we note
(see Table 1) that Michael’s talk functions in at least the following ways: to prompt elab-
orated turns; to emphasize important student contributions by revoicing them to nominate
speakers; to tie-in seemingly tangential ideas; to redirect talk to more productive talk; to
explicate material students may not understand; to offer authentic questions with interest
 Language and Education 527

and enthusiasm; to offer feedback; and to close turns of talk or even topics of discussion.
Moreover, Michael maintains the language of possibility, using ‘maybe’, ‘usually’, and
‘seems to be’. In short, Michael’s endorsement of loose turn-taking norms, including over-
lapping talk and students completing the evaluative third turn, and his varied use of talk
structures and purposeful listening guide classroom discussion so that it stays focused and
supportive of student thinking. None of this is possible if his responses are not contingent
upon what he has heard his student say. Michael must listen.
Examining how students’ talk functions is equally enlightening. Analysis of 48 turns
of student talk indicates that the students are not merely answering questions to appease
their teacher (see Table 2). Their most frequent functions are explanations and elaborated
statements (16 and 14 occurrences) as they explore and provide nine examples from their
own reading of how ‘orphanages’ are memetic topoi in children’s literature (without ever
utilizing the formal terminology of elements of fiction). They are clearly not ‘shut down’ by
Michael’s display questions. Instead, they respectfully challenge the veracity of peers’ and
teacher’s comments, self-nominate for turns of talk, offer tentative responses and questions,
and are willing to extend the topic to areas that may or may not be related. Their dialogue
negotiates a collaborative understanding: Herbert’s ‘Yeah, but that was the other giant’
(TOT 29) is met with Michael’s ‘Well but she didn’t know that’ and is followed up by
Herbert’s ‘But she found out . . .’ and includes dissent: Nick’s insistent ‘He’s not . . .’ and
‘No, he isn’t’ (TOT 58 and 62, respectively). In this excerpt, there is dialogue as instruction,
conversation toward consensus, and inquiry (Renshaw 2004). These nine-year-olds adopt
traditionally teacher participant roles: they initiate turns of talk (nine occurrences) and
encourage other students (TOTs 16, 19, and 36), and students and the teacher actually
engage in ‘interthinking’ (Mercer 2002), directly building off of the previous speaker’s
statement to co-create knowledge (TOTs 33, 44, 51, and 85). For example, Hannah begins:
‘Um, well, sort of with Harry Potter, ‘cause he has to go to his um . . . umm . . . his umm’
and Michael picks up where she stops with ‘Aunt and Uncle’s. But that’s not an orphanage
. . . but he’s an orphan . . . or as The BFG would say, a norphan’ (TOTs 42–45). To which
Hannah adds: ‘And um in this other book, oh yeah, in the um a, the Sunny and um and um
. . .’. And, this Michael neatly ties up with ‘Oh yes, The Bad Beginning things?’ In other
words, student talk functions to access and build a rich and socially constructed knowledge
of a particular topic.
Analysis also sheds light on how Michael negotiates the space between his students’
everyday foreknowledge and the school knowledge he hopes for them to acquire. It begins
with his willingness to listen to his students. Indeed, the very topic for this discussion
did, in fact, originate with one of his students’ observations. So, Michael seized upon this
‘orphanages’ theme and delivered it to the class for potential further discussion. Michael
was also flexible enough in his understanding of the literature that he firmed up student
connections that might have at first seemed tangential: for example, Harry Potter does not
live in an orphanage but is an (n)orphan and does initially live in a setting similar to the
stereotypical orphanage (TOTs 42–48). Michael is savvy enough to know when he is unsure
of the literature and able to move beyond student conversations that are argumentative and
for which he cannot be a helpful authority. For example, when Sam and Nick argue about
whether Mike is an orphan in Like Mike (TOTs 57–64), Michael first revoices this new topic
(TOT 59), admits he is unfamiliar with the film (TOT 63) and then gracefully maneuvers
to a new topic (TOT 65) to put an end to their bickering.
Importantly, Michael continuously draws out examples from his students of how or-
phanages can be seen as a negative stereotype that impacts characterization. Only after
most of the class has volunteered an example from their foreknowledge of their personal
528 M.P. Boyd and W.C. Markarian

Table 2. Analysis of student language.

Code Explication Turn(s) of talk Frequency

Explanation Responses that state causal relationships. 4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 35, 16
40, 42, 55, 64,
68, 74, 77, 79,
81, 83
Elaborated responses Responses that provide more information 2, 26, 40, 51, 53, 14
than is typically required by a closed 55, 64, 66, 68,
question. These are sententially 70, 74, 79, 81,
structured. 83
Student-initiated These are turns of talk in which the student 6, 8, 13, 35, 42, 9
statement has not waited for the teacher to nominate 49, 58, 60, 70
him or her as speaker and offers
information of his or her own volition.
Succinct responses Short phrases, usually directly responding to 15, 18, 28, 31, 38, 7
a closed question. 57, 72
Interthinking Interthinking reveals teacher language that 33, 44, 51, 85 4
directly builds upon/extends/completes an
unfinished student thought.
Revoicing Revoicing of student or teacher language 24, 48, 51 3
occurs when a student echoes either
directly or indirectly what another student
or the teacher has offered in a previous
turn of talk.
Student This is student talk that functions to 16, 19, 36 3
encouragement encourage other speakers to contribute or
continue contributing.
Authentic questions Student-generated questions – assume 24, 57, 76 3
students are asking questions because
they want to know the answer – so all
authentic questions.
Student willingness to This is student talk that challenges the 29, 58, 60 3
challenge peers veracity of what another student has said.
Student enthusiasm This is student back-channeling talk that 23, 46 2
suggests students are enthused about the
current conversation.
Topical extensions These are student responses that fall 57, 81 2
somewhat outside the focal topic of the
discussion but that have significant,
meaningful connections to the topic
(orphan but no orphanage – Harry Potter;
boarding school with limited parental
contact – The Lightning Thief ).
Back-channeling Listener vocalizations such as ‘Uh huh’ and 10, 21 2
‘Hmmm’ that signal listening and
encouragement.
Peer rebuttal Student defends argument in face of peer 61, 62 2
challenge.
Student willingness to This is student talk that challenges the 33 1
challenge teacher veracity of what the teacher has said.

understandings of this ‘orphanages’ theme does Michael make the move from their fore-
knowledge to the school-sanctioned language of ‘antagonist’ and ‘protagonist’ in turn
(TOT) 68, and even this turn is a revoicing of Rena’s use of ‘antagonist’ in response to
Michael’s open question: ‘So here’s a question for you – why do all these authors have their
 Language and Education 529

characters be orphans? Why would, why would that – must be something that authors think
is a good idea – what, what’s it do for a story?’ (TOT 65).
This extended collaborative conversation about orphanages is clearly a sophisticated
literacy event. It involves no less than 14 conversants, discusses in depth the prevalence of a
literary stereotype, and pulls in examples from across nine books and one movie in 86 turns
of talk, all of which occurs in a third-grade classroom of nine-year-olds. One might argue
that it should be an expected practice that students are able to nominate texts and make
connections, but expectations do not make it a common practice. Further, in this particular
case, Michael is cultivating his students’ everyday knowledge of literature to draw together
specific examples that relate to orphanages and their frequent typecasting as threatening
environments. This becomes the conceptual foreknowledge he needs in order to activate a
meaningful connection between everyday knowledge and school knowledge. Only after 66
turns of talk transpire does Michael casually broach this connection. In turn 67, he ‘slips in’
the school term antagonist as someone or something that threatens the main character. Two
turns later, he slips in the school term for this main character, protagonist, as well. Thus,
using concepts that his students already possessed in their everyday knowledge, Michael
helps his students make connections to the formal language that school sanctions for such
discussions of literature, like the one they held that day on the role of orphanages.

Discussion
This close examination of just seven minutes of Michael’s interactions with his students
provides clear evidence that, indeed, he is a dialogic teacher, despite the outward syntactical
structure of many of his questions and statements. This is because he adopts a dialogic
instructional stance.
From a Freirean perspective, we can see Michael working in the moment of discussion
to provide responses, questions, and comments that signal to his students that he is listening,
that their ideas are important, and that learning, while serious, can also be playful and fun.
However, while the informal turn-taking marks the tone as conversational, Michael is not
shy of making didactic statements and he too speaks over students in the excitement of
interthinking. He does not view this overlapping talk as problematic. Rather, by strategically
using authentic dialogue – real talk – as a guide and by allowing his students to have real
voices as they consider real purposes in real contexts, Michael listens to what his students
already know and anchors his questions and comments in their contributions, aligning
illocutionary force and educational purpose.
From an Alexandrian perspective, we can see that, overall, this discussion, and the
learning it facilitated, was collective, reciprocal, supportive, cumulative, and purposeful.
Clearly, the learning that took place in this discussion involved the great majority of students
and the teacher addressing a task together (collective). The students in Michael’s classroom
were active participants and initiators of lines of reasoning. There are a number of instances
where it is obvious that students and teacher are all listening to each other and sharing ideas
(reciprocal). The environment Michael has established is likewise obviously supportive.
We witness students comfortable enough to stretch the topic and take risks by offering
ideas that are similar but not exactly aligned with the topic or by offering material that is
similar but not a traditional example of literature (such as Harry Potter, who is an orphan
but does not live in an orphanage, or Like Mike, which is a movie not a text). The fact that
so many students were contributors to this discussion and that students and teacher were
able to complete each other’s ideas similarly points to a discussion that is cumulative and
530 M.P. Boyd and W.C. Markarian

co-constructed. And, finally, Michael’s awareness of the potential richness of ‘orphanages’

and his ultimate ability to show that orphanages are a strong example of how we can
find stereotypical settings that set up stereotypical character types drive home the concept
that what Michael is doing is not mere chance. It is the result of the purposeful creation
of a dialogic classroom that allows these ideas to become fully accessible concepts to his
students. The scope of the discussion is contingent on the moment – it is directly in response
to Teresa’s reading log – but there is a planfulness to the literacy event and a purposefulness
to the participatory norms.
The supportive and substantive opportunities for engaged talk with content to explore,
challenge, reconsider, disagree with and extend ideas across several turns and in ways that
enhance student learning, exemplify Freire’s authentic dialogue and Alexander’s dialogic
teaching. However, as we have demonstrated, this was accomplished through many and
varied talk structures in service of a dialogic stance.

Concluding thoughts
What can seven minutes of talk tell us? Close examination of this talk elucidates the accre-
tive, embedded, and contingent nature of dialogic teaching. These focal seven minutes were
the product of an entire school year’s worth of building specific community discourse prac-
tices and expectations. Michael’s students respond to his dialogical stance (not monologic
discourse structures) as his talk has functioned all year to invite and support their contribu-
tions for developments, explorations, and applications to conceptual understandings. His
students are thus predisposed to perceive Michael’s utterances within this socio-historical
pattern of functioning. This is evident through the elaborated, authoritative, and substantive
student responses. In this classroom community, students can challenge and be challenged,
and this can be perceived not as a face-threatening act but rather as evidence of intimacy –
of trust and solidarity.
As educators, what’s striking is all that was accomplished and evinced in just seven
minutes.

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532 M.P. Boyd and W.C. Markarian

Appendix 1. Children’s literature referenced in orphanage talk sequence.

∗ ∗
Title Author Reading level Lexile score
1. The Witches Roald Dahl 5.5 740
2. Molly Moon Georgia Byng 5.6 770
3. The Thief Lord Cornelia Funke 4.9 640
4. The BFG Roald Dahl 5.8 720
5. The Samantha books (American Girl series) Valerie Tripp 4.1 500
6. Harry Potter series (Harry Potter and the J.K. Rowling 5.3 880
Sorcerer’s Stone)
7. The Bad Beginnings Lemony Snicket 6.1 1010
8. The Supernaturalist Eoin Colfer 6.2 650
9. The Lightning Thief Rick Riordan 4.7 740
10. Like Mike (movie) 2002 PG Movie
∗
Reading level and lexile score accessed at Scholastic Book Wizard (http://bookwizard.scholastic.com/tbw/
homePage.do).

Appendix 2. ‘Orphanages’: annotated talk sequence (86 turns of talk; seven

minutes, one second).

Turn Speaker Talk (Begins at time stamp 33:17)

1. Michael Teresa? (as in ‘Teresa, may I have your journal?’)
2. Teresa I don’t want anybody to read it.
3. Michael Pass it over. (Hand gesture and authoritative tone. Teresa flips journal toward
him.) Why is it that you don’t want us to read it?
4. Teresa Because I don’t want you to read it (giggles).
5. Michael I was hoping for more specifics . . . (Pauses to read journal. Looks up and
addresses Teresa, apparently reporting what she has written him). Taking a
break from The Witches . . . (more giggles)
6. Teresa That’s because I got back to Molly Moon.
7. Michael Uh huh.
8. Teresa . . . like it was good.
9. Michael So there’s an orphanage involved? [student sneezes] Whoa!
10. Emily Yeah, uh huh.
11. Teresa Yeah, she lives in an orphanage.
12. Michael Orphanages seem to be a place where authors like to put kids when they . . .
and they are usually terrible places and everybody’s mean to them and that
sort of thing.
13. Teresa Yeah, in the first book that you had like a really mean . . . (Unsolicited
response. He cuts her off .)
14. Michael Does anybody know anyone who was in an orphanage in a book they read?
Hussni?
15. Hussni The girl in The Thief Lord.
16. Maeve Oh yeah.
17. Michael Uh huh, in The Thief Lord, anybody have another one, Sean?
18. Sean Um Um, in the the the . . . the one that Teresa recommended Eddie Dickens
(unclear reference).
19. Students Oh yeah! That’s it!
20. Michael Susie, do you know anybody who’s been in an orphanage to start out?
21. Suzie Umm . . .
22. Michael Somebody named Sophie . . .
23. Students OHHHHHH!
(Continued)
 Language and Education 533

Appendix 2. ‘Orphanages’: annotated talk sequence (86 turns of talk; seven

minutes, one second). (Continued)

Turn Speaker Talk (Begins at time stamp 33:17)

24. Teresa Named Sophie?
25. Michael Maybe you haven’t read it, I’m not sure . . . okay, umm Herbert?
26. Herbert Uh, Sophie-e-e-e escaped from the orphanage with the help of her, her sa . . .
of her new oo, oo, traveling buddy-e-e, the BFG – the big friendly giant.
27. Michael Yeah, but when she left the orphanage, what was she thinking was gonna to
happen to her?
28. Suzie She was going to be eaten, uhh!
29. Herbert Yeah, but that was the other giant.
30. Michael Well but she didn’t know that.
31. Herbert Yeah.
32. Michael She thought . . . (overtalking here)
33. Herbert But she found out . . .
34. Michael Yeah, but in the mean time, just think how she felt. She really thought, like,
all the way to the cave and everything, she thought that she was going to be
supper or breakfast (‘breakfast’ echoed by student) or something. Yeah.
That would be awful scary, I wouldn’t want to be hanging out with
somebody I thought was going to eat me (student laughter). Whoa . . .
Okay, so orphanages, you know, I imagine a lot of orphanages are really
doing a nice job taking care of kids and things, and love the kids and are
nice to them – but they certainly seem to be good places for authors to have
kids be picked on and be mean to. Yes?
35. Maeve Well, in the Samantha books, Nelly, she goes to the orphanage . . .
36. Emma Oh, yeah.
37. Michael Uh huh, and how is the orphanage for her, is it a nice place?
38. Maeve No.
39. Michael See?
40. Maeve See, they won’t let the older girls who know the littler girls see each other.
And her two sisters are the littler girls.
41. Michael Uh huh, that would be terrible. Okay, uh huh, Hannah?
42. Hannah Um, well, sort of with Harry Potter, ‘cause he has to go to his um . . . umm
. . . (other student ‘Hogwarts’) his umm.
43. Michael Aunt and Uncle’s . But that’s not an orphanage . . .
44. Hannah I know but . . .
45. Michael . . . but he’s an orphan! (with emphasis, catching on to student’s point) . . .
46. Students Yeah, yeah.
47. Michael . . . or as The BFG would say, a norphan.
48. Jack A norphan.
49. Hannah And um in this other book, oh yeah in the um a, the Sunny and um and um . . .
50. Michael Oh yes, The Bad Beginning things?
51. Hannah Yeah, bad things that’s it! [claps hands] They’re orphans . . . and they . . . and
they went to boarding school.
52. Michael Mm hmm, boarding schools can be places where . . .
53. Hannah . . . and they and they went to the um . . . they went to the um the . . . shack . . .
the orphan shack.
54. Michael Mmm hmm.
55. Hannah That’s sorta an like orphanage but there’s only three of them in it.
56. Michael Um, other orphanages that you know of? Sam?
57. Sam In the movie, like . . . in the movie, Like Mike?
58. Nick He’s not . . .
59. Michael In the movie Like Mike . . .
60. Nick Is he? Like Mike?
61. Sam Yeah, he’s an orphan.
(Continued)
534 M.P. Boyd and W.C. Markarian

Appendix 2. ‘Orphanages’: annotated talk sequence (86 turns of talk; seven

minutes, one second). (Continued)

Turn Speaker Talk (Begins at time stamp 33:17)

62. Nick No, he isn’t.
63. Michael I’m not familiar with that.
64. Sam (Student chatter in background about Mike) Mike’s an orphan and he like
gets these shoes . . . and kids pick on him.
65. Michael (Overlaps with above with an assertive, louder tone, effectively ending the
uncertainty about Like Mike) So here’s a question for you – why do all
these authors have their, their characters be orphans? Why would . . . why
would that – must be something that authors think is a good idea – what
what’s it do for the story?
66. Rena It gives them like good antagonists, maybe . . .
67. Michael There might be some good antagonists at the orphanages. Okay, what else?
Sean?
68. Sean Um, it it makes you feel sorry for them. And I have another book.
69. Michael It it really makes you feel sorry for and and sympathetic for our hero – or the
protagonist. Okay, you know, you know, if you don’t have the parents and
stuff, that seems like a really terrible thing. And so it really makes you
connect in a way um with with that character I think.
70. Sean Oh, and I have another book that that happens in.
71. Michael What’s that?
72. Sean The . . . The Supernaturalist.
73. Michael Oh (nodding). Is it . . . Is it the same deal? The orphan, is the orphanage is a
bad place, or is it . . .
74. Sean He’s in the orphanage and they test sort of products on them that’s.
75. Michael Oooo, that doesn’t seem very nice . . . Ew ohohoh (ominous voice)
76. Shing They test what?
77. Sean Products. They test them.
78. Michael They test things. Okay. That actually, I think I know of some real stories like
that.
79. Sean The, they use them as like hamsters.
80. Michael Like, um, let’s see, test subjects. Yes, experimenting on them. Jack, you have
one, too?
81. Jack Well, in The Lightning Thief he’s not really an orphan because his mom’s still
alive.
82. Michael That would be true.
83. Jack But he goes to boarding school and he never gets to see his mom.
84. Michael Um hm. Kind of the same deal – like, you wouldn’t want to move away from
home and rarely see your parents, would you? There might be moments
when you would like to do that but generally thinking (humor) . . .
85. Jack Like he sees her like once a year.
86. Michael Yeah, that doesn’t sound like a good deal. So that would increase the
sympathy factor there for the character [moves to next reading journal].