Why this approach is important

If you ask questions, your students will probably give answers. In many classrooms, however, the same students tend to answer questions and the answers are often very short. Not much talking about science goes on!

Vygotsky (1978) established that the construction of knowledge and understanding is predominantly a social process. Understanding appears first in the social space that students share, and then becomes internalised by individuals. The activities of talking around new ideas, exploring them through discussion, and asking for explanations and justifications, are all part of the process of building individual knowledge. Meaning is constructed as students talk among themselves, as well as discuss with the teacher; Vygotsky showed that language provides the tools for thought. Teachers can encourage students to describe and explain their ideas, and help students to feel unafraid of getting things wrong. There is research to show that spending time planning and using activities that focus on structured cooperative talk in students leads to higher scores in general logical processing.

By encouraging students to talk to each other in pairs, they get the benefits of talk, and it works with large classes. In this unit, you will learn about three possible approaches for activities to support structured student talking. You can find out more in Resource 2, ‘Talk for learning’.

Video: Talk for learning

Pause for thought When do your students get opportunities to talk in science lessons? How do you encourage them to talk about science ideas with other students? How do you organise for them to report their ideas to the whole class?

Through talk, we can combine our intellectual resources to find better solutions to problems than we can as individuals. Additionally, by using language to think together, students can also learn valuable ways of thinking independently. In this unit there are some techniques for organising productive talk with pairs of students. Other techniques – such as mind mapping, brainstorming and doing practical work – are also useful in supporting productive student science talk. All these techniques are covered in other units.