Language and Teaching

I guess this is the blog that should contain this information. Yesterday, I went to a talk by Neil Mercer about what "it is known" about dialogue and child development. I found it quite interesting and very clear. Here, there is a summay of some of the points I understood.

WARNING: Note that I might have misinterpreted something so be careful when reding the paragraphs below! Also, I haven't check the references yet; therefore they might have errors!!!!!


* It seems that the amount of talking between children and parents make a difference in their development (Hart & Risley, 1995)
* Elaborative talk can help to long time retention (Goswami and Bryant, 2007)

So, quality of talk seems to be important. Also, language is related with a social mode of thinking and individual cognition (sorry, I am thinking how to phrase these sentences).

* Teachers make use of language in order to know:
-What children know and think about something
-Encourage metacognition
-See a learning trayectory
-For reasoning and arguing

Some works also point out about how to make questions and a comparion of quality of this can be found in Rojas-Brummond & Mercer 2004.
Some thinks that work and do not work can be found in Wolf, Crosson & Resnick 2006.
A hands-on activity and discussion - Murphy, 2007?2004?