Dialogic Inquiry in Education: Building on the Legacy of Vygotsky

The last twenty-five years have seen a number of changes of great significance in our thinking about learning and teaching.(1) Thanks, in large measure, to the work of James Moffett in the United States and of James Britton and the Royal Commission in England and Wales (HMSO, 1975), there is now a greater recognition of the central role of language in education, not only as a subject in the curriculum, but also as the medium in which the learning and teaching of all subjects is actually carried out. Arguments similar to those advanced by the Royal Commission have also underpinned the Whole Language movement worldwide (Goodman, 1987) and the emphasis on Writing Across the Curriculum, both in schools and in first-year university courses in the United States (Russell, 1991). During the same period, starting in the disciplines of science and mathematics, there has been a growing recognition of the constructive nature of learning (Bruner, 1990; von Glasersfeld, 1989) which, as one of its outcomes, has led to a renewed emphasis on the inquiry approach that Dewey advocated nearly a century ago (Dewey, 1900). And from a quite different direction has come strong support for cooperative learning and the importance of tasks carried out in small groups (Johnson, Johnson,& Holubec, 1993; Sharan & Sharan, 1992; Slavin, 1983).