Implications of Dialogic Teaching: Practices of and Reflections from English Language Teachers

Abstract

Researches often endorse discussion, dialogues, and other learning tasks for the promotion of fluency, critical thinking, reasoning, and ability to evaluate and justifying. Keeping in view the Pakistani context, especially, the local context, it is not clear what type of classroom practices prevail in the region and what reflections teachers have about the use of such practices. Taking Bakhtin's and Vygotsky's ideas of dialogism and learning as a social entity, the present study aimed at knowing the teaching practices of English language teachers from the perspective of dialogic teaching and also at exploring how do teachers reflect on such a teaching approach. For this purpose, English Language Centers of district Mardan were taken as data sources where twenty classrooms were observed for classroom practices and the concerned teachers were interviewed for their reflections. It was found that the teachers use of dialogic teaching having positive and negative impacts. The positive impacts of dialogic teaching include creativity, thinking ability, confidence building, and other social impacts. It has little negative impacts that include challenges for the teachers in terms of behavior problems and control of talks.