An interview with Neil Mercer

Professor of Language and Communications at the Open University

Why do you think that exploratory talk should be an interest to teachers?

Well I think we have to reconsider what language is really for to understand why exploratory talk is important. People sometimes have the idea that language is something that we use simply to share information to pass ideas from one person to another but isn’t. It’s much more than that. It’s actually a very effective tool for thinking together and by using language we can link up our minds and achieve more together than e ever would individually and I think that schools ought to be enabling children to use language to think together effectively and I think what exploratory talk represents is one very good way of using language to get things done.

What do you think is the impact upon pupils' learning?

If children are able to learn to use language to think together effectively what you’ll find is they learn ways of thinking alone effectively. It’s through using language being involved in conversations with other people but right from the beginning children learn how to think. They hear how other people are making sense of the world and that tests their own idea of how they are making sense of the world. They can take on new ways of analysing experience through being involved in conversations and they do so by a mixture of gaining guidance and role models from more expert speakers if you like in their communities and through practicing ways of making sense of the world through engaging with their peers with other children.

When teachers use group  talk in classroom it is often disappointing for teachers why do you think this is the case?

When I first started looking at children’s talk in classrooms back in the early 90s as part of the National Oracy Project I expected to see lots of good reasons why group work was an excellent idea. Unfortunately that wasn’t what we found. A lot of the talk we saw was disappointing: children were not really concentrating on the task, they weren’t listening to each other. One child would dominate everything or they’d argue in a sort of futile you know ‘you’re stupid, I’m right’ kind of way. And we wondered why this was …we gradually came to the realisation that one reason why the quality of talk often wasn’t very good was children didn’t know what was expected of them when they were asked to go and talk and work together. We just assumed that they knew what we meant by ‘go and talk together’ and they’d know how to do it. Well, in fact they don’t know how to do it often and in fact many adults don’t know how to do it very well. It seems strange that we tell children lots of little things that they need to know in school about how to, you know, how to do multiplication and things and this is one aspect that was left completely sort of implicit and teachers were assuming that everybody knew what it meant. So what we began to do then was bring it out in the open and encourage children with their teachers to think about the ways they talked and how they could talk together more effectively.

How would I know as a teacher when collaborative talk is working?

I found that if you ask teachers how they would know a good discussion when they overheard one you’ll find that they come up with many of the features of exploratory talk… I think the sorts of things that you want to see are: children asking each other questions, children listening to each other, giving due respect to each other’s ideas, challenging each other’s ideas but if they do so it’s in a constructive way. It’s not to make out that somebody’s stupid or their ideas are worthless but more because they think the group won’t get to excel if we don’t challenge those ideas. And you hear everybody participating. You hear people being encouraged to participate, saying "What do you think?" and what’s more you’ll find you hear a lot more of certain sorts of reasoning words than you would hear in many normal classroom discussions. You’ll hear children saying "Why?" a lot; you’ll hear them saying "Well because";…you’ll hear them saying things like "Well perhaps", "But" and so you will be hearing lots of ways that they’re actually taking one idea and contrasting it with another and those kind of marker words 'why', 'because', 'but', 'if', and so on are the kind of things that give you an indication that exploratory talk is happening.

Are there stages in the development of learners as they acquire collaborative talk skills?

I think, as children are growing old we can expect more of them in the kind of way they use language and so the kind of exploratory talk that we expect of them can be more … sophisticated. With the youngest children I think it’s enough to hear that they’re asking each other questions and giving reasons. We might not want to be too critical of those reasons but we might want to be sure that they are giving them and that they realise that that is part of what you do to justify your opinions. When they get late into Key Stage 2 then you’re expecting children to be weighing up evidence a bit more carefully, … perhaps bringing together ideas, putting ideas more explicitly out in the open and saying where have we got to now. When you get to Key Stage ,3 at that point you ought to be expecting them to be giving good reasons. There ought to be a kind of quality expectation of the kind of thinking and reasoning that they do with language and the kind of extent that they are aware of each other’s information…the extent which they take into account what the other person doesn’t know and needs to know.  I think that’s something that develops as children get older naturally but it can be helped to develop in ways that can help them become better communicators and inter-thinkers as I call it. With language you don’t just interact you inter-think.

I know in your research you set out to describe the features of effective collaborative (or exploratory talk), but you found other types of less effective talk. What were they?

When we’ve looked at the kind of talk that goes on in classrooms we’ve been able to identify three main kinds. One kind is what we’ve called disputational talk and it’s where children don’t argue in a very productive way. They often say "Yes it is", "No it’s not", "I’m right: you’re wrong" kind of thing. There’s no real collaboration: it’s more a kind of competition of ideas and they don’t really strive together to reach any goal. There’s a lot of that goes on unfortunately in some classrooms. The other kind of talk we saw is cumulative talk … and that’s where people share ideas in a more friendly way: there’s not a much of a competitive atmosphere but there’s also not much of a critical engagement of ideas. Everybody’s right and you just agree with what everybody says. Now sometimes that’s fine. It’s sometimes fine for example if you’re just brainstorming and just trying to put a lot of ideas there for consideration …. But at some point you’ve got to get to a more critical level of engagement with ideas if you’re going to sift out the good ideas from the less worthy ones. And then you want that kind of talk that we called exploratory talk to happen: we have this critical engagement and a goal directed kind of activity. Now on the whole we found that there’s a lot more cumulative talk and disputational talk than exploratory talk naturally happening in our classrooms and our aim has been to try and make more of the exploratory talk to happen when it’s appropriate.

Your research also talks about creating a context for effective group talk. What do you mean by that?

For children to use language to make sense of their educational experience I think they have to be helped to see that education isn’t just a series of separate events, one happening after another. It’s a journey. It’s a continuity of experience and a good teacher enables children to get an education out of the experience of their classroom by helping them see where they’ve been and where they’re going to. I think that means bringing things out in the open, making things explicit in talk things that often are left implicit - and that is a characteristic of exploratory talk. So the children themselves start to realise that the way you use language to get things done is often to build very carefully of what you already know and lead forward to what you don’t know and you can see them doing that. They say "Well what have we done already?  What do we know? Didn’t somebody say something like this a little while ago? What do we have to do next? And what do we have to get to?" And so they can see the continuity of experience and they create a context for their own talk in that way. They build on a history of their own experience. It’s like a track laying machine: it kind of creates its own track as it goes along so that they can build on what’s already been said and what they already know so that the common knowledge of the group becomes the foundations for their future activity.

Can explorative talk be taught?

I think it’s often assumed that children come to school knowing all they need to know about how to speak and listen that it’s well understood that they won’t know how perhaps to read and write very effectively or to use numbers very effectively and so on. But it may be assumed that they just kind of know about speaking and listening. I think there’s an awful lot they can learn from school that will help them become better speakers and listeners. The teacher needs really to provide a role model for those children in how language is being used. Many children come to school probably without much natural experience of exploratory talk. It may just not happen in their own homes very much or when they’re out of school. They may not have enough access to situations in which people are very carefully reasoning together about ideas and trying to get things done using the tool of language. And schools may provide the only significant experience that may be happening.

How can teachers support the development of exploratory talk?

One important thing that a teacher needs to do to enable more exploratory talk to happen is to establish a set of ground rules in the classroom for how people will work in groups. Everybody will have their own ground rules: they will be implicit ... Everybody will be assuming that they know how they should work together but the whole issue may be different. And what we really want is for everybody to be working to the same agreed set of rules and if a teacher asks children how they should work together and draws out from them what they think – are there effective ways of working together – you’ll find many of those rules will come out naturally. The teacher can then establish a set of rules which will say such things as: when we’re working together we will listen to everybody, we’ll ask each other questions, everybody’s ideas will be respected and we’ll try and reach agreement at the end of a discussion and we’ll all give reasons and so on. And those can go on the wall of the classroom as a part of the continuous context of work in that classroom. Everybody can refer to them. Somebody can say "Miss, Nigel is not following the ground rules!" and in that way they can always appeal to them if they feel that people aren’t really working collaboratively…Another important thing is to provide opportunities for children to practice using exploratory talk and that means giving them the right kind of activities. It means offering activities in which it really will help if you talk and work together with someone. There are some activities that it really doesn’t matter whether you talk to anybody because it won’t really make the outcome really different. But there are some things in which weighing up information, sharing the different kinds of information that different people bring to that activity and actually testing the ideas out on other people can make quite a difference to the success of the product in the end. Another thing I think that teachers can do is stay out of the group when the children are practising, because children will talk and interact in quite different ways when there isn’t a teacher there. And they need that opportunity. Finally, the other thing that they need is to help the children assess their own talk so that they become evaluators of their own use of language,  so that they’re not relying on external evaluation but are able to see themselves how well they’ve contributed to a discussion and how they might improve their contribution in the future.

What can the teacher do when things aren't working?

I think if a group isn’t working well it can be important for a teacher who sees this to intervene and one useful thing to do is to remind the children of the ground rules that they’ve agreed to. It may be that they’ve just forgotten that they’re meant to be operating in that way and it won’t do them any harm to be reminded. Another way is if say one child isn’t really contributing very much, the teacher might come in and ask the child for some of their views to kind of stimulate that point of view. And another way I’ve seen that works very well is if there’s not much life in the discussion, that they’re not really taking off and challenging each other’s ideas very much, it can sometimes help to give them some prompts.

Have you any advice on group composition?

We found it can be important for the teacher to give some consideration to the composition of groups when children are learning how to use exploratory talk. It’s not always a good idea to have friends in the same group…because they’ll tend to agree rather too easily. The talk will tend to be cumulative perhaps because they do have very similar ideas and perhaps because they don’t like to disagree. Also the children are meant to be learning how to interact and think with anyone. So you don’t really want the people they can already do it with necessarily. So we find it helps to have mixed-ability groups and to have mixed-gender groups often. The mixed-ability groups are interesting too because you find that the most able children often have to make their own ideas more explicit that they have to when they are with children that are the same level as them. That can be very useful for the development of their own thinking and the children who need more help often appreciate that help and accept it from their peers in a way that they might be less receptive to from an adult. They’re more relaxed about it and what’s more they’re more likely to make active contributions themselves. So we think the kind of mixture of a group can be quite vital to the development of children’s capabilities.

Clearly teachers aim to make group activity as inclusive as possible, what is it that makes a group inclusive?

One important aspect of a group that works is that the group is inclusive and that doesn’t just mean that people all contribute and that everybody else is asked to contribute. It means that the allows everybody the kind of thinking space that they need to make a contribution and to get the benefit of the group’s activities. And in good groups you see that. There might be some children whose language skills are less developed than others and need more time to process information. There might be people who are simply less socially confident and so take more time to think what they want to say and express it and there may be some children who are just less used to working in groups situations and so find it harder to attend to everything that’s going on. I think those are the kind of things that if children are aware of and are helped to become aware of, especially I think in the later years in school when they’re able to do that, that can be an important contribution to their own awareness of their language skills and of their own contribution to the learning of their group.

There are obvious benefits of such work on learning as you have already explained, what other benefits do you feel there are?

I think there are a number of benefits of children learning to use exploratory talk which might not be apparent at first. One of them us that there are measurable impacts on their own individual achievements in school subjects. We’ve found that children who are able to use exploratory talk in the study of science and maths go on to get better SATS results in science and maths because they’re able to use the joint activities that they’ve been involved in as a way of developing their own individual thinking skills.

There are also benefits in terms of classroom management. Children who become able to use language to work effectively together can take more control of their own learning and that means the teacher can safely leave them to take control of their own learning at times when they are engaged in a group-based activity, so the balance of responsibility becomes more even. The teacher still has an important guiding role, and whole class teaching is a vital part of teaching is vital in some times and places, but if you can enable children to take control within a group for their own learning when they’re engaged in those activities you can see the benefits in how they work together, the level of their engagement with the activity and the outcomes for the individuals as well as for the group itself.

I think the thinking together approach, which enables children to use exploratory talk has lots of benefits but I think some of them are most apparent with children who are the least engaged in class. We’ve often found that the children, who are most difficult in classes, are the ones in whom you see dramatic changes as the ground rules get established .Those children seem to be gain a new kind of responsibility and a new kind of freedom by seeing for the first time how they can engage productively with a group and they often take quite a leading role in some of the group discussions.