Abstract

In this talk I will analyse the nature and quality of primary students’ and teachers’ dialogic interactions while working on collaborative writing projects using ICT . As part of these projects; triads of children carried out investigations on topics of their choice, produced and published articles in magazines, and delivered conferences to real audiences conformed by the whole learning community of the school. We used analytical tools derived from Sociocultural Discourse Analysis (Mercer, 2010), as well as The Ethnography of Communication (Hymes, 1972; Saville-Troike, 2003), to investigate how adult-children and peer interactions could create ‘Intermental Development Zones’ (Mercer, 2000; Mercer & Littleton, 2007), and ‘dialogic spaces’ (Wegerif, 2007), as scaffolds for enhancing children’s understanding, reasoning and learning. As part of the talk I will present a system of analysis that can aid researchers in this endeavor. I will also illustrate its application with selected data from 6th grade children (11-12 y.o.) and their teacher. Finally, I will discuss the theoretical and practical contributions of this line of research in relation to both increasing our understanding of developmental and learning processes, as well as developing teacher professionalization programmes.