This book has been, unfortunately, one of my worst selling books. However, I feel it is some of my best research and writing on how teachers talk with students. The book's title is a term I have never used and I fought with Scholastic to call it
"Talking Comprehension: Using Language to Expand
Understanding"
or something like that.
This excerpt is from the opening chapter:
Throughout our
daily lives we use language to communicate our intentions and understandings,
to foster relationships with other human beings and to apprentice young
children into our society. In and out of school settings, language is also used
to scaffold the learning experiences of children and to regulate the complexity
of the tasks they encounter, enabling them to do things they would not be able
to do on their own. It is through language that we create our identities and
find our place in the world among ideas, peoples and the artifacts and
traditions of the culture that have gone before us.
In general, the language used in
educational settings and institutions is used to help novices learn, teachers
teach and communities to be established. For example, children learn through
participation in classroom discussions the appropriate ways of talking about particular
ideas, concepts, and fields of inquiry such as math, science, and literature.
They learn how to interact with one another and the teacher. Particular ways of
talking are endorsed in classrooms by teachers’ responses to students, by the
formal assessments we use to award grades and such, and by the expectations we
set for the learning experiences we provide. In other words, through language
children learn how to “do” school.