Discussions in a Fourth-Grade Classroom: Using Exploratory Talk to Promote Dialogic Identities

In this article, we address the ways children collaborate to inquire about text in the context of group discussions, addressing the question: How do students stay on-topic and sustain their discussions of text? We speculate that a framework for dialogic discourse, referred to as exploratory talk, allows students to understand that discussions of text are about collaborating, thinking together, asking questions, and reasoning about the text or a topic related to the text.