Talking Texts

This volume presents oral discourse as central to the creation of knowledge. More specifically, it examines how oral texts can be successfully inter-connected to the written texts that are used on a daily basis in schools. By presenting research that illuminates how oral and written language function in school learning, this book adds a semblance of balance and order to the past century's conflicting theories about this issue. Rather than argue for the prominence of one over the other, the goal is to help the reader gain a rich understanding of how oral discourse and written texts might work together to create a new discourse that ultimately creates new knowledge. Talking Texts: How Speech and Writing Interact in School Learning: provides historical background for the study of talk and text; shows how talk, text, and meaning evolve, moving beyond recitation, in the context of school learning; presents examples of children's and adolescents' natural conversations as analyzed by linguists; includes exemplars offorms of talk and their evolution inside school contexts; contributes to research on school discourse by considering communication that is, at the same time, conversational and instructional--a style of talk that has been scientifically shown to draw students into learning; and, addresses talk as it interfaces with domains of knowledge taught in schools--covering a range of subject areas--to show how talk is related to and may be influenced by the structure, language, and activities of a specific discipline.Bringing together seminal lines of research to create a cohesive picture of discourse issues germane to classrooms and other learning settings, this volume is an essentialresource for researchers, graduate students, classroom teachers, and curriculum specialists across the fields of discourse studies, literacy and English education, composition studies, language development, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics.