Classroom Talk in Higher Education: Enabling Learning Through a Reflective Analysis of Practice

SUMMARY

Providing a keynote address at the opening of the SEDA conference in Worthing, November 1994. Brian Roper, vice‐chancellor of the University of North London emphasized ‘the increasing centrality of pedagogic research’ within the development of higher education (HE).

In this article we describe and discuss some of the research currently in progress at the School of Education, Brunei University: the investigation into pedagogy and student learning, using empirical analysis of classroom talk; carried out within the context of a four‐year BA/BSc Qualified Teacher Status (Secondary) degree course. We make a number of observations regarding teaching and learning within Initial Teacher Education (ITE); we draw upon some pedagogical principles within the ‘constructivist’ tradition; we provide some selected transcriptions of student talk to which we add a brief reflective commentary; we comment, too, on the nature of research within this field.