LANSI Virtual Lecture Series Presents Neil Mercer

LANSI are delighted to announce that Neil Mercer from University of Cambridge will be giving a talk around dialogic teaching titled "It's Only Words: Why Classroom Talk is Important" on Friday, April 9, from 11:00 am - 12:15 pm EST. Register for this event by clicking here. 

Abstract 

I will describe what is now known from research about the importance of children’s spoken language experience for the development of their skills in reasoning, their subject learning and their life chances in general. I will relate this to what some of the most successful teachers already do with talk in their classrooms and discuss the implications for teachers’ professional development and the improvement of classroom education.

Speaker's Bio

Neil Mercer is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, Director of Oracy Cambridge: the Centre for Effective Spoken Communication, a Life Fellow of the Cambridge college Hughes Hall and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Before he joined Cambridge, he was Professor of Language and Communications at the Open University. He is a psychologist whose research has focused on the development of children’s spoken language and reasoning abilities and teachers’ role in that development. He has worked extensively and internationally with teachers, researchers and educational policy makers. In 2019 he was given the Oevre Award by the European Association for Research into Learning and Instruction for outstanding contributions to educational research. His books include Words and Minds, Exploring Talk in School, Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking, Interthinking: putting talk to work and Language and the Joint Creation of Knowledge; and he was co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education.