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Extensive research has focused on analysing teacher-student discourse within whole-class dialogic interactions, and several descriptive tools have been proposed so far to cover possible variations. However, what still remains unanswered is what types of teacher questions are 'better' than others. To answer this question, I propose a pragmatic analysis of teacher-student interaction based on the criteria of authenticity and dialogicity. The analysis focuses on two types of dialogue moves, 'information-seeking' and 'inquiry' moves and their subtypes, as assessed on the basis of their degree of dialogicity, emerging from the dialogue sequence in which the moves are situated. The discussion focuses on how such a normative analysis of interaction can help teachers guide more productive dialogues with their students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Goal. The problem of the authenticity of teacher questions has not received sufficient attention from educational researchers interested in the intersection between dialogue and argumentation. In this paper, we adopt a definition of authentic questions as dialogical units that prompt teacher-student interactions that are both productive (i.e., several students participating) and constructive (i.e., students produce arguments of high complexity). Our goal is to analyze whether and how specific types of dialogue prompts can encourage students’ engagement in more sophisticated argumentative interactions, as manifested through the construction of high-complexity arguments. Method. We describe the implementation of our analytical approach to a large corpus of classroom interactions from five European countries. The corpus was segmented into dialogical sequences, which were then coded according to the argumentation dialogue goal expressed in the sequence. We also coded students’ arguments according to Toulmin’s elements and distinguished between low- and high-complexity arguments from a structural point of view. Findings. Our findings show the predominance of the so-called Discovery questions as prompts that are both productive and constructive and Inquiry questions as prompts of argumentative constructive interactions. We discuss the importance of these findings for teacher professional development purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dialogue and argumentation are two processes that complement and mutually influence each other. However, this essential relationship is not sufficiently acknowledged by current educational research. This neglected relation is also mirrored by the lack of sufficient dialogue between two fields that are defined by the dialogical approach to education and argumentation, namely dialogic pedagogy and educational argumentation. In this Special Issue, we argue that dialogue pedagogies and argumentation theory and practice should communicate more, bridging their somehow different perspectives for the common goal of engaging learners in productive and constructive discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empathy, broadly defined as the ability to experience another's emotions and perceptions, is one of the major attitudes and actions underpinning an individual's participation in dialogue across diversity. The goal of this methodological paper is to operationalize empathy as a discursive construct, manifested in children and adolescent dialogic interactions. A coding scheme is developed based on three distinct steps. First, a review of the operational definitions of empathy is carried out, to capture how its related values, skills, and dispositions have been detected thus far. Second, the definitional elements resulting from this overview are represented in the dialogical notion of other-orientedness, which can be manifested, actually and potentially, in discourse. Moves are distinguished in 8 categories based on their disposition to be potentially other-oriented (dialogicity), which becomes actually manifested depending on their relevance to the discourse they are used in. Dialogicity and relevance are captured by the coding scheme proposed in this paper, which is validated and used to illustrate how it can reveal dialogical empathy and the development of common ground in interactions. • Providing a validated coding scheme for capturing the manifestations of dialogical empathy in dialogues. • Operationalizing empathy for the purposes of discourse analysis. • Showing the relationship between dialogical empathy and other-oriented moves. • Reviewing the operational definitions of empathy in psychology, discourse studies, and rhetoric. • Providing a tool for analyzing conflicts of "common" grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural literacy, as a set of values and dispositions developed through dialogue and constructive argumentation with people representing different cultural identities, is an essential skillset of a twenty‐first‐century citizen in any part of today's world. Especially within the current European landscape of continuous immigration and change, the fluidity and rhetoricity of identity construction require a notion of citizenship education that can adapt to this dynamic process. Moreover, the practical aspects of being a citizen in its authentic, global, democratic sense are not sufficiently emphasized within current curricula. In this paper, we present an innovative citizenship education curriculum based on dialogic, argumentative and cultural literacy skills, which addresses this gap through proposing discursive practices of cultural identity construction at a collaborative level (small group or whole class) inspired by wordless texts (picture books and animated films) on core civic cultural values such as tolerance, empathy and inclusion. Through applying a design‐based research methodology with teachers from three education levels and four European countries, we conclude that dialogic lesson plans aiming at the development of cultural literacy dispositions can act as an innovative and adaptive citizenship education curriculum in diverse contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of how context affects meaning, and how utterances affect a conversational situation is a fundamental and little acknowledged dimension of educational and argumentative dialogues. Pragmatics is presupposed by any discipline addressing how dialogic teaching affects learning or how argumentative dialogues can improve critical thinking skills. Pragmatics is underlying the study of arguments conceived not only as logical constructs but as means for resolving conflicts, differences, or doubts in different contexts and of different types. Pragmatic is the type of analysis that is often conducted in the areas of education and argumentation when dialogues are coded according to the function of utterances that constitute them, assessed based on their relevance or the cohesion between their parts, or studied in their implicit components and messages. Overall, pragmatics is the hidden dimension of many educational studies in argumentation and education, and one of the tenets of argumentation theory. However, no explicit consideration of the pragmatic dimensions of educational dialogue, especially the argumentative one(s), is currently present in the literature. The hidden and crucial relation between pragmatics, education, and argumentation is the subject matter of this special issue, and the tentative to make it explicit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]