Exploring opportunities for dialogic teaching within the genre pedagogy teaching and learning cycle in primary classrooms

There has been an increasing focus on oracy in the curriculum in England. This focus is justified as the need for children to develop skills essential for future success. However, beyond oracy as skill, classroom talk is a powerful tool for developing thinking and shared meaning as evidenced by dialogic teaching pedagogy. This raises the question of how to establish spaces for such dialogue, leading to meaningful engagement with texts. Grounded in systemic functional linguistics, genre pedagogy is a well-known approach to structuring talk leading to writing. Based on interview data from a large-scale genre pedagogy intervention in primary schools, this paper explores teachers’ accounts of how they implemented the genre pedagogy teaching and learning cycle (TLC). It provides authentic insights from teachers on how aspects of the TLC supported them to gradually enable learner talk to predominate. On the basis of these insights, the article proposes possible ways of aligning the genre pedagogy TLC with some of the principles of dialogic teaching while taking into account relational aspects of talk. In this way the paper offers opportunities to consider the TLC as a possible organising framework for oracy within the primary curriculum.