The paper presents a part of research aiming at increasing learning chances of the second-language learners and improving teacher’s education in terms of competent communication. Second-language learners are the growing part of the European reality as is the issue they bring with themselves: academic underachievement. In order to grant them a chance of becoming full-fledged international citizens, this issue needs to be addressed with special pedagogical means teachers could employ in dyadic interaction with their second-language learners. These means include scaffolding strategies such as slowing down the pace of the talk, allowing pupil time to express himself, probing pupil's statements and checking for understanding. All these strategies are employed in Socratic Dialogue. So, the central question is “Will the training in Socratic Dialogue produce positive effects on teacher interactive behaviour in Teacher-Pupil Learning Dialogues with second-language learners?” Socratic Dialogue is a group dialogue introduced and developed by Nelson and Heckmann (Saran 2004, Kessels 1999, Nelson 1994) led by a facilitator according to a set of strict rules, with the aim to construct an answer to the commonly raised fundamental question through thinking together and gaining insights along the way. There has been very little research done on the Socratic Dialogue. Two empirical research projects (Griessler et al. 2004, Pihlgren, 2008) point out the positive effects of the Socratic Dialogue on communicative skills. In the present study, the Socratic Dialogue was employed as a substantive method for an integrative development of teacher interpersonal communicative competence during a seven-week training. It set out to influence both teachers' beliefs about communication in learning and instruction and teachers' behaviour in dyadic interaction. Through discussing key concepts of teacher education such as learning, language, meaning, teaching, it also afforded in-depth insights into some aspects of communication in learning and instruction. However, this paper restricts itself only to teachers' behaviour. It discusses effects Socratic Dialogues may have had on teacher interactive behaviour in terms of scaffolding pupil's learning. Therefore, it focuses on teacher behaviour in ten-minute Teacher-Pupil Learning Dialogues. It does so on the basis of the results of the analysis of 238 talks. The analysis was mainly a quantitative one and tried to capture the interpersonal communicative competence of teachers operationalised in a number of scaffolding strategies which were expected to develop through the intervention. Trained observers judged the quality of the talks by means of an observation schedule containing the above mentioned strategies. The observation schedule thus attempted to capture the quality of talks by drawing on the one hand on the expected effects of the Socratic-Dialogue training and on the other, on the scaffolding theory (Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1976; Gibbons, 2002) and the theory of guided construction of knowledge (Mercer, 1995).

This quasi-experimental research has been conducted among pre-service Bachelor and in-service Master of Education students preparing for teaching in various content subjects. The participants were matched into two groups of 18. The experimental group was trained in the Socratic Dialogue. Three measurements took place in the experimental group and two in the control one in terms their behaviour in TPLDs with second-language learners in secondary schools. This study developed two instruments. The first one was an intervention-control instrument, an assessment form chartering the characteristics of the Socratic Dialogue. The second one was a Teacher-Pupil-Learning-Dialogue analysis instrument. This instrument was used to evaluate the impact of the intervention with help of quantitative analyses. The changes in quality of the Teacher-Pupil Learning Dialogues were investigated with time series analyses with a control group.

There have been statistically significant effects in the overall quality of Teacher-Pupil Learning Dialogues. A mixed between-within subjects analysis of variance was conducted to assess the impact of the intervention on the quality of Teacher-Pupil Learning Dialogues by the experimental group as compared to those of the control group. An interaction effect was looked for between the experimental and the control groups. There was a significant interaction between the time and the groups (Wilks’ Lambda = .84, F(1,34) = 6.32, p = .02, partial eta squared = .16). Partial eta squared indicated a large effect size. These results may lead us to cautiously conclude that the training in Socratic Dialogue has had a positive effect on teachers' behaviour in their TPLDs with second-language learners. The positive effect consisted mainly in creating more space for the pupils' input. Teachers slowed down the pace of dialogues, talked less, asked more open questions, explicitly invited pupils to contribute, probed pupils' statements and allowed pupils more time to express themselves.