The paper presents the result of research aiming at increasing developmental and learning chances of secondary school second-language learners in dyadic interaction with content area teachers. This paper clearly fits the conference theme as it discusses one of the basic conditions for education and development for all: the freedom of speech. In our understanding, the freedom of speech is realized only inasmuch the spoken word is heard, understood and taken up. It takes emancipatory teaching for education for all to take place.

Drawing on sociocultural views of learning as a situated dialogic inquiry (Wells, 1999; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Wegerif, 2007) and dialogic teaching (Alexander, 2010) we focused on the dialogic skills and strategies student teachers would need in order to respond sensitively to the special linguistic learning needs of their second language learners. These needs involve slowing down the pace of the dialogue (Cazden, 2001) and paying attention to language. We also regarded the language and thought provoking teacher moves such as eliciting the learner’s contribution, probing his/her statements and asking follow up questions. These strategies, also recognized in micro-scaffolding (Gibbons, 2009), happen to be extensively employed in the Socratic Dialogue. This was one of the reasons for employing the method to develop student teachers’ interactive skills. Contrary to Socratic method, the Socratic Dialogue applied here is a group dialogue developed in the tradition of Plato’s Dialogues by Nelson in the 1920’s (translated by J. Kessels, 1984) and Heckmann (1981). In the Socratic Dialogue, the participants strive to reach a consensus in answering a fundamental question under the guidance of a facilitator and a number of ground rules.  So, the central question was: “Will the quality of student teachers’ interaction with their second language learners improve after they had taken part in a series of Socratic Dialogues?” In order to measure the improvement of the dialogic strategies we developed a concept of Teacher Pupil Learning Dialogue and the accompanying scoring scheme. We defined the Teacher Pupil Learning Dialogue as a dialogue between the teacher and the pupil in which the teacher evidently tries to scaffold the pupils’ learning by means of the following strategies: asking open-ended and follow up questions, slowing down the pace of the dialogue, inviting the pupil to contribute, allowing the pupil time to express him/herself, checking for understanding and paying attention to language. Empirical research on the Socratic Dialogue (Griessler, Littig, Hüsing, Zimmer, Santos, Muñoz, et al., 2004; Pihlgren, 2008) pointed out the positive effects of the Socratic Dialogue on participants’ communicative skills.  Also, Knežić, Wubbels, Elbers and Hajer (2010) recommend integration of the Socratic Dialogue in teacher education.  Thus encouraged, we employed this substantive method in an integrative development of content area student teachers’ dialogic skills. 

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