Gordon Wells
Biographic Data
| ID | 3781898 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gordon Wells |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gordon |
| FAMILY NAME | Wells |
| SIGNATURE | WELLS G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 41 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Reading Island Voices
Divergent views on the relative value or status of spoken and written language skills may contribute to a disconnect between lay community members and language professionals, activists, or academics, and conflicted approaches to language support, teaching and/or revitalisation. Taking the bilingual Outer Hebrides as a case study, an online language capture and curation project is described which attempts to engage with these issues, acknowledging…
Dialogic Inquiry and Teacher Talk in Second Language Classrooms
A sociocultural approach to language and literacy emphasizes the need for students to be actively engaged in jointly undertaken activities that involve the co‐construction of knowledge through dialogue with teacher, texts, and peers.
Some Key Pedagogic Principles for Helping ELLs to Succeed in School
In this article, we put forward 4 pedagogic principles that we consider to be particularly important in helping English language learners (ELLs) to succeed in school. These principles are: creating multiple and varied opportunities for ELLs to use the target language in both speech and writing, promoting high engagement by building on students' interests, connecting the curriculum to ELLs' lives and their funds of knowledge, and working toward a …
Integrating CHAT and Action Research
Theory (CHAT) is not answerable in categorical terms. Both CHAT and AR have been variously interpreted and much depends on the individual biographies of those who pronounce on their relationship. In this paper, therefore, I offer no more than my own answer to this question, based on my own research trajectory. In fact, neither of the above perspectives was influential in my initial research; nevertheless each has become central to the ways in whi…
The contribution of inquiry to second language learning
In this article the authors raise their concern about the way in which students with different levels of competence in the language of instruction (English in this case) acquire a second language. They also address the issue of the types of conditions which are necessary in order for dialogic interaction to be effective in the classroom when these students are acquiring a second languageIn the first section, a review of the different theories on …
Semiotic Mediation, Dialogue and the Construction of Knowledge
Both Vygotsky, a psychologist, and Halliday, a social linguist, argue for the central role of language in human development. Language is the principal mode of meaning making; it mediates both the communication through which thinking with others is made possible and also the inner speech through which individual thinking is brought under conscious control. I develop this central claim by drawing on the writings of Vygotsky and Bakhtin, as well as …
The Mediating Role of Discoursing in Activity
Discoursing, the use of language in interaction with others, plays a part in almost every human activity. Indeed, some have argued that it is discoursing that has made possible the cumulative development of culture over the course of our species ’ history. Whether or not that is correct, there can be no question that the ability, with the aid of linguistic discourse, to coordinate action, and to reflect together on the relationship between action…
Dialogue in the Classroom
There is increasing agreement among those who study classrooms that learning is likely to be most effective when students are actively involved in the dialogic coconstruction of meaning about topics that are of significance to them. This article reports the results of an extended collaborative action research project in which teachers attempted to create the conditions for such dialogue by adopting an inquiry approach to the curriculum. A quantit…
Contents Vol. 49, 2006
Acknowlegment
Exploring the Relationship between Brain and Culture
The Autobiography of Alexander Luria is a relatively short and immensely readable book. In it, Luria recounts the various phases of his career and, in this process, provides a valuable overview of the major themes in Soviet psychology during the first two thirds of the 20th century. In 1923, at the age of 21, Luria was appointed to the Moscow Institute of Psychology and between then and his death in 1977 he conducted research that included what h…
Orality And Literacy
Preeminent scholar David Olson opens this symposium with a reflection on the decades-long debate concerning the relationship between written and oral discourse. His essay is followed by a series of responses by leading literacy researchers, including David Bloome, Anne Haas Dyson, James Paul Gee, Martin Nystrand, Victoria Purcell-Gates, and Gordon Wells. The symposium concludes with a further essay by Professor Olson, in which he offers his refle…
Responding in Interviews and Tests
The Role of Dialogue in Activity Theory
Activity Theory as formulated by Leont'ev and expanded by Engeström has tended to emphasize activity systems in which the objects to which subjects' actions are directed are material in form. In such accounts, discourse-if considered at all-is treated as just one of the artifacts or practices that mediate the subject's object-directed actions. As several scholars have pointed out, however, this model does not provide a satisfactory account of the…
Writing in Knowledge-Building Communities
Draws on the work of three students to argue for the value of treating writing as a tool for knowledge building. Claims when writing is used in this way, (1) students extend their repertoire of writing strategies, and (2) the effort students put into creating functionally effective texts plays a role in their learning
Dialogic Inquiry
For more than a quarter of a century, the polemics surrounding educational reform have centered on two points of view: those who favor a 'progressive' child-centered form of education, and those who would prefer a return to a more structured, teacher-directed curriculum, which emphasizes basic knowledge and skills. Vygotsky's social constructivist theory offers an alternative solution, placing stress on co-construction of knowledge by more and le…
Using the Tool-Kit of Discourse in the Activity of Learning and Teaching
Teaching and learning are largely conducted through talk, yet the relationship between the talk and the activity goals it is intended to achieve is rarely problematized or treated as a matter for conscious choice. In this paper, I describe a tool for the analysis of classroom talk, developed in the context of teacher-researcher collaboration, which draws upon activity theory and systemic linguistics. Three main units of analysis are proposed: epi…
Profesores e investigación
Partiendo de los puntos planteados por D. del Amo en su artículo, se abordan aquí algunos supuestos de la investigación conjunta profesor-esp ecialista desde la perspectiva socio-cultural. Se aboga por la necesidad de que el profesor se convierta en observador de los procesos educativos que se dan en su aula, enfatizando el enfoque dialógico que supone cualquier proceso de enseñanza-aprend izaje
Language and the Inquiry-Oriented Curriculum
Public debate about the goals of education is often couched in terms of an opposition between, on the one hand, the need to transmit to all students the knowledge and skills that are culturally valued and, on the other, the responsibility to foster each individual student's potential and creativity. By contrast, my aim is to show that, when one adopts a social constructivist theory of learning and teaching-enacted through an inquiry-oriented curr…
Reevaluating the IRF sequence
Learning and teaching in Signed English
Talk about Text
To be literate, the author proposes, is to have the disposition, as composer or interpreter, to engage with a text in one or more different modes according to the type of text involved and one's purpose in using it. Five modes of engagement are distinguished: performative, functional, informational, re-creational, and epistemic. However, only the epistemic mode, it is argued—in which meaning is treated as tentative, provisional, and open to alter…
Rural community mental health consumer satisfaction and psychiatric symptoms
The Fragile Environment
The Fragile Environment explores the impact of the human species on its environment and deals with such topical and urgent questions as the death of forests, acid rain and pollution, desertification, the greenhouse effect and other disruptions to the global climate. The eight contributors, all international authorities, address themselves to a broad general readership
Language Development in the Pre-School Years
Adult-child discourse
Some Key Pedagogic Principles for Helping ELLs to Succeed in School
In this article, we put forward 4 pedagogic principles that we consider to be particularly important in helping English language learners (ELLs) to succeed in school. These principles are: creating multiple and varied opportunities for ELLs to use the target language in both speech and writing, promoting high engagement by building on students' interests, connecting the curriculum to ELLs' lives and their funds of knowledge, and working toward a …
Language and the Inquiry-Oriented Curriculum
Public debate about the goals of education is often couched in terms of an opposition between, on the one hand, the need to transmit to all students the knowledge and skills that are culturally valued and, on the other, the responsibility to foster each individual student's potential and creativity. By contrast, my aim is to show that, when one adopts a social constructivist theory of learning and teaching-enacted through an inquiry-oriented curr…
Rural community mental health consumer satisfaction and psychiatric symptoms
Learning to talk and talking to learn
1984). Learning to talk and talking to learn. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 23, Access to Meaning: Spoken and Written Language, pp. 190-197
Some Antecedents of Early Educational Attainment
This report draws on a longitudinal study of language development in 32 children from one to seven years of age and involves data from recordings of spontaneous conversation in the home, interviews with the parents, tests and teachers' assessments. The results show that scores on measures of oral language at successive age‐points yield progressively stronger predictions of later educational attainment. Of even greater significance, however, are d…
Describing Children's Linguistic Development at Home and at School
A theory of language is outlined which emphasises the interactive nature of linguistic communication, and it is hypothesised that such interaction forms the basis for the child's acquisition of control of the language system. It is further suggested that differences in quality and quantity of interaction, in which meaning is negotiated in the shared construction of social reality, may be largely responsible for the ‘linguistic disadvantage’ which…
Talk about Text
To be literate, the author proposes, is to have the disposition, as composer or interpreter, to engage with a text in one or more different modes according to the type of text involved and one's purpose in using it. Five modes of engagement are distinguished: performative, functional, informational, re-creational, and epistemic. However, only the epistemic mode, it is argued—in which meaning is treated as tentative, provisional, and open to alter…
Learning to code experience through language
An attempt is made to explain how the child comes to relate his acquisition of the form of language with the categories that he is establishing in the organization of his non-linguistic experience, by hypothesizing a basis for language in pre-linguistic cognitive development. The child's task is seen as being to match the organization of language with the cognitive organization that he has already imposed upon his experience. This is made possibl…
Highway and transportation planning in England
Describing Children's Linguistic Development at Home and at School
A theory of language is outlined which emphasises the interactive nature of linguistic communication, and it is hypothesised that such interaction forms the basis for the child's acquisition of control of the language system. It is further suggested that differences in quality and quantity of interaction, in which meaning is negotiated in the shared construction of social reality, may be largely responsible for the ‘linguistic disadvantage’ which…
Adult-child discourse
Enabling Factors in Adult-Child Discourse
The use of a special baby-talk register by adults when talking to children in the early stages of language development is now well established (e.g. Sachs, 1977; Snow, 1976), but it is not yet clear how far the specific form it takes in particular adult-child interactions is the
Learning through Interaction
There have been many studies of children learning to talk, but perhaps none as comprehensive - in terms of the number of children involved, the period of continuous observation and the scope of the analysis - as the Bristol Study of Language Development. This is the first full-length volume to be written by members of the research team and it is a fundamental study of language development from infancy to primary school. It synthesises the researc…
Some Antecedents of Early Educational Attainment
This report draws on a longitudinal study of language development in 32 children from one to seven years of age and involves data from recordings of spontaneous conversation in the home, interviews with the parents, tests and teachers' assessments. The results show that scores on measures of oral language at successive age‐points yield progressively stronger predictions of later educational attainment. Of even greater significance, however, are d…
Characteristics of adult speech which predict children's language development
Samples of the speech addressed by adults to a socially representative sample of 2-year-olds in naturally occurring contexts of interaction were analysed with respect to syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse features to determine which features were most strongly associated with gain by the children on a variety of measures of language development over the ensuing 9 months. Following a principal components analysis of the adult speech vari…
Learning through Interaction
Learning to talk and talking to learn
1984). Learning to talk and talking to learn. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 23, Access to Meaning: Spoken and Written Language, pp. 190-197
Explorations in the Development of Writing
Language Development in the Pre-School Years
The Fragile Environment
The Fragile Environment explores the impact of the human species on its environment and deals with such topical and urgent questions as the death of forests, acid rain and pollution, desertification, the greenhouse effect and other disruptions to the global climate. The eight contributors, all international authorities, address themselves to a broad general readership
Talk about Text
To be literate, the author proposes, is to have the disposition, as composer or interpreter, to engage with a text in one or more different modes according to the type of text involved and one's purpose in using it. Five modes of engagement are distinguished: performative, functional, informational, re-creational, and epistemic. However, only the epistemic mode, it is argued—in which meaning is treated as tentative, provisional, and open to alter…
Rural community mental health consumer satisfaction and psychiatric symptoms
Learning and teaching in Signed English
Reevaluating the IRF sequence
Language and the Inquiry-Oriented Curriculum
Public debate about the goals of education is often couched in terms of an opposition between, on the one hand, the need to transmit to all students the knowledge and skills that are culturally valued and, on the other, the responsibility to foster each individual student's potential and creativity. By contrast, my aim is to show that, when one adopts a social constructivist theory of learning and teaching-enacted through an inquiry-oriented curr…
Using the Tool-Kit of Discourse in the Activity of Learning and Teaching
Teaching and learning are largely conducted through talk, yet the relationship between the talk and the activity goals it is intended to achieve is rarely problematized or treated as a matter for conscious choice. In this paper, I describe a tool for the analysis of classroom talk, developed in the context of teacher-researcher collaboration, which draws upon activity theory and systemic linguistics. Three main units of analysis are proposed: epi…
Profesores e investigación
Partiendo de los puntos planteados por D. del Amo en su artículo, se abordan aquí algunos supuestos de la investigación conjunta profesor-esp ecialista desde la perspectiva socio-cultural. Se aboga por la necesidad de que el profesor se convierta en observador de los procesos educativos que se dan en su aula, enfatizando el enfoque dialógico que supone cualquier proceso de enseñanza-aprend izaje
Dialogic Inquiry
For more than a quarter of a century, the polemics surrounding educational reform have centered on two points of view: those who favor a 'progressive' child-centered form of education, and those who would prefer a return to a more structured, teacher-directed curriculum, which emphasizes basic knowledge and skills. Vygotsky's social constructivist theory offers an alternative solution, placing stress on co-construction of knowledge by more and le…
Writing in Knowledge-Building Communities
Draws on the work of three students to argue for the value of treating writing as a tool for knowledge building. Claims when writing is used in this way, (1) students extend their repertoire of writing strategies, and (2) the effort students put into creating functionally effective texts plays a role in their learning
Responding in Interviews and Tests
The Role of Dialogue in Activity Theory
Activity Theory as formulated by Leont'ev and expanded by Engeström has tended to emphasize activity systems in which the objects to which subjects' actions are directed are material in form. In such accounts, discourse-if considered at all-is treated as just one of the artifacts or practices that mediate the subject's object-directed actions. As several scholars have pointed out, however, this model does not provide a satisfactory account of the…
Dialogue in the Classroom
There is increasing agreement among those who study classrooms that learning is likely to be most effective when students are actively involved in the dialogic coconstruction of meaning about topics that are of significance to them. This article reports the results of an extended collaborative action research project in which teachers attempted to create the conditions for such dialogue by adopting an inquiry approach to the curriculum. A quantit…
Psychology (32 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Linguistics (20 works) · Mathematics education (18 works) · Pedagogy (18 works) · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning (15 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Developmental psychology (9 works)