Talking for reasoning among Mexican primary school children

We analysed the development and promotion of ‘exploratory talk’ as a discursive tool to facilitate collective and individual reasoning in Mexican primary school children, following Mercer et al. (Br. Educ. Res. J. 25 (1999) 95) in the UK equivalent experimental and control groups of primary school children were administered a group and an individual problem-solving test before and after training. Teachers of the experimental groups trained their respective students to use competently exploratory talk to make their reasoning visible to others for solving diverse problems. In contrast with control children, experimental ones used significantly more exploratory talk, and this gain was accompanied by a substantial improvement in group and individual problem-solving. Results confirm sociocultural claims that language can function as a powerful tool to facilitate reasoning in social contexts, confirming previous UK findings.