Opening dialogue: Understanding the dynamics of language and learning in the English classroom. By Martin Nystrand with Adam Gamoran, Robert Kachur, and Catherine Prendergast. (Language and literacy series.) London & New York: Teachers College Press, 1997. Pp. 139.

Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom promises to reorient our thinking about how younger adolescents and their teachers, talking together, compose shared understandings that contribute to individual students' learning. Presenting a new conceptual framework, Nystrand and his colleagues argue that people learn not merely by being spoken (or written) to, but by participating in communicative exchanges. Dozens of schools and thousands of students participated in the study reported here, under the auspices of the National Centre on Effective Secondary Schools. Its audience will include graduate education courses in language, literature, and literacy, teaching methods, quantitative research, teacher research, and educational psychology, as well as researchers, teachers and policymakers.