| Neil Mercer is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, Director of Oracy Cambridge: the Centre for Effective Spoken Communication and a Life Fellow of the Cambridge college Hughes Hall. He is a psychologist whose research concerns the development of children’s spoken language and reasoning abilities and teachers’ role in that development. He has worked extensively and internationally with teachers, researchers and educational policymakers. In 2019 he was given the EARLI Oevre Award for outstanding contributions to educational research. His books include Words and Minds, Exploring Talk in School, Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking, Interthinking: putting talk to work and Language and the Joint Creation of Knowledge. It’s only words: why the quality of classroom talk is important. Neil Mercer, University of Cambridge Research has shown that children’s spoken language experience is very important for the development of their reasoning skills, their subject learning and their life chances in general. It is therefore vital that teachers use talk to the best effect in their classrooms. On the basis of recent research, I will describe how they can do so. Rupert Wegerif https://www.rupertwegerif.name/about.html is Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge where he mostly teaches educational psychology. His research focuses on education for dialogue in the context of the Internet Age. He researches dialogic theory in education and ways of teaching through dialogue and teaching for dialogue in classrooms with and without technology. He is co-lead with Sara Hennessy of the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research group (CEDiR) and co-convenor of the argumentation, reason and dialogue Special Interest Group (SIG) of the European Association of Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI). Neil Phillipson Neil was a science subject leader in a secondary school in the UK until 2009. Since that time he has been a consultant and trainer, specialising in approaches to dialogic education. He co-wrote the 2017 book Dialogic Education – Mastering Core Concepts through Thinking Together with Professor Rupert Wegerif of Cambridge University. Neil is registered with SAPERE to provide Level 1 and Level 2a training in Philosophy for Children. He is an associate of Oracy Cambridge, and facilitates ‘global dialogues’ with Generation Global.  |