Facilitator talk in EAP reading classes

Current sociocultural perspectives on language learning call on teachers to reinvent themselves in ways which facilitate student learning rather than transmit knowledge. For teachers, this means adopting new roles, and acquiring a new repertoire of teacher talk. This paper aims to further the work on facilitator talk begun by Clifton (2006) and Walsh (2002). It looks particularly at the role of facilitator talk in teaching reading, and shows how teachers can enhance students' dialogue with texts by using unobtrusive task management, re-redirecting students' attention to the text, increasing prospectiveness (Hammond and Gibbons 2005), and giving sensitive feedback.