From Theoretical Roots to Empirical Outcomes: The Interdisciplinary Foundations of Quality Talk in Taiwan

Critical, reflective dialogue is essential for enhancing students’ interactions with text and content. During productive discussions, students learn to reflect, refine, and expand their understandings through collaborative and challenging exchanges with teachers and peers. Such exchanges demand a discourse-intensive and contextually responsive pedagogical approach. In this chapter, we introduce such an approach to productive small-group discussions called Quality Talk (QT). Specifically, we delineate QT’s theoretical roots and summarize its empirical foundations. After which, we present the core elements of QT as well as our iterative refinement of QT to meet the needs of teachers and students across various contexts. We highlight the importance of recontextualization when remaking QT and present QT implementation in various domains or cultural contexts. Further, we provide empirical findings for each version of QT implementation from our program of QT research. Finally, we summarize why QT has worked effectively over time.