In this paper I argue that dialog facilitates learning. As a consequence teaching and learning should be dialogic in principal. Against this background the question arises what dialog actually is and how it can be implemented for teaching and learning. A pilot corpus study of a dialog and a monolog corpus of selected teacher/learner interactions sheds light on some of the structural and lexical characteristics of dialogic teaching and learning. The analysis of the data discloses five communicative functions of selected keywords of the dialog corpus, which indicate how speakers are affiliated in dialogic interaction.
['Sebastian Feller']
The nature of dialog: structural and lexical markers of dialogic teacher/learner interactions