Dialogic Pedagogy and EFL Learning: From Teacher Transmission to Collaborative Meaning-Making
Abstract
English as a foreign language (EFL) education has often been organized around teacher explanation, display questions, correction, and student reproduction of forms. Dialogic pedagogy offers a different orientation in which learners and teachers use language to examine ideas, negotiate meanings, reason together, and revise understanding. This paper synthesizes sociocultural, dialogic, classroom-discourse, and second-language research to examine how this shift can support EFL learning without abandoning teacher expertise or curricular responsibility. The reviewed evidence indicates several potential mechanisms, including extended output, uptake and repair, collaborative reasoning, noticing, and affective engagement. However, causal evidence remains uneven. Controlled studies report gains in vocabulary, phonological awareness, and feedback-supported writing, whereas qualitative and correlational studies document productive classroom talk, willingness to communicate, and learner perceptions. The effects of dialogic pedagogy appear to depend on proficiency, task design, participation norms, assessment regimes, class size, teacher development, and digital access. Accordingly, dialogic EFL teaching is best understood not as unstructured conversation or simply maximizing student speech, but as the deliberate orchestration of scaffolding, interaction, and learning opportunities. Its effectiveness ultimately depends on aligning dialogic practices with instructional goals, learner needs, classroom conditions, and assessment practices.