Dialogue constraints in instruction

Teaching is a special kind of communication between a tutor and a student. Ideally, it seems, this communicative process should be a dialogue, but in contrast to more symmetric dialogues, tutor and student differ substantially in knowledge and skills to be acquired. Also, the tutor is assumed to take most of the initiative, and largely to control the dialogue. A regular dialogue, in addition, contains dialogue control utterances, serving to control the effective flow of information between partners, but utterances of this kind are remarkably rare in instructional dialogues. So, it appears that instructional theory has hardly ever employed dialogue theory in implementing tutoring systems, but also that dialogue research has so far neglected to cover the instructional dialogue. It is argued here that this should be urgently remedied, and that for a considerable time evaluation research on communicative and instructional success will remain necessary