Neil Mercer is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, where he is also the Director of Oracy Cambridge: the Hughes Hall Centre for Effective Spoken Communication and a Life Fellow of the college Hughes Hall. He is a psychologist with particular interests in the use of talk for thinking collectively, the development of children's spoken language abilities, and the role of teachers in that development. He has worked extensively and internationally with teachers, researchers and educational policy makers.

Introduction; Chapter 1. Community language and education; Chapter 2. Researching common knowledge: studying the content and context of educational discourse; Chapter 3. The quality of talk in children's collaborative activity in the classroom; Chapter 4. Laying the foundations; Chapter 5. Language for teaching a language; Chapter 6. Developing dialogues; Chapter 7. Reasoning as a scientist: ways of helping children to use language to learn science; Chapter 8. Sociocultural discourse analysis: analysing classroom talk as a social mode of thinking; Chapter 9. The seeds of time: why classroom dialogue needs a temporal analysis; Chapter 10.The analysis of classroom talk: methods and methodologies; Chapter 11. Dialogic teaching in the primary science classroom; Chapter 12. Using interactive whiteboards to orchestrate classroom dialogue; Chapter 13. The social brain, language, and goal-directed collective thinking: a social conception of cognition and its implications for how we think, teach, and learn; Chapter 14. Classroom talk and the development of self-regulation and metacognition; Chapter 15. The study of talk between teachers and students, from the 1970s until the 2010s; Chapter 16. Dialogue, thinking together and digital technology in the classroom: some educational implications for a continuing line of inquiry; Chapter 17. An Oracy Assessment Toolkit: linking research and development in the assessment if students' spoken language skills at age 11-12