79 FACILITATING THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE COLLECTIVELY THROUGH DIALOGIC DISCOURSE: TEACHERS’ PERSPECTIVES AND PRACTICES IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING Sheila Adelina Ramasamy a , Azlin Zaiti Zainal b ( a sheila.rama@eltc.edu.my; b azlinzainal@um.edu.my) Department of English Language, Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya Jalan Universiti, 50603, Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Abstract: Dialogic discourse is said to aid the social and cognitive aspects of language learning and acquisition and students’ success in second language learning is therefore largely dependent on the interactional opportunities available. Recognising the potential impact of dialogic discourse in enhancing second language acquisition amongst Malaysian students, the Malaysian Ministry of Education (MOE) provided a large-scale training on dialogic discourse to a group of lower secondary English language teachers. This study explores the perceptions of English as a second language (ESL) teachers on the role of dialogic discourse in affording students’ opportunities for the construction of knowledge and investigates their practices in affording students with the opportunities to construct knowledge collectively through the discourse structure. To understand the role of dialogic discourse in affording students to construct knowledge collectively, five ESL teachers’ dialogic discourse strategies were examined. A qualitative approach was employed, which comprised semi-structured interviews and classroom observations for the data collection. Two of the teachers’ lessons were also examined to illustrate how dialogic discourse created opportunities for the construction of knowledge collectively which supported ESL learning through close discourse analysis of the lesson transcripts. The findings have shown that ESL teachers’ use of dialogic discourse strategies facilitates the construction of knowledge collectively among the students. This study expands our current understanding of how ESL learning occurs through classroom discourse. Keywords: ESL, dialogic discourse, construction of knowledge, teacher questioning, second language learning DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15639/teflinjournal.v34i1/79-96 Spoken interaction manifested through collaborative classroom dialogue is an important factor in the process of second language acquisition and is seen as an important tool for thinking and constructing knowledge collectively (Swain & Watanabe, 2012) in which dialogic discourse becomes one of the examples of such a discourse. It refers to collective effort and places emphasis on authentic exchanges between teachers and students (Alexander, 2018; Boyd, 2015; Muhonen et al., 2018). These authentic exchanges are formed through series of questions and responses which encourage students to talk (Boyd, 2015; Böheim et al., 2021; Hardman, 2019; Muhonen et al., 2018). Based on Vygotskian theory, spoken interaction and mediated learning