Teaching mathematics involves a lot of talking, and dialogic practices are central to most pedagogical practices in mathematics classrooms. Furthermore, for mathematical processes such as ‘reasoning’, ‘explaining’ and ‘mathematical thinking’ to be developed, there is a need for rich and robust dialogic interactions in the classroom. In this paper we investigate the dialogue in a typical Year 5 mathematics lesson by analysing the transcript using two different analytical frameworks. While the analysis showed that there were many interactions with nearly half being student turns, it was also evident that almost all the exchanges followed an Initiation-Response-Feedback pattern, with a high degree of teacher control. Furthermore, there was little evidence that the dialogic pedagogies of the lesson promoted student development in the mathematical processes. Thus, we content that there is a need to understand the dialogue of mathematics pedagogy, and its impact on students’ broader mathematical learning.