8.4 Communication styles in the classroom

Teachers and students have identifiable styles of talking to each other that linguists call a register. A register is a pattern of vocabulary, grammar, and expressions or comments that people associate with a social role. A familiar example is the “baby-talk” register often used to speak to an infant. Its features—simple repeated words and nonsense syllables, and exaggerated changes in pitch—mark the speaker as an adult and mark the listener as an infant. The classroom language register works the same way; it helps indicate who the teacher is and who the student is. Teachers and students use the register more in some situations than in others, but its use is common enough that most people in our society have no trouble recognizing it when they hear it (Cazden, 2001). In the following scene, for example, the speakers are labeled only with letters of the alphabet; yet figuring out who is the teacher and who are the students is not difficult:

A: All right now, I want your eyes up here. All eyes on me, please. B, are you ready to work? We are going to try a new kind of math problem today. It’s called long division. Does anyone know what long division is? C, what do you think it is?

C: Division with bigger numbers?

A: Any other ideas? D?

E (not D): Division by two digits.

A: …I only call on people who raise their hands. D, can you help with the answer?

D: Division with remainders.

A: Close. Actually you’re both partly right.

In this scene Person A must surely be the teacher because he or she uses a lot of procedural and control talk, and because he or she introduces a new curriculum topic, long division. The other Persons (B, C, D, and E) must be students because they only respond to questions, and because they individually say relatively little compared to Person A.

In general, effective classroom communication depends on understanding how features of the classroom talk register like these operate during actual class times. In the following sections therefore we describe details of classroom talk, and then follow with suggestions about how to use the register as effectively as possible. In both of these sections we assume that the better the communication, the better the learning and thinking displayed by students. For convenience we divide classroom talk into two parts, teacher talk and student talk.

How teachers talk

Although teacher talk varies somewhat with the tasks or purposes at hand, it also has uniformities that occur across a range of situations. Using detailed observations of discourse in science activities, for example, Jay Lemke identified all of the following strategies from observations of teachers’ classroom talk (1990). Each strategy simultaneously influences the course of discussion and focuses students’ attention, and in these ways also helps indirectly to insure appropriate classroom behavior: