Classroom Talk and the Learning of New Registers in a Second Language

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Classroom Talk andthe Learning of NewRegisters in a SecondLanguagePauline GibbonsPublished online: 29 Mar 2010.

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Classroom Talk and the Learning of NewRegisters in a Second Language

Pauline GibbonsCentre for Language and Literacy, Faculty of Education, University ofTechnology, Sydney, Australia

This paper describes the role of student–teacher interactions in the development ofEnglish, focusing on the more formal academic registers of school, among 9- and10-year-old ESL students in an inner city mainstream primary classroom in Sydney.The interactions between teacher and learners appeared to play a significant part infacilitating the acquisition of English associated with the science topic that the studentswere studying, and in the development of literacy skills. Significant factors in thisprocess lay in the place of the interaction within a linguistically based sequence oftasks, and in the degree of student initiation within the interactions. The paper alsosuggests the need for a broader theoretical base for ESL research in schools, which takesaccount of both the social and linguistic contexts in which learning occurs.

IntroductionFor students who are learning English as a second language in an English

medium school, English is both a target and the medium of education. Incountries where minimal resources are put into bilingual education (a policywhich can be questioned on educational, ethical and social grounds but which isnot the subject of this paper), many children in mainstream classes (that is, inregular, non-specialist classrooms) are not only learning the dominant languageas a new language, but are regularly expected to learn in and through it as well.In such classrooms, the construction of new curriculum knowledge must gohand-in-hand with the development of the second language.

This paper illustrates how such integration can be achieved. Through ananalysis of the nature and context of the interactions of one classroom, it arguesthat children’s current understandings of a curriculum topic, and their use offamiliar ‘everyday’ language to express these understandings, should be seen asthe basis for the development of the unfamiliar registers of school; and thatteacher–student interactions arising out of such understandings serve as a sharedcontextual basis from which these new meanings can be jointly constructed.Theorising from the analysis, the paper also argues that a language model whichis text-based and contextually grounded is an important theoretical underpin-ning for ESL teaching in schools. In addition, it suggests the usefulness ofbringing together, for the purposes of classroom-based research, bodies ofresearch which have rarely overlapped, namely Second Language Acquisitionresearch and Systemic Functional Linguistics.

To date, much work in Second Language Acquisition research (henceforthSLA) has focused on language form and the learning of grammatical sub-systems(for summaries of major research, see Ellis, 1985; 1994). This has led, for example,to insights into learners’ acquisition of morphology and syntax, and the orders

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in which these are acquired. Studies which are based on the sentence or clause asa unit of analysis, however, can say little about the acquisition of discourse, andso do not provide the linguistic insights necessary for the design of curriculumand pedagogical models for the development of subject discourses. Yet it is thisacademic register which school aged ESL learners must learn to control. Harleyet al. (1990) suggest that second language proficiency of school aged students isrelated to the control of sociolinguistically appropriate registers, particularly inmore context reduced situations, while Cummins (1986) and Skutnabb-Kangas(1984) have shown that it is this more ‘academic’ language associated withlearning in school which minority language children are less likely to acquirethan their dominant-language peers.

One response to a situation where large groups of learners are learning in whatis often their less well developed language, is for a teacher to consciously simplifyor modify the language of the classroom by, for example, attempting to avoid alllexical or grammatical complexity which is beyond what she believes to be herlearners’ current understanding — a kind of ‘simplified reader’ approach to herown language use. While this strategy may help to make language comprehen-sible to learners, it fails to take into account how the learner is to obtain newlinguistic data, and can lead to what is effectively a simplified, reductionist and‘alternative’ curriculum, which may in turn create lower academic expectationsin some classrooms. While teachers must at times simplify or modify theirlanguage for their ESL learners, simplified input, as White (1987) argues, maywork against successful second language learning since learners do not haveaccess to as yet unknown grammar. Ongoing linguistic simplification on the partof the teacher in fact reduces what is often the main source of English languagedata for young ESL children, and provides an insufficient basis for thedevelopment of a language-for-learning in school.

The Context for the StudyThe classroom from which the data discussed in this paper derive, is in an

inner city school in Sydney, situated in a poor socioeconomic area which has anethnically and linguistically diverse population. Twenty-three languages arerepresented in the school, with all but two children in the class coming from homebackgrounds where a language other than English is spoken. Some children arefirst generation migrants, but many were born in Australia, and entered the firstyear of school with little or no English. Generally such children, who representup to 98% of the school population in some inner city areas, are adept, or becomeadept very quickly, at using English in face to face, context-embedded commu-nication, where meanings are reliant on the surrounding physical and visualsituation. However, these children sometimes experience difficulty in under-standing and using the more context-reduced registers of the classroom,especially in later years as the demands of written literacy increase throughoutschool. The focus of this paper is on the learning of an ‘academic’ register bychildren who are largely fluent in English in basic communication contexts.

The Language ModelIf the teaching of a new language is to occur concurrently with the teaching of

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subject content through the medium of that language, then program planning ismost usefully informed by a model of language which relates language tomeaning, and to the context in which it is used. This study draws on systemicfunctional grammar (Halliday, 1994) and related descriptions of register theory(Halliday & Hasan, 1985). Register theory describes the grammar of a written orspoken text in terms of the linguistic realisations of the variables of the context:how the text realises Field, (what the text is about, its topic); Tenor (the relationshipbetween speaker-listener or reader-writer); and Mode (the channel of the text,whether it is spoken or written). Each of these variables requires the speaker orwriter to draw on specific resources within the lexico-grammar (the grammarand vocabulary).

The construct of mode and the notion of a mode continuum (Martin, 1984) wasa major organising principle of the teaching programme described, because itoffers a linguistic framework against which teaching activities can be sequencedfrom most context-dependent (and thus for ESL learners the most easilyunderstood), to least context-dependent. The following four texts illustrate thismode continuum, and show how certain linguistic features change, in predictableways, as language becomes increasingly context-reduced and closer to thewritten forms. (The inclusion of these texts at this point is illustrative; the textsthemselves are not part of the data set of this research.)

Text 1: (spoken by three 10-year-old students and accompanying action)

this ¼no it doesn’t go¼it doesn’t move¼try that¼yes it does ¼ a bit¼that won’t ¼won’t work it’s not metal¼these are the best¼going really fast.

Text 2: (spoken by one student about the action, after the event)

we tried a pin¼a pencil sharpener¼some iron filings and a piece of plastic¼themagnet didn’t attract the pin but it did attract the pencil sharpener and the ironfilings¼it didn’t attract the plastic.

Text 3: (written by the same student)

Our experiment was to find out what a magnet attracted. We discovered that amagnet attracts some kinds of metal. It attracted the iron filings, but not the pin.It also did not attract things that were not metal.

Text 4: (taken from a child’s encyclopedia)

A magnet is a piece of metal which is surrounded by an invisible field of force whichaffects any magnetic material within it. It is able to pick up, or attract, a piece ofsteel or iron because its magnetic field flows into the magnet, turning it into atemporary magnet. Magnetic attraction occurs only between ferrous materials.

Text 1 is typical of the context-embedded language produced in face-to-facecontexts. There is a use of exophoric reference (this, these, that), since the visualcontext obviates the need to name the referent, and as a result, there is a relativelylow lexical density, or number of ‘content’ words per clause. In Text 2 the changes

Second Language Classroom Talk 101D

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in language are the result of a change in context. The original experience is nowdistanced in both time (the text occurred later) and space (the student no longerhas the science equipment in front of her). The speaker reconstructs theexperience through language, and so makes explicit the participants (realisedthrough nouns and pronouns: we, pen, pencil, pencil sharpener, piece of plastic) andprocesses (realised through verbs: tried, attract). Text 3, a written text, is furtherdistanced from the original event, since the audience is now unseen; written textscannot rely on shared assumptions and a writer must recreate experience throughlanguage alone. Here, for example, an orientation is needed to provide thecontext for what follows: Our experiment was to¼ There is also the inclusion of ageneralisation — a magnet attracts some metals. In Text 4 the major participant (amagnet) is generic: its properties are those of all magnets. There is a furtherincrease in lexical density, and the text includes a nominalisation, the coding ofa process term as a noun (attraction) which is typical of much written text, andincreased numbers of circumstances, (which give details about where, when andhow processes occur): within it, into the magnet, between ferrous materials.

Although spoken and written language have distinctive characteristics, it isalso clear that there is no absolute boundary between them. Modern technologyincreases this blurring: sending an informal e mail, although it is in the writtenmode, often produces the kind of informal language that has much in commonwith speech. Similarly, leaving a lengthy message on an answer machine may bequite linguistically demanding, since it is a relatively context-reduced task whichrequires us to ‘speak aloud’ the kind of language that would more usually bewritten. Indeed, in terms of the mode continuum, it is more accurate to think oftexts as being ‘more spoken-like’ or ‘more written-like’. (Note that the termscontext-reduced, and decontextualised as used in this paper have the specificlinguistic meaning indicated here, and refer to the way in which languagechanges as it is distanced in time and space from the original and immediatecontext in which it was located. The terms do not of course imply the notion ‘outof context’.)

Young children’s first language development reflects this spoken–writtencontinuum; the language of the ‘here and now’ develops long before a child learnsto reconstruct his or her experiences through language alone, or to expressgeneralisations. And at a more macro level, the continuum reflects the process offormal education itself, as students are required to make shifts within anincreasing number of fields, and to move from personal everyday ways ofmaking meanings towards the socially shared discourses of specific disciplines.Clearly a second language learner is likely to have fewer difficulties withproducing something like Text 1, where the context itself provides a support formeaning, and where s/he does not need great linguistic resources, than withmore context-reduced texts, where there is a greater demand placed on thelearner’s lexico-grammatical resources. In the classroom, an oral ‘reporting’ stage(like Text 2) is, surprisingly, often not given much attention, and while infant andprimary classrooms are rich in the provision of experiential learning activities,children are frequently expected to write simply on the basis of these personalexperiences, which represents a very large linguistic step (as can be seen bycomparing Text 1 and 3 above), and one which is beyond the linguistic resources


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of many young second language learners. In the classroom described here, amajor focus is given to the way in which students can be supported in thedevelopment of spoken, but more context-reduced, language, as a way intogaining control of the more formal — and often written — registers of thecurriculum.

Pedagogical Influences

A social view of learningThe importance of allowing space for talk within the curriculum has long been

recognised (Barnes, 1976; Bruner, 1978; Britton, 1970; Martin, 1976). Morerecently, largely influenced by the work of Vygostsky, the social and contextual-ised nature of learning has been foregrounded (Mercer, 1992, 1995; Maybin et al.,1992; Wells, 1992; Fisher, 1994). A social and constructivist view of learning placesinteractions, and the social context of learning, at the heart of the learning process.Talk is ‘an integral part of how understanding is developed’ (Maybin, 1994: 133).In such a model of learning, the classroom is viewed as a place whereunderstanding and knowledge are jointly constructed, and where learners areguided by the teacher into common understandings and a common language toexpress them (Edwards & Mercer, 1995; Mercer, 1995). The notion of apprentice-ship into a culture which this view of learning implies, is particularly relevant inthe ESL context, where, in order to participate in the dominant culture, part ofwhat students must acquire is control of the dominant language through whichthat culture is constructed (Martin, 1988; Delpit, 1988). While this study illustratesthe value of ‘learning by doing’ (especially for ESL learners where concrete‘hands-on’ experiences help to make language comprehensible), it also illustrateshow a teacher can build on these experiences, and the critical role that talkbetween teacher and children plays in learning and language development.

Some classroom implications of SLA researchThe importance of interactive communication, where weight is given to

learner as well as to teacher contributions, is also a major theme in SLA research(see for example Ellis, 1984, 1994; Van Lier, 1988, 1996; Hatch, 1992), and parallelsstudies of mother tongue development which likewise suggest that the processof language development involves adult and child together jointly negotiatingand constructing meaning (Halliday, 1975; Wells, 1981; Painter, 1991). The kindsof modification which occur as meaning is negotiated and clarified appear to beparticularly significant in second language learning, because they make meaningmore comprehensible for the learner (Hatch, 1978; Long, 1980; Pica et al., 1986).

Swain (1985, 1995) also suggests that it is important for second languagelearners to have opportunities to modify what they say, in order to produce morecomprehensible, coherent, and syntactically improved discourse for their listen-ers. This attention to output ‘stretches’ the learner, in that s/he is pushed to attendto syntactic as well as to semantic processing. The classroom implication for this,I suggest, is not that language ‘form’ per se should become a major teaching focus,but that it is important, at times, for learners to have opportunities to use stretchesof discourse in contexts where there is a ‘press’ on their linguistic resources, and


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where, for the benefit of their listeners, they must focus not only on what theywish to say but on how they are saying it.

A clear teaching implication of these SLA studies is that the degree to whicha classroom is facilitative of second language learning depends largely on howclassroom discourse is constructed. The studies imply that there must be a focuson extended opportunities for student talk, and consequently, in terms ofprogramme planning, ‘air time’ for such interactions to occur. Yet traditionalclassroom interactions may actually deprive learners of just those interactionalfeatures and interactive conditions which SLA research suggests are enablingfactors in language learning. Typically, talk in the teacher-fronted class consistsof sequences of initiation, response, and feedback moves (Sinclair & Coulthard,1975), or what Lemke (1990) refers to as ‘triadic’ dialogue, illustrating whatEdwards and Mercer (1995: 25) refer to as the ‘two thirds’ rule:

for about two thirds of the time someone is talking;about two thirds of this talk is the teacher’s;about two thirds of the teacher’s talk consists of lecturing or askingquestions.

A classroom programme which is supportive of second language learning willcreate opportunities for alternative interactional patterns to occur.

The Teaching ProgrammeIn the classroom which is the focus of this study, teaching and learning

activities, based on the science topic of Magnetism, were planned to reflect pointsalong the mode continuum described earlier, the assumption being that thiswould offer a logical progression in terms of language learning. Thus studentsinitially participated in small-group learning experiences where the languageused was clearly context-embedded. This was followed by a teacher-guidedreporting session, where each group described what they had done and offeredexplanations for what happened, while the teacher interacted with individualsfrom each group, clarifying, probing and recasting. Talking with the teacherabout what had been learned, since this did not involve the use of the concretematerials, led to a mode shift towards more decontextualised, less context-em-bedded, language, and provided a bridge into the writing, which was the finalactivity of the cycle and linguistically the most context-reduced. This three-partcycle was repeated several times during the course of the development of the unitof work. At the beginning of the topic the teacher invited the students to tell herand the class what they already knew about the subject. As expected, thestudents’ answers indicated that they had some personal understanding of thetopic, but, not surprisingly, they expressed this understanding using ‘everyday’,rather than ‘scientific’ language. Typically, for example, they explained thatmagnets ‘stick to things’ rather than using field-specific lexis such as attract andrepel, while many students indicated knowledge through reference to personalor specific instances ‘like the magnet on the fridge’ rather than through generalisa-tions about the nature of magnets. The activities discussed occurred one weekinto the topic (after three 40-minute lessons). By this time the students hadbecome familiar with the notion of ‘magnetic’ and ‘non magnetic’, and the teacher


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had modelled and encouraged the children to talk about their findings using theterms magnetic, non magnetic, and attracts. In the activities described, the focus ison the concept of magnetic repulsion.

Stage 1: Small group workIn many primary classrooms where experiential learning is valued, a normal

routine would be for all students to rotate through a number of activities overthe course of one or two lessons. Such an organisational structure in fact negatesany authentic communicative purpose for reporting back to the rest of the class(since there is little need to hear what others have discovered if one has alreadyexperienced the same things oneself!). In this classroom an attempt was made toset up a genuine communicative situation by having each group of children workat different, though related, science experiments, and therefore holding differentinformation from other class members. In its communicative structure it reflects,at a whole class level, the notion that information exchange is a key factor in thedesign of interactive tasks (Long, 1989). Thus in the small group work each groupparticipated in one activity which was designed to develop students’ under-standing, at a concrete level, of magnetic repulsion. Although each activityinvolved the use of different materials, the learning of each group could beexpected to be similar. One activity, for example, consisted of a bar magnet hungfrom a beam, while the students tested the effect of a second magnet held closeto it. (Two like poles cause repulsion and the hanging magnet spins.) Anotheractivity consisted of a small polystyrene block into which a number of woodenpaddle-pop (ice-lolly) sticks had been inserted and which enclosed a bar magnet.Again the students tested the effect of a second magnet. (In this case, repulsioncauses the second magnet, when placed above the first and encircled by thepaddle-pop sticks, to be suspended in midair.) The data discussed here relate tothis activity.

Prior to beginning the group work, students were told that they were to findout what happens when two magnets come close together, but were left free todecide as a group how to do this. They were also aware of the expectation thatthey would describe their own findings to the large group, and provide a possibleexplanation for the behaviour of the magnets.

Stage 2: Teacher guided reportingBefore the reporting began, there was a short teacher-led discussion focusing

on the specific lexis which the children might need to use. It included a revisionof words already learned during the course of the topic, plus one new lexical item(repel). The overall aim of the teacher-guided reporting stage was to extend thechildren’s linguistic resources in a less context-embedded situation, and to focuson the specific discourse of science. The teacher’s focus on language was madeexplicit to the students. Her comments included: we’re trying to talk like scientists;your language has got to be really precise; the language you choose is very important andstudents’ responses were often evaluated in terms of language use: you explainedthat very well; that was very well told. It was anticipated that the reporting stagewould create a context for students to ‘rehearse’ language structures which werecloser to written discourse. During the reporting session, the students sat together


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on the floor as a whole class and each small group, in turn, came to the front andexplained what they had done and what had happened. Frequently during thesesessions, while interacting with the students, the teacher sat among the ‘listeners’,thereby positioning herself in a way that suggested a greater equality of statusbetween herself and the reporters, and implicitly acknowledging the ‘expertise’of the children as they explained their findings.

Stage 3: Journal writingAfter all the students had taken part in the teacher-guided reporting, which

included listening to what others had said, they wrote a response in their journalsto the question ‘what have you learned? This writing was intended as a personaland ongoing record of each student’s learning, rather than a piece of formalwriting, and was completed in a single sitting. Its purpose can best be describedas ‘writing to learn’ rather than the more usual ‘learning to write’, reflecting thenotion that writing is not only a product in itself but also a tool for learning. Theinterest of the journals in this study, however, is that they provide some evidenceof second language ‘uptake’ in that they reflect wordings which occurred in theprocess of jointly negotiated learner-teacher interactions.

The DataThe texts included in this paper have been selected as being representative, in

terms of the linguistic features discussed above, of each of the three stages. Exceptwhere indicated, the texts come from a single group of four students. They areexamined, using a systemic functional model of language, to indicate thelinguistic realisations of each stage, and the relationship between stages. Textsfrom each stage are also analysed in relation to a single student, Hannah,identified in the group work as S2. This ‘tracking’ of a student through the threestages illustrates how language development can evolve out of interactions andthrough jointly constructed discourse, and thus offers an insight into the how oflanguage learning.

In the transcripts, pauses of up to a second are denoted by (.) with eachadditional (.) representing approximately an additional second.

Texts from Stage 1: Small group work

Text 1.1

S2: try .. the other wayS3: like thatS2: north pole facing downS4: we tried thatS1: oh!S2: it stays up!S3: magic!S4: let’s show the othersS3: mad!S1: I’ll put north pole facing north pole .. see what happenS4: that’s what we just did


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S1: yeah ¼ like this ¼ look

(The dialogue continues for several minutes longer as the students try differentpositions for the magnet, and then they begin to formulate an explanation. There has beenno teacher input during the course of the conversation.)

Text 1.2

S2: can I try that?¼ I know why ¼ I know why .. that’s like .. because the northpole is on this side and that north pole’s there ¼ so they don’t stick together

S1: what like this? yeahS2: yeah see because the north pole on this side .. but turn it on the other .. this

side like that .. turn it that way ¼ yeahS1: and it will stickS2: and it will stick because ¼ look ¼ the north pole’s on that side because ..S1: the north pole’s on that side yeah

Texts from Stage 2: Teacher-guided reporting

Initial teacher-led discussion

T: (referring to reporting session about to begin) what are some of the words weare going to use?(Children call out and offer: magnet, attract, metal, north pole, south pole)

T: Now I’m going to give you another word for what Joseph was trying to say¼ one more scientific word, and that is when something doesn’t attract ¼some of you were saying it pushes away .. or slips off ¼ so instead of sayingthe magnet pushes away. I’m going to give you a new word¼ repel (saidwith emphasis) .. it actually means to push away from you (demonstrating withher arm) so we’re going to use words like¼(Children again offer associated lexis, and include ‘repel’.)

Teacher interacting with student (Hannah/S2)

Text 2.1

T: Try to tell them what you learned ¼ OK. (to Hannah) yes?Hannah: em er I learned that em when you put a magnet ¼ (laughter from

Hannah and children as Hannah is attempting to explain withoutdemonstrating with her hands) when I put when you put ¼ whenyou put a magnet ¼ on top of a magnet .. and the north polepoles are ....... (7 second pause, Hannah is clearly having difficulty inexpressing what she wants to say)

T: yes yes you’re doing fine .. you put one magnet on top of another¼

Hannah: and and the north poles are together er em the magnet ¼ repelsthe magnet er ¼ the magnet and the other magnet ¼ sort offloats in the air?

T: I think that was very well told ¼ very well told .. do you haveanything to add to that Charlene?


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(The teacher invites or nominates other contributions, and then returnsto Hannah. She invites Hannah to first show the experiment to the otherstudents, and then asks her to explain it again.)

Text 2.2

T: now listen .. now Hannah explain once more ¼ alright Hannah¼ excuse me everybody (regaining classes attention) ¼ listenagain to her explanation

Hannah: the two north poles are leaning together and the magnet on thebottom is repelling the magnet on top so that the magnet on thetop is sort of ¼ floating in the air

T: so that these two magnets are repelling each other and ¼ look atthe force of it

Texts from Stage 3: Excerpts from written journal entries

Text 3.1 (from Hannah’s journal )I found it very interesting that when you stuck at least 8 paddle pop sticks in

a piece of polystyrene, and then put a magnet with the North and South pole inthe oval and put another magnet with the north and south pole on top, the magneton the bottom will repel the magnet on the top and the magnet on the top wouldlook like it is floating in the air.

Text 3.2The thing made out of polystyrene with paddle pop sticks, one group put one

magnet facing north and another magnet on top facing north as well and theyrepelled each other. It looked like the top magnet was floating up in the air.

Text 3.3¼and I learn how to talk like a sciencetist (sic).

Discussion of transcripts

Stage 1 TextsThe initial small group activities in Stage 1 led to the use of ‘here and now’

language, with the visual support available providing support for meaning.More important, the activities allowed for children to explore and developtogether certain scientific understandings about the topic (the discovery that theposition of the poles is significant to the movement of the magnets) using familiareveryday language. This understanding occurred before students were expectedto understand and use more scientific discourse. The teacher introduces repel forexample, at the point of communicative need, and at a time when the studentshave already expressed this meaning in familiar everyday language, for example:it slips off; it pushes it away; they’re fighting; it feels like a strong wind! There is someparallel here to the principle within bilingual programmes which suggests thatlearning should occur first in L1 as a basis to learning in L2, but here the issue isone of register rather than language.

Both Text 1.1 and 1.2 have many of the characteristics of spontaneous spokenlanguage as it occurs in contexts where there is visual support for meaning. Itincludes many exophoric references (like that; like this; this side; that way), which


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in this context are clear to the listeners. These references, of course, carrymeanings which, in the absence of a visual context, must be realised in a differentway, and it is in fact precisely this aspect of discourse which causes Hannah, andmany of the other students, difficulty in the reporting session.

Transcripts from this stage also indicate the foregrounding of interpersonalaspects of language: the text is about social interaction as much as it is aboutmagnets. In terms of Halliday’s model, language enables speakers to exchangeone of two items: goods and services (including action) or information. In thesetexts its function is primarily to control action. Throughout all the small-grouptexts there are a large number of imperatives as students direct each other (in thistext: put, let). Using Berry’s analysis of exchange types (Berry, 1981), the text iscomposed largely of action, rather than information, exchanges. There are alsopersonal comments indicating affect, such as the expression of attitude andfeelings (magic! mad!). Participants are generally human and frequently thema-tised; and they relate to the interactants themselves (We tried that; I’ll put northpole facing north pole) or to other students; (Let’s show the others).

In a year-long study aimed at discovering critical variables on school ESLlearners’ academic achievement, Saville-Troike (1984) suggests that communica-tive activities and social interaction between students may not themselves besufficient to develop English language and academic skills, and identifiesvocabulary knowledge as a highly significant factor. This short transcript, andothers from the same data set produced in the experiential group work, suggestthat this is not a surprising finding. Subject specific language is simply notnecessary for communication between the interactants; what is most importanthere is social communication.

It is interesting, however, to note that as the discourse progresses (Text 1.2),individual utterances become longer and more explicit, and this occurs as thestudents begin to formulate explanations for what they see (note the logicalconnectives so, because). Interpersonal elements are reduced; there is now anon-human participant (the north pole) which is thematised and this, rather thanthe interactants themselves, becomes the topic of conversation. The cognitivechallenge inherent in the teacher’s instruction to ‘try to explain what you see’may have been significant here, since it extended the task from simply ‘doing’ to‘doing and thinking’. This explicit focus on thinking (note the teacher’s use of theprocess explain) is an important one in the light of this type of teaching context,where a teacher must balance the need for suitably high levels of cognitivelearning with learners’ relatively low levels of English, and where learningactivities aimed at development of the second language must also be linked tocognitive growth. Clearly within these texts there is evidence of children’slearning of science: the beginnings of an understanding of why the magnets arebehaving as they are, and attempts to hypothesise about the causal relationsinvolved. Through the kind of exploratory talk which begins to be evident herein the small group work, ‘knowledge is made more publicly accountable andreasoning is more visible’ (Wegerif & Mercer (1996: 51).

Stage 2 TextsIn relation to experientially based approaches to learning, Driver makes the

important point that ‘activity by itself is not enough. It is the sense that is made


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of it that matters’ (Driver, 1983: 49). In Stage 2 texts we see the teacher workingwith the children to make sense of the activities in which they have been engaged,by helping them reconstruct their experiences and develop shared under-standings through language. Wegerif and Mercer suggest that it is through beingencouraged and enabled ‘to clearly describe events, to account for outcomes andconsolidate what they have learned in words’ that children are helped to‘understand and gain access to educated discourse’ (Wegerif & Mercer, 1996: 53).Text 2 illustrates one type of situation in which this process can occur.

From the point of view of second language learning, it is important to notethat interactions with the teacher occurred at a time when students had alreadydeveloped an understanding of the topic of the interactions. Thus the languageof the teacher would be likely to be comprehensible because of the schematicknowledge of the learners. It follows that a teacher in this context is able to usestructures and lexis beyond what might be understood if learners had not takenpart in the small group experiences first, and were without these as a basis forinteraction and interpretation. However, the language demands on the studentsof the more decontextualised situation, and the consequent difficulty of the taskfor them, were at times very evident:

it’s hard to explain without using your handsI can’t say itthis is hard Miss!I can’t get the words Miss

The teacher’s role in these episodes was crucial; the texts show how herinteractions with individual students provided a ‘scaffold’ for their attempts,allowing for communication to proceed while giving the learner access to newlinguistic data. To exemplify how this occurs I will first consider the nature of theinteractions that typify these episodes, and then discuss the transcripts in relationto the SLA insights referred to earlier.

In Text 2, the micro interactions between teacher and students are different inseveral small but important respects from the IRF pattern associated with moretraditional classrooms, but these differences appear to have significant effects onthe interaction as a whole. As Cazden points out, ‘even small changes [to the moreusual patterns of teacher–student interaction] can have considerable cognitive orsocial significance’ (Cazden, 1988: 53). Typically, the IRF pattern is realised infairly predictable ways, frequently involving a teacher known-answer question,followed by a student (often brief) answer, and followed by a teacher evaluationcomment relating to the correctness or otherwise of the answer. Lemke (1990)argues that this pattern, which he terms ‘triadic dialogue’ functions not only toallow the teacher to control the thematic development of the topic, but also tomaintain the unequal nature of teacher/student power relations, a pointsimilarly made by Mehan (1979). In Text 2, however, the interactions approxi-mate more closely what occurs in typical L1 adult–child interactions outside ofthe formal teaching context. The teacher begins the exchange, for example, withinviting students to relate what they have learned, rather than with a ‘knownanswer’ or display question. It has been suggested that teachers’ questions areoften framed in ways which do not allow for students to make extended


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responses (Dillon, 1990). Here, by contrast, the teacher sets up a context where itis the students, rather than herself, who initiate the specific topic of the exchange.The student takes on the role of what Berry refers to as ‘primary knower’ (Berry,1981). Although of course it is the teacher who is in control of the knowledgeassociated with the overall thematic development of the unit of work, theindividual exchanges locate that control in the student, thereby reversing typicalteacher/student roles. The effect is to modify relations of power by shifting thelocation of knowledge, at least temporarily, onto the student, and therebymodifying knowledge asymmetries. Thus we have:

Initiation: an invitation by the teacher for the student to take the floorResponse: student initiates meaningFeedback: teacher recasts student’s meaning in new (register appro-

priate) wording

Since this sequence is in some significant ways unlike a more typical IRFsequence, and because it was an identifiable pattern which occurred regularlywithin all teacher-guided reporting back sessions, I refer to it hereafter as SI/TR(Student Initiates, Teacher Recasts). Students were clearly aware of the expecta-tions this mode of discourse placed on them; in other words, it was a pattern thatthey had learned to recognise. (The teacher initiation move, once the episode hadbeen introduced, did not occur with every exchange, except insofar as childrenwere nominated to begin their account.)

As in adult–child L1 interactions, the reciprocity and mutuality in the speakerroles of the SI/TR pattern lead to longer stretches of discourse in which meaningis jointly constructed, a process which Wells describes as ‘dialogic’ (Wells, 1992).The teacher ‘leads from behind’, and while following the learner’s lead andaccepting as a valid contribution the information given by the child, she at thesame time provides alternative linguistic forms to encode the learner’s meaningin more context-appropriate ways. This recasting and extension of studentinitiated meaning depends on the adult’s contribution being closely related to,and thus following, the student’s contribution. In this process new meanings arecollaboratively developed as the teacher wording provides the learner withaccess to new field lexis, or models more decontextualised language throughencapsulating a mode shift. In the following example, taken from the same dataset, the teacher’s contribution both extends what the student has said and shiftsthe meaning into a sociolinguistically more appropriate register. Her contribu-tion includes the use of science-specific lexis (repelling), but remains closely linkedto what the child has said, through the conjunctive so that, which provides acohesive tie across the two turns.

H: the magnet on the top is sort of floating in the airT: so that the two magnets are repelling each other

The reciprocal nature of this discourse is evident in the final exchange in Text2.2. Here the teacher is not explicitly concerned with providing linguisticalternatives for what Hannah is saying, but takes up the role of a conversationalpartner by expanding on what Hannah has said and adding a new element ofmeaning (and look at the force of it).


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The SI/TR interactional pattern has potential significance in relation toVygostsky’s work, which suggests that learning occurs, with support from thosemore expert, at the learner’s ‘zone of proximal development’, (Vygotsky, 1978),that is, at the ‘outer edges’ of a learner’s current abilities. In Text 2.1 we mightconclude that the student has reached her own zone of proximal developmentfor this task, since she hesitates for a considerable time, and can presumably gono further alone. The recasting and support she receives from the teacher thenappears to be precisely timed for learning to occur.

H: em er I learned that em when you put a magnet¼when I put when you put¼when you put ¼ a magnet on top of a magnet and the north pole polesare....... (7 second pause)

T: yes yes you’re doing fine ¼ you put one magnet on top of another¼

Focusing on the role of the adult in first language acquisition, Wells (1981)suggests that adult contributions to an exchange must be modified to the child’sreceptive capacities, but at the same time provide the means whereby the childcan enlarge his or her linguistic resources and thus develop understanding of thecontent of what is being said. The interactional context described above appearsto offer a parallel example within a second language classroom context, and onewhich offers a rich potential for the simultaneous learning of both curriculumcontent and language. Yet it is worth noting that what is occurring here is in facta reversal of the kinds of micro interactions inherent in many ESL and EFLprogrammes, where the teacher selects and models new or unknown linguisticstructures and lexis, which students are then expected to use in their responses.

An examination of the same transcript from an SLA perspective also indicatesthat it provides several of the conditions facilitative of language learning whichwere discussed earlier. First, we can note that guided reporting encourageslearner language to be ‘pushed’. Hannah is going beyond what is unproblematicfor her and, because she is allowed a second attempt, she also has an opportunityto produce more comprehensible output. It is interesting to note that Hannah’ssecond attempt at her explanation is considerably less hesitant and syntacticallymore complete than her first, and is produced this time without the help of theteacher. It appears also that Hannah herself has more confidence in her secondattempt; in Text 2.1 her utterance is marked by a rising intonation patternindicating some uncertainty and tentativeness, whereas in 2.2 it is unmarked. Thecontext also gives students opportunities to produce longer stretches ofdiscourse, whole units of meaning which are more written-like than those whichoccurred in the small group work. Throughout the reporting sessions, studentson average produced utterances of 4.5 clauses in length, which represents aconsiderable increase over the responses normally associated with ‘knownanswer’ or referential type teacher questions. In many cases this required theteacher to increase ‘wait time’, and on occasions this was as long as eight seconds.Research suggests that when teachers ask questions of students, they typicallywait one second or less for the students to begin a reply, but that when teacherswait for three or more seconds, there are significant changes in student use oflanguage and in the attitudes and expectations of both students and teachers(Rowe, 1986). It can be hypothesised that the importance of wait time is increased


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for students who are formulating responses in a language they do not fullycontrol. It is also worth pointing out that students in this classroom did not appearto became uncomfortable or embarrassed by the length of the wait time; on thecontrary there were many explicit and enthusiastic bids for turns to offercontributions. What is probably more important, students speaking in thiscontext were able to complete what they wanted to say, whether alone or throughinteraction with the teacher, and as a result were positioned as successfulinteractants and learners.

In addition, since it is the immediate need of the learner which is influencingto a large extent the teacher’s choice of actual wording, it would seem likely thatthis wording will be more salient to the learner — more likely to be noticed —than if it had occurred in a context which was less immediate. (For discussion ofthe significance of ‘noticing’ in second language development, see Ellis, 1992).Equally it would seem that the structure of the exchange sequence itself (learnerwording followed by teacher wording) creates a context for the teacher to talkexplicitly about language use, as in this example with another child in Hannah’sgroup, later in the same lesson:

S: one north pole standing up¼next to another north pole which you put ontop¼it¼will push it away because it will make it more ¼

T: I want you to use that new word we talked about ..push away?S: and it can¼repel the other magnet¼it will repel.

Again as a result of this process, the learner repairs the utterance and producesan improved, contextually more appropriate, version.

Overall, Stage 2 texts indicate a marked change from those in Stage 1 in therelative importance of the two major speech functions. Where Stage 1 texts werelargely concerned with the controlling of action, here the business of the text isthe exchange of information. While there are still human participants (I and you),there are many more references to non-human participants than in Stage 1 texts;magnet occurs nine times in Hannah’s speech and the north pole three times andboth of these are thematised. Thus Stage 2 texts may be characterised as helpingto create a bridge for learners between personal everyday ways of knowing andthe public discourse of shared and socially constructed knowledge. This point isunderlined by the way that the teacher handles students’ individual contribu-tions in relation to each other. Here she takes on a mediating role betweenchildren’s individual experiences and the public discourse which they aredeveloping, by using their personal knowledge to show how generalisationsmight be generated:

is that the same result as George got?are you saying the same as ¼can you see something in common with all these experiences?

Contributions in the teacher-guided reporting episode are thus not onlyindividually responded to, but are placed in a larger framework of meaningswhich are part of the public discourse the students are learning at this point.

Stage 3 textsThe written texts offer some evidence of uptake. Many of the students included


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wording which they had used in the teacher-guided reporting session, or whichhad been part of the teacher’s recasting. In Hannah’s text (3.1), which was writtenwithout further assistance other than teacher provision of the spelling ofpolystyrene, her interaction with the teacher, and her own second attempt atwording, have clearly influenced both syntax and lexis. There is also evidencethat the reporting back sessions influenced not only the interactants themselvesbut also those who listened to the interactions as part of the larger group. Text3.2 was written by a student who had not taken part in this particular experimentherself, but her text too echoes both the teacher’s recast and Hannah’s finalattempt.

Students’ perceptions about their learningLearners themselves are able to offer valuable insights to teachers about the

process of their learning. Such information may provide an additional source ofdata about the usefulness of specific classroom practices and evaluative feedbackon the teaching programme. Thus, following the writing, students were asked totalk about what had helped them to write. Almost all responses referred to thefact that the talking they had taken part in, including the small group work, hadplayed an important part in helping them to write, while several students alsoreferred to the role listening to others had played:

I discussed it with my group ¼talking helped me¼it helped when we discussed¼I like the other people — I can hear their idea¼

In addition, students indicated as important the fact that they had built up aknowledge base for the writing, that is, they had built up the field of the writing.As one student said, writing was:

easier because we learned about it a lot — like I knew about it.

The journal entries also provided evaluative feedback. In this entry, thestudent’s perceptions of the value of talking, listening, and learning to interact,is evident in her reference to both the small group work, and to the reportingsession:

Not only did I learn from what I have experimented but from others who have sharedtheir ideas with the class and I. They shared things about the two sides of themagnets even before we learned what they were called, and why they repel. In thattime I learned how to respond to others what I think the answer was.

And as Text 3.3 indicates, some students were aware that they were alsolearning to use an alternative register of English!

ConclusionsTeacher-guided interactions in this context offer a rich potential for second

language development. In an exchange structure where students’ intendedmeaning is used as a basis for teacher recasts, there is clearly a parallel with a keyprocess in L1 learning, and in this classroom this interactionally derived input


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provided data for learners to extend their language into more decontextualisedregisters. Also of significance is the opportunity such episodes offer to studentsto use longer stretches of discourse and hence to produce comprehensible output.In addition, in learner-initiated exchanges, the learner is hearing new languageitems in the context of the immediate and personal meaning he or she is tryingto make. The learner might therefore have a greater ‘investment’ in the newlanguage, than is perhaps the case when language items have been predeter-mined by the language focus of the teacher.

The study also suggests that in analysing how interactions are madecomprehensible to ESL students in the classroom context, we need to look furtherthan the linguistic features of the interactions themselves (for example thesimplicity or otherwise of syntactic structures), and examine the context in whichthose interactions are situated. Of particular significance was the place ofstudent–teacher interactions within the lessons. Occurring as they did afterstudents had already developed some understanding of key concepts throughthe small group work, allowed the teacher to use new wordings and ways ofmeaning — a new register — which were more readily interpretable by thestudents. The degree to which interactions are comprehensible for ESL studentscan therefore be related not only to the interactional features themselves, and tothe immediate situational context in which they occur, but also to what haspreceded them — in this case the development of individual schematicknowledge which students gained through participation in the small groupwork, and which they then brought to the interaction.

The significance of the overall sequence of activities also lies in the challengeit presents to more traditional ways of sequencing teaching and learning activitiesin the second language classroom. Often the teaching of new language beginswith some preteaching of vocabulary or grammatically focused input by theteacher, and students are then given a series of increasingly less focused and lessteacher-directed activities in which to practise the language (for a description andcritique of this approach, see Willis, 1990). Underlying this approach is thesuggestion that learners must first ‘learn’ language before they can ‘use’ it. Asidefrom questions about the nature of language and language learning which thissets up, it is also clear that it is an approach which cannot be easily applied to theschool ESL context, where children must from the outset use their target languagein specific social contexts and for specific purposes. Account must be taken of thefact that children are doing more than learning new language items: they are alsousing it to construct new curriculum knowledge and to develop additional waysof thinking and talking about personal learning. The reversal of the morecommon ‘input-practice-use’ order meant that students used their currentlanguage resources at the beginning of the unit while the focus on new languageoccurred at later stages. In this process students and teacher ‘relate discourse tocontext, and build through time a joint frame of reference’ (Edwards & Mercer,1995). This sequencing allowed for students to build on their existing under-standings and language, and to link old learning with new; in effect to movesuccessfully towards target texts, rather than beginning with them.

This study also indicates the significance for language learning of theintertextual nature of classroom language: how one text is understood or


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produced in relation to another. A wide range of intertextual relationships existin all classrooms, between, for example, what a teacher says and what studentsare expected to read; what students listen to and what they are expected to write;the print displayed in the classroom and the writing that students are expectedto do; the discourse of the lesson and the texts students are expected to work withfor homework; and the familiar language or dialect of the home and the lessfamiliar language of the school. Thinking about how these links are madeintertextually — and recognising where linguistic ‘bridges’ are missing — mightoffer insights for the planning of school programmes for all learners, and help tosuggest the kind of linguistic support most relevant for students less familiar withthe language of the classroom.

A final point concerns the model of language drawn on in this study. Alanguage model which addresses the relationship between context and meaning,and which is concerned therefore with more than grammatical competence,provides a significant dimension to the planning of ESL programmes, and to thedesign of individual classroom activities. In the ESL context, the rationale for thedesign of tasks has often focused on the nature of the task itself, for example,whether it involves a one-way or two-way exchange of information (see, forexample, Long, 1989), or on the vocabulary or syntactic structures likely to beinvolved in a particular activity. But where a major focus is on the developmentof language for curriculum learning, other aspects of task design are significant;for example, whether the task is likely to lead to action or information exchanges,what opportunities there are for learner-initiated exchanges, or the degree ofcontext-embeddedness of the task. Addressing such issues requires a model oflanguage which is discourse and text-based.

Further classroom-based studies are needed into the language learningprocesses of school-aged ESL learners, to help point the way to more theoreticallyinformed and equitable curricula and pedagogy for minority language students.I believe this task requires researchers to take a more interdisciplinary approachto research in multilingual classrooms — one which draws on both the traditionof ethnographic classroom-based research, and of the SLA field, and which isunderpinned by a social view of learning and a model of language-in-context.

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Documents

Classroom Talk and the Learning of New Registers in a Second Language