Epl 300 Assignment

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tmih mmd UlhRichard CullenIn the era of communicative language teaching, analyses of teacher talktypically focus on the characteristics that make, or fail to make such talk'communicative'. In most cases, the criteria for communicativeness aretaken from what is felt to constitute communicative behaviour in the worldoutside the classroom. Thus, communicative classrooms are held to bethose in which features of genuine com mu nication are evident, and, byexclusion, classes where they are not present are considered to be un-communicative. In the case of teacher talk, similar criteria might be used toassess such aspects of classroom language use as the kind of questionsteachers ask their students, or the way they respo nd to student contribu-tions. In this article, I argue that this analysis of teacher talk is over-simplistic, and ultimately unhelpful to teachers since its attempt tocharacterize communicativeness only in terms of features of authenticcommunication which pertain outside the classroom ignores the reality ofthe classroom context and the features which make fo r effective commu-nication within that context.

Teacher talk: Until comparatively recently, teacher talk in the EFL classroom wasquantity and considered to be something of a danger area for language teachers, andquality trainee teachers were warned to use it sparingly. 'Good' teacher talkmeant 'little' teacher talk, since it was thought that too much teachertalking time (111) deprived students of opportunities to speak. Interestin teacher talk within the profession has since shifted away from aconcern with quantity towards a concern with quality: while the questionof how much teachers talk is still important, more emphasis is given tohow effectively they are able to facilitate learning and promotecommunicative interaction in their classroom through, for example,the kind of questions they ask, the speech modifications they make whentalking to learners, or the way they react to student errors (see, forexample, Nunan 1989).There are a number of good reasons for this shift in emphasis. Firstly,teacher talk is now generally recognized as a potentially valuable sourceof comprehensible input for the learner. Since this is essential forlanguage acquisition (Krashen 1981), getting teachers to reduce theamount of their talk would not necessarily be in the interests of thelearner. Secondly, so far all attempts by trainers to root out the 111phenomenon have failed. This is particularly true in parts of the worldwhere the teacher's role is traditionally one of transmitter of knowledgeand values, and where a preoccupation with reducing 111 would beunrealistic, as well as culturally inap prop riate. Thirdly, there is evidenceELT Journal Volume 52/3 July 1998 Oxford University Press 1998 179

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The notion ofcommunicativeteacher talk

from classroom research that aspects of teacher talk, such as the kind ofquestions teachers ask, can significantly affect the quantity and quality ofstudent interaction in the lesson (Brock 1986), and are also amenable tothe effects of training (Long and Sato 1983).Recent studies (e.g. Tho rnbury 1996) have tended to focus on the extentto which teacher talk supports a communicative environment in theclassroom, and specifically on how authentic it isjudged by how far itshares features of so-called authentic communication outside theclassroom. Thus Nunan (1987) attempted to evaluate whether classeswhich purported to be communicative really were so by determining theextent to which genuine communication was evident in them. Hesuggested that

genuine communication is characterized by uneven distribution ofinformation, the negotiation of meaning (through, for example,clarification requests and confirmation checks), topic nomination andnegotiation of more than one speaker, and the right of interlocutors todecide whether to contribute to an interaction or not . . . In genuinecommunication, decisions about who says what to whom are up forgrabs. (Nunan 1987: 137)

Using characteristics such as these as criteria of communicativeness,Nunan's conclusion from his own investigations into classroom practicewas that 'there is growing evidence that, in communicative classes,interactions m ay, in fact, not be very comm unicative a t a ll' (ibid.: 144). Asimilar conclusion is reached by Kumaravadivelu (1993: 12-13):

In theory, a communicative classroom seeks to promote interpreta-tion, expression and negotiation of meaning . . . [Learners] should beencouraged to ask for information, seek clarification, express anopinion, agree and/or disagree with peers and teachers . . . In reality,however, such a communicative classroom seems to be a rarity.Research studies show that even teachers who are committed tocommunicative language teaching can fail to create opportunities forgenuine interaction in their classrooms.In these arguments, the criteria for assessing the communicativeness ofclassroom discourse and, by extension, of teacher talk, are taken fromwhat is perceived to constitute communicative behaviour in the worldoutside the classroom. The fact that genuine communication appears tocomprise characteristics such as 'negotiation of meaning' and 'topicnomination by more than one speaker' becomes de facto a reason forincorporating them into classroom discourse, and for judging thecommunicativeness or otherwise of classrooms according to whetheror not these features are present. The argument I wish to develop in thisarticle is that attempts to define communicative talk in the classroommust be based primarily on what is or is not communicative in thecontext of the classroom itself, rather than on what may or may not becommunicative in other contexts; and that the application of criteria ofcommunicativeness solely on the basis of social behaviour which exists in

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Communication andcontext

certain contexts outside the classroom could result in an inappropriateand ultimately unattainable model for the majority of language teachersto follow, similar to the earlier preoccupation with teacher talking time.

One might, to start with, take issue with the description of authenticcommunication on which the argument is based. Would it be true to say,for example, that in genuine communication, decisions about who sayswhat to whom are 'up for grabs'? It might be generally true of informalgatherings of groups of friends, but certainly not of more formalgatherings, such as staff or board-room meetings. Communication atsuch events tends to follow a very different patte rn, determ ined by theirown rules and conventions, but that does not make it any less 'genuine'or au thentic. Similarly, the classroom, typically a large, formal gatheringwhich comes together for pedagogical rather than social reasons, willalso have its own rules and conventions of communication, understoodby all those present; these established patterns are likely to be verydifferent from the norms of turn-taking and communicative interactionwhich operate in small, informal, social gatherings outside. A ny analysisof the characteristics of the communicative classroom needs to takethese differences into account.This is not to deny the importance of analyses of the properties ofspoken discourse found in contexts outside the classroom (e.g. Hoey1992) in shedding light on what our wider teaching goals should be, andto that extent suggesting ways in which the discourse of the classroomcould be moderated , in order that these goals might be more successfullyachieved. But that is a rather different matter from suggesting thatclassrooms only need to replicate communicative behaviour outside theclassroom in order to become communicative.

features of If we pursue the case for replicating communicative behaviour outsideteacher talk the classroom, there are a number of characteristics of teacher talkwhich we might identify as being communicative (see Thornbu ry 1996).Some of these are:1 The use of 'referential' questions, where the teacher asks the classsomething (e.g. 'What did you do at the weekend?') to which he or shedoes not know the answer, and which therefore has a genuinecommunicative purpose. This is in contrast to typical 'display' questions(e.g. comprehension questions on a reading text) to which the teacheralready has the answer, and only asks so that the class can display theirunderstanding or knowledge. Insights from analyses of discourse insideand outside the classroom (e.g. Long and Sato 1983) have revealed verymarked differences between typical classroom talk and non-classroomtalk in this respect.2 Content feedback by the teacher, where the teacher's response tostudent contributions focuses on the content of what the studentsaysthe messagerather than on the form (e.g. the correctness of thegrammar or pronunciation).Teacher talk in the classroom 181



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3 The use of speech modifications, hesitations, and rephrasing in theteacher's own talk, e.g. when explaining, asking questions, givinginstructions, etc.4 Atte m pts to neg otiate m eaning w ith the students, e.g. throu ghrequests for clarification and repetition, and giving opportunities forthe students to interrupt the teacher and do the same.I shall refer to the features listed above as List A. Conversely, there area number of features of teacher talk which would be regarded as non-com mun icative, in that they do not re presen t the way langu age is used inmany situations outside the classroom, and which I shall refer to as ListB. Examples of these features are:1 Exclusive or excessive use of display questions.2 Form-focused feedback, i.e. feedback by the teacher which only showsinterest in the correct formation of the students ' contributions (ratherthan the content) .3 'Echoing' of students ' responses, when the teacher repeats what astude nt ha s just said for th e benefit of the whole class (som ething whichrarely happens in social intercourse).4 Sequence s of predictab le I R F (init iat ion-response-feedback ) dis-course chains (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975) in which the teacherinit iates the chain (typically by asking a question), a student responds,and the teacher then gives feedback to the student (e.g. 'good') beforeinit iat ing another chain with another question. The structure of spokendiscourse outside the classroom is usually more complex and flexiblethan this (Hoey 1992).

The classroom The problem with this analysis is that defining communicative teachercontext talk purely in terms of the norms of communication outside theclassroom ignores the context of the classroom itself, and what iscommunicative within that context. It thus presents us with a one-dimensional view of classroom talk, ignoring the fact that ' theclassroom is a unique social environment with i ts own human activit iesand i t s own conve nt ions governing these act iv i t ies ' (Bree n and Cand l in1980: 98).In what way does this uniqueness affect the discourse of the classroom,and teacher talk in particular? If we look at some of the characteristics ofteacher talk in List B above, it is not difficult to see how they may, infact , perform important communicative functions in the classroomcontext . Take the phenomenon of echoing s tudents responses . Theteacher may have perfectly valid communicative reasons for doing this,such as making sure that every one in the class has heard what S tudent Ahas just said, so that a discussion can continue with everybody followingit. In a large class, echoing by the teach er m ay be the quickest an d mosteffective way of doing this. Equ ally im por tant is the conve ntion in manyclasses throughout the world that the teacher's repeti t ion of a student 'sresponse acts as a signal confirming that the response is correct. Thestudents understand this convention, and the teacher's fai lure to observe

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it may well result in puzzlement, insecurity, and hence a malfunction inclassroom communication.In the same way, few (with some notable exceptions) would deny thatproviding feedback on form has a place in language teaching. If this is thecase, there must be ways of providing it which are more or less effective,and more or less communicative, in the sense of communicating clearlyand successfully to the students concerned. Rather than regard suchdiscourse as essentially uncomm unicative, it would seem more productiveand more realistic in terms of our expectations of teacherstoconsider how to provide feedback in a way which is as communicative aspossible in the context of the classroom and which assists in theattainment of the pedagogical purposes for which the students are there.

Teacher talk in The following fragment of a secondary school English lesson in Egypt,action transcribed from a video recording of the lesson, illustrates the point tha twhat appears to be non-communicative teacher talk is not necessarily soin the classroom context. The context is a third-year class in a mixedpreparatory (lower secondary) school in Cairo. There are about 35students in the classroom, seated at individual desks, facing the teacherat the front of the class. The teacher is preparing the students for areading passage in their textbooks about the Egyptian writer TahaaHussein. The classroom interaction recorded here is heavily teacher-led,and thus very typical of the classroom discourse of large classesthroughout the world:

T: All right. Who can give me . . . er . . . a name of a great writer inthe English-speaking world? In the English-speaking world? Thename of a great writer. Right.SI : Charles Dickens.T: Charles Dickens. OK. What novel are we studying from CharlesDickens this year?S2: [indistinct reply]S3: A Tale of Two Cities.T: A Tale of Two C ities. All right. We say that Dickens is a writer.Who can give me another name for the word 'writer'a morespecialized term for the word 'writer'?S4: Shakespeare, [indistinct reply]T: Er . . . Um . . . Th at's not what I want. Shakespeare also is a greatwriter, but I want . . . Yes?S4: Novelist?T: A novelist. Tha t's what I want, Mazin. So I want the word'novelist'. So we have the word 'novel', [writes on blackboard] Wesay that A Tale of Two Cities is a . . . ?Ss: Novel.

T: A novel. And the writer of A Tale of Two Cities is a . . . ?Ss: Novelist.T: A novelist, [writes on blackboard] Is a novelist. OK. He saidwasit you, Mazin, who said 'Shakespeare'? Is Shakespeare also anovelist? Is Shakespeare a novelist?Teacher talk in the classroom 18 3


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Ss: Yes.T: Er no. I don 't agree with you. Shakespeare used to write plays. H eused to write . . . ?Ss: Plays.T: Can you remember some of his plays?S5: Hamlet.T: Hamlet.S6: As You Like It.T: As You Like It. Fine.S7: The Tempest.T: The Tempest, fine. We say Shakespeare was a 'play . . . wright'.[writes on BB] A playwright. R emem ber this is not 'write', W-R-I-T-E. This is playwright, W-R-I-G-H-T. A playwright. He was awriter of plays. Now about our great writer Tahaa Hussein, TahaaHussein. Who can give me one word to describe Tahaa Hussein?As m any words as you can. Everybody knew him or nobody knewhim or few people knew him? Who can give me a word to describehim?S8: Blindness.T: Er . . . blindness. Er . . . do we say Tahaa Hussein was blindness orTahaa Hussein was . . . ?S9: Blind.T: Blind. OK. Tahaa Hussein was blind. I'm looking for a word todescribe his fame. A word to describe his fame. So we say that hewas a . . . ?Ss: Popular.T: Popu lar. He was . . . ?Ss: Popular.T: Tahaa Hussein was popular. Popular. All right, can you give methe name of a popular actor in Egypt? Popular actor in Egypt.Popular actor.If we use the descriptors of communicative and uncommunicativeteacher talk outlined in the foregoing discussion, this would probably beclassified as an essentially uncommunicative fragment of classroomdiscourse. There would appear to be few, if any, List A characteristicsand plenty of List B ones. The teacher's questions are all displayquestions, since their purpose is to find out what the students knowabout the writers he introduces, thus enabling them to display theirknowledge. Feedback from the teacher to the students' responses iseither an acknowledgement that the answer is acceptable (e.g. byechoing, or by a comment such as 'fine') or an indication that it needscorrecting ('Er . . . blindness. E r . . . do we say Tahaa Hussein wasblindness . . . ?'). The extract also contains a good deal of echoing, andthe structure of the discourse follows a very distinctive IRF pattern.In the context, of the classroom, however, one could argue that manycommunicative aspects of the discourse are illustrated here. The teacheris following a carefully structured sequence of questions leading to clearpedagogical goalsthe teaching of the vocabulary items 'novelist' and

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Categorizingteacher talk: away forward

'popular'. He tries to find out what the students know before tellingthem himself, and in the process responds on the spot to an unexpectedstudent response ('Shakespeare'), and makes a small teaching episodeout of it. The feedback he gives the students is clear and unambiguous,and it is equally clear from the video recording of the lesson that he hastheir undivided attention. One could argue, too, that his use of echoinghelps to ensure that this attention is not lost as he moves the classtowards the vocabulary items he wishes to focus on. The teaching, inshort, is effective, and the teacher's talkhis use of questions and hisfeedback movesis supportive of learning.Within the context of the classroom therefore, and the norms ofcomm unication that operate th ere , it is surely meaningless and unhelpfulto classify this, and other similar examples of pedagogically effectiveclassroom discourse, as uncommunicative, simply because they fail toexhibit features of communication which are found in contexts outsidethe classroom. Communicative language teaching means communicativeteaching as well as communicative use of language, and defining thenotion of 'communicative' in relation to teacher talk must therefore takeaccount of the teacher's dual role as instructor as well as interlocutor.I do not wish to imply from this that there is no place in the classroomfor the kind of features of genuine communication described in List A,or that teachers will not benefit from an awareness of different ways ofoperating in the classroom involving, for example, the increased use ofreferential questions, and responding to the content as well as the formof what students say in class. The inclusion of such features might wellenhance this particular teacher's effectiveness by stimulating moreproductive and varied use of English by his students. To that extent, thestudy of discourses outside the classroom can serve to enrich theinteraction and the pedagogical effectiveness of what goes on inside theclassroom. But we should not conclude from this that the absence offeatures of communication characteristic of discourses in the worldoutside the classroom automatically renders classroom discoursewrtcommunicative, since to do so is to ignore the peculiar nature andpurpose of the classroom encounter.With regard to defining the notion of 'communicative teacher talk', Iwould suggest that rather than comparing the way teachers talk in theclassroom with the way people talk outside it, a more productiveapproach would be to identify categories of teachers' verbal behaviourin the classroom, and attempt to determine what it means to becommunicative in each one, and what might constitute a communicativebalance of behaviours for different teaching and learning purposes. Thefollowing six categories are adapted from a list of categories ofclassroom verbal behaviour in Bowers (1980), cited in Malamah-Thomas(1987), identified through a process of classroom observation andanalysis of lesson transcripts:

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questioning/elicitingresponding to students' contributionspresenting/explainingorganizing/giving instructionsevaluating/correcting'sociating'/establishing and maintaining classroom rapport.In order to determine how communicative a teacher's use of a particularcategory, such as questioning, is in a particular lesson, one would takeinto account not only the extent to which particular questions engagedthe students in meaningful, communicative use of language, but also thepedagogical purpose of the questions asked, and the teacher's success incommunicating this purpose clearly to the learners. In the same way, ateacher's classroom instructions might be assessed as being m ore or lesscommunicative according to how clearly they were understood andfollowed, whether they were sufficient or even superfluous, and whetherthe teacher allowed opportunities for the students to seek clarificationand to 'negotiate meaning'.There .are three important advantages, as I see it, in this approach todescribing and evaluating teacher talk. Firstly, the categories of verbalbehaviour are rooted firmly in the reality of the classroom and on whattypically goes on there. Secondly, the criteria for assessing commu-nicative use of classroom language in each of these categories arelikewise based on what it takes to be communicative in the context ofthe classroom itself, rather than in some outside context. The model ofcommunicative teacher talk emerging from such an approach shouldthus reflect the primary function of teacher talk, which is to support andenhance learning. Providing a model of the way language is used forcommunication in the real world may be an important part of thatfunction, but it is not the only way in which teacher talk supportslanguage learning: it is a means to an end rather than an end in itself.Thirdly, a model of communicative language teaching which recognizesthe importance of the pedagogical function of teacher talk within theclassroom context, and what it means to be communicative within thatcontext, is likely to be a more realistic and attainable model for teachersto aspire to than one which insists on the replication of features ofgenuine communication as the only measure of genuine communicativeteaching.Received July 1997

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ReferencesBreen, M. and C. Candlin. 1980. 'Th e essentials ofa communicative curriculum in language teach-ing'. Applied Linguistics 1/2: 89-112.Brock, C. 1986. 'The effects of referential ques-tions in ESL classroom discourse'. TESOLQuarterly 20/1: 47-59.Bowers, R. 1980. 'Verbal behaviour in thelanguage teaching classroom'. UnpublishedPhD thesis, Reading University.Hoey, M. 1992. 'Some properties of spokendiscourse' in R. Bowers and C. Brumfit (eds.).Applied Linguistics and English LanguageTeaching: Review of ELT 2/1. London: Macmil-lan.Krashen, S. 1981. Second Language Acquisitionand Second Language Learning. Oxford: Perga-mon.

Kumaravadivelu, B. 1993. 'Maximizing learningpotential in the comm unicative classroom'. ELTJournal 47/1: 12-21.Long, M. and C. Sato. 1983. 'Classroom foreignertalk discourse: forms and functions of teachers'questions' in H. Seliger and M. Long (eds.).Classroom-oriented Research in Second Lan-guage Acquisition. Rowley, Mass: NewburyHouse.

Malamah-Thomas, A. 1987. Classroom Interac-tion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Nunan, D. 1987. 'Communicative language teach-ing: making it work '. ELT Journal 41/2: 136-45.Nunan, D. 1989. Understanding Language Class-rooms. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall.Sinclair, J. an d R. Coulthard. 1975. Towards anAnalysis of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press.Thornbury, S. 1996. 'Teachers research teachertalk'. ELT Journal 50/4: 279-89.

The authorRichard Cullen is a Senior Lecturer in theDepartment of Language Studies at CanterburyChrist Church College. He has worked for theBritish Council as an English Language TeachingOfficer in teacher education on developmentprojects in Egypt, Bangladesh, and Tanzania. Hehas also taught and trained teachers in Nepal andGreece. His professional interests include teacherand trainer-training, classroom discourse, phonol-ogy, and the teaching and learning of grammar.E-mail:

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Epl 300 Assignment