SOME PROPERTIES OF FORMAL TEACHER AND PUPIL CLASSROOM COMMUNICATION*

BRYCE B. HUDGINS AND WILLIAM P. AHLBRAND, JH.

Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville

Educational researchers probably know as much about classroom communi- cation as they do about any other classroom phenomenon. It has repeatedly been shown that teachers in secondary schools tend to do two-thirds or more of the speaking in classes (Bellack et al., 1963; Corey, 1940; Flanders, 1960; Stevens, 1912). The several research monographs cited here were published over a span of 50 years, covering virtually the entire educational research epoch. These particular decades, encompassing the most active years of the progressive era in education, were characterized by many educational innovations. Yet, as far as it is possible to judge from independent investigations conducted at isolated periods over that 50 years, the pattern of teacher and pupil speech remains essentially unchanged, at least by innovations in teaching, classroom organization, and methods of teacher education as we have known them over the last half-century.

This paper presents the results of an inquiry into the properties of formal communication in several junior high school classes. By formal communication is meant public oral contacts of teachers and pupils with each other. It excludes all nonverbal behavior of both parties, as well as those verbal contacts that are es- sentially audible only to the teacher and an individual pupil. The term includes all statements by any person in the classroom that would ordinarily be audible to all those present. The properties that we chose to investigate include the time spent speaking by teacher and by pupils, the length of pupil classroom speeches, the range of individual differences in frequency and length of speech, the distribution of voluntary and non-voluntary pupil speeches and their distribution among three categories: management, substantive, and prohibitory. The management category includes references by pupils to the operations and procedures of the classroom, the substantive category deals with pupil statements about the content of the lesson, and the prohibitory category deals with matters of discipline and pupil behavior regulation.

Jackson and Lahaderne (1967) reported that contacts between sixth grade teachers and their pupils are unequally distributed. They explain that the children who interact least frequently with the teacher have interaction rates similar to one another, probably reflecting the necessity for some minimal frequency of interaction between the teacher and every child, but that the highest interaction rates are disparate, perhaps indicating that they are a function of some set of individual differences among pupils. The present authors have attempted to describe with some precision the nature of the individual differences among teachers and pupils, and some of the similarities among them, in formal classroom communi- cation.

Sample and Data Taking Procedures Nine intact English classes, three at each of the seventh, eighth, and ninth

grades, within a single suburban junior high school constituted the sample. Each class, approximately 50 minutes long, was audio tape recorded for five days. The

*Tabular summaries of the data discussed in this article can be obtained from the authors.

266 BRYCE B. HUDGJNS AND WILLIAM P. AHLBRAND, JR.

original intention was to tape record each class on five consecutive days, from Monday through Friday. Because of scheduling problems, several of the classes had to be visited two or three weeks before it was possible to complete the recording of five class sessions. The teachers were asked to follow their normal class schedules and to conduct class much as they would on any school day.

An observer in the classroom noted the name of each pupil who spoke so that it would later be possible reliably to assign speeches t o individual pupils. He also noted whether the pupil entered the classroom discussion voluntarily or at the request of the teacher.

Analyses drew upon the audio tapes of the lessons or upon typescripts as sources. The audio tapes were used to measure the time of teacher speech and pupil speech. Those analyses were made in the following manner: The tape of a lesson was begun, and the time was noted. The individual making the analyses held a stop watch in each hand, one representing teacher speech, the other pupil speech. The appropriate stopwatch was allowed to run, depending upon who was speaking at any particular moment. At the end of the tape, the time was noted again, and thus three scores were available: the total class time, the teacher-speech time, and the pupil-speech time.

Typescripts were scored to provide information about the voluntary-non- voluntary nature of the pupil communication and to obtain data about individual differences among pupils with respect to the frequency of their communications. Those communications were also coded as management, substantive, or prohibitory. The lengths in words of pupil speeches were also obtained from the typescripts.

Properties of Classroom Communication Speaking. These nine junior high school classes clearly are verbal kingdoms.

Speech is the coin of the realm. How plentiful that coin is depends partly upon how one defines “speech.” Pupils in English classes spend a sizable fraction of class time reading aloud. Technically this is speaking, but i t has been decided to exclude the time spent in that way from the measures of speaking, since its inclusion would tend to inflate the total speaking time and to overestimate the actual con- tributions, in time, made by pupils to the general discussion of classes.

Slightly more than half (52%) of the total time available to these nine English classes for five days was devoted to formal communication. One may well ask how t,hose verbal riches are distributed among the members of the nine classes. Not surprisingly, the teacher is the dominant communicator in every case. On the average for this sample of classes, the teachers account for 83.4% of all speaking done in the classes. Put differently, the teacher is speaking on the average of 43.7% of the time that the classes are in session.

Number and length of pupi l speeches. The chief properties of pupil formal communication in the classroom are brevity and inequality of distribution.

If one had to characterize the utterances of the pupils in these junior high school English classes, the description would be of the following order. The typical student seems to participate in a public way on the average about two times each class period. Each utterance is approximately eight-and-a-half words in length. (Corey in 1939 and 1940 reported that the average pupil response to a teacher

SOME PROPERTIES OF FORMAL TEACHER A N D PUPIL CLASSROOM COMMUNICATION 267

question is 11 words in length. Although we have not segregated pupil speeches in terms of such response, our figure of 8.5 and Corey’s of 11 seem to be of the same general magnitude.)

Of the two brief speeches this hypothetical student makes each day, one will tend to be a t his own behest, the other a t the request of the teacher. The chances are quite good that his speech will deal with the subject matter of the lesson. Per- haps one time in ten i t will be directed a t an issue of classroom management, such as the nature of a procedure or assignment. Only rarely will the student speak out, on the classroom floor about prohibitory or disciplinary matters. Our data suggest that this occurs in less than one speech in a hundred, and our guess is that many individuals never make such speeches.

Individual Differences in Formal Communication Among teachers. It is possible to estimate how the teachers differ in the extent

to which they encourage or permit pupil verbal participation in the classroom by computing separately for each teacher the product of the mean length of each student communication and the mean number of communications per student. These products represent the mean number of words spoken during the five observation days by each member of the class. The eight products range from a low in one class of 45.50 to a high of 156.11 in another class. However, when these values are ordered by grade level, there is a distinct difference in the average amount that each pupil speaks. The mean value for grade seven is 141.96, for grade eight it is 69.33, and in the ninth grade classes the figure is 46.95. These values are clearly significantly different overall (F = 18.2, df = 2.5, p < .Ol). The seventh grade teachers allow more pupil participation on the average than either the eighth or ninth grade teachers ( p < .01 for both comparisons). Despite the sizable mean difference, the values for the eighth and ninth grades are not significantly different from each other.

It concerns the tactics employed by the teachers to involve pupils in classroom discussion. The teachers differ to an extent in distributing pupil interactions between voluntary and nonvoluntary involvement. Two teachers heavily control access to communi- cation. Two others obviously play this particular game quite differently. About two-thirds to three-quarters of the communicating done by pupils in their class- rooms occurs a t the request of the pupils rather than the teacher.

The teachers also differ with respect to how individual pupils become direct participants in classroom interaction. In half the classes studied correlations between voluntary and nonvoluntary pupil participation are statistically significant, and in the other half they are not. Put simply, a pupil in any of the seventh grade classes or in one of the ninth grades expects the teacher to call for his participation more often if he is voluntarily a high rate interactor, and less often if he is not. The pupil’s tendency to volunteer his remarks increases as the teacher involves him i n a “nonvoluntary mode.” These teachers appear to support the natural proclivities of pupils to interact frequently or infrequently. In the other classes, one’s chances of being singled out by the teacher seem to be no different than anyone else’s i n relation to this variable. Again, however, the relatioilships found here are suggestive arid intriguing rather than definitive.

A further difference among the teachers should be discussed.

268 BRYCE B. HUDGINS AND WILLIAM P. AHLBRAND, JH..

Individual diferences among pupils. A striking way to illustrate the differences among pupils in formal communications is to estimate the range of words spoken by individuals. If we use the mean of 8.49 words as the length of every pupil speech, we find differences between high and low speakers ranging from a low for five class sessions in one class of 34 words spoken by the least voluble class member to 170 for the most talkative, or of 26 to 73 in another class, to a maximum difference in one class of zero to 382.

If the data of our sample were representative of each of the 40 weeks of the school year, the impression is greatly intensified that pupils grouped together for instruction experience very different classroom environments. To what features of classroom learning and adjustment to school these differences relate is an important and largely unexplored research question. At some point in the continuing studies of classroom life, it seems imperative that investigators begin to relate concern with the traditional individual psychological variables of learning, incentives, and others, to knowledge that is emerging about the quality of life as teachers and children pursue it daily in their natural habitat of the classroom. In that way, we may hope one day to have a more complete understanding of the variables that influence learning in classroom settings and to be in a position to make effective recommendations for facilitating it.

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Corny, S. M. Teacher's questioning and activity. In AERA, Research on the foundations of Amer- can education. Official Revort. 1939. 43-46.

I - - , COREY, S. M. Some implications of verbatim records of high school classroom talk. In h EA Pro-

ceedings, 1940, 371-372. FLANDERS, N. A. Teacher influence, pupil attitudes and achievement. U. S. Department of Health,

Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, dooperative Research Project No. 397. Minnea- DO&: Universitv of Minnesota. 1960.

JACKSON, P. W., & LAHADERNE, H. M. Inequalities of teacher-pupil contacts. Psychology in the Schools, 1967, 3, 204-211.

STEVENS, R. The question as a measure of efficiency in instruction: A critical study of classroom practice. Teachers College Contribution to Education, 1912, No. 48.