Investigating Classroom Talk

A. Edwards, D. P. G. Westgate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135720247
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this fully revised and extended edition, Tony Edwards and David Westgate continue to examine methods of investigation for use in classrooms and ways in which researchers and teachers may advance their knowledge of classroom talk. They have taken the opportunity to add material on oracy and the importance of spoken language in the curriculum.; All research evidence and bibliographic material has been revised and updated. This book should continue to be an important text for a new generation of students and researchers in language and linguistics, social science and education studies.

1

A Rationale for Researching Classroom Talk

All normal human beings are expert in the practical interpretation of talk. Most of our everyday life depends on skills in talking and making sense of the talk of others, as we work or trade or simply pass the time of day.

These skills go far beyond the uttering of sounds related by the conventions of our language to objects, actions or ideas. In our speech we select and organize our utterances according to our sense of what is correct and appropriate in a particular setting. This is partly a matter of grammar, partly of social etiquette, partly of culture, and essentially of assuming that others will be perceiving the same situation as we do. Our largely tacit knowledge of ourselves, of others, and of the conventions which shape interpersonal behaviour, enables us to take part in all kinds of social interaction. In interpreting the talk of others, we routinely make allowance for apparent disparities between what we take them to mean and the actual words they use. We also create coherent conversation out of the seemingly unconnectable—

Speaker A	‘Do you know what time it is?’
Speaker B	‘The train was late.’
Speaker A	‘That’s a tall one.’

Readers will have little difficulty in imagining possible contexts for this exchange, a fact which both illustrates the point already made and then extends it by demonstrating our capacity to make hypothetical analyses even of second- hand data. As participants in interaction, we can be generally confident in our interpretations because we can use our ability to attend to fine details of intonation, stress, pitch and tone of voice, pausing and hesitation, gesture, movement, facial expression and other features of body language. We can integrate clues from each source of evidence, and act or react instantly on the basis of our judgment. In our turn, we deploy such signals in ways which are normally consistent with our personalities but are also adapted to our shifting perceptions of those with whom we interact in the circumstances in which we do so. In the act of making statements about the world, or asking or answering questions, we also and simultaneously locate ourselves socially, indicate how we perceive others, and announce, confirm or challenge how the situation is to be defined. As observers of the talk of others, we draw on this everyday knowledge in treating the words as evidence of the meanings, purposes and consequences for those involved.

At a deeper level, this knowledge reflects processes which underlie all social interaction. Cicourel (1973), for example, lists among the basic ‘interpretive procedures’ which make orderly communication possible an assumed ‘reciprocity of perspectives’, mutual willingness to ‘fill in’ meanings which are meant but not stated, and a recognition that what is said now may not become clear until later in the interaction or may have to be reinterpreted in the light of past words and action. From a very different disciplinary perspective, Grice (1975) suggests a similar basis for orderly talk which he calls a ‘co-operative principle’. This consists of a readiness to assume that our interlocutors’ utterances mean something, and that it is our job to discern what that something may be. We therefore scan both talk and context for relevant evidence. As soon as it is appropriate, we may test our judgment, not (usually) by asking directly ‘Do you mean X?’, but rather by backing our hunch and basing subsequent contributions on it. The hunch can then be revised if things go wrong. Continuous interpretation, and frequent re-interpretation, are among the intricacies which confer upon talk both its fascination and its intricacy as an object of study.

Although we have begun with conversation, it has been the more evidently purposeful, ‘transactional’ uses of talk which have received most analytical attention, especially from linguistics, psycholinguistics, and philosophy of language. Sociolinguistics and sociology, however, have been more concerned with the ‘interactional’ functions of language—its uses to establish and maintain social relationships. From this perspective, talk can often be seen as an end in itself, from its more trivial to its most ‘artful’ forms. It includes so-called ‘phatic’ talk through which the participants tell each other little or nothing they did not know already (‘Raining again, I see’), but where the mere exchange of words conveys at least a token friendliness and sense of solidarity. It also includes all kinds of deliberate word-play, such as the playground rhyming recording by the Opies (1959, p. 18) —‘I’m a knock-kneed chicken, I’m a bow-legged sparrow, Missed my bus so I went by barrow’—or the ritualized exchanges of insults reported by Labov (1972a, p. 342)—‘At least my mother ain’t no railroad track laid all over the country’. Here propositional content is, mercifully, not the point. What counts is style, quickness in repartee, finding old words to fit the context or skilfully creating new content within quite rigidly prescribed forms.

We have begun as though talk was either transactional or interactional. In fact, utterances characteristically convey social and cultural as well as propositional meanings. Some conversations are almost entirely interactional, ways of passing the time of day, while business-talk in public places is almost entirely transactional. In general, however, talk is social action, and represents the fundamentally human way of getting things done. We persuade others to provide us with goods or services, or ask them to tell us what we do not know. We sharpen our own understanding by telling or attempting to explain to others. As we hear ourselves say what we think, or what we think that we think, we can monitor this objectification of our thoughts, judging its accuracy or adequacy and modifying it where necessary. Without plentiful experience of ‘talking things through’, we would be denied access to that ‘inner speech’ (Vygotsky, 1962) through which we organize our thinking.

All of us have the temerity at times to instruct others. Some of us are paid to do so, to transmit systematically some selected parts of what we believe we know. The institutionalizing of this process in schools has invested with special status certain kinds of knowing and certain ways of displaying knowledge. The complex relationships between knowing and displaying provide an underlying theme of this book, because pupils and students have to develop the language skills necessary to meet the transactional and interactional demands characteristic of classrooms. Some of these skills have already been learned in the home and are easily transferred to a new setting, some have to be newly acquired, and much of what has been learned already about communication has to be set aside as unnecessary or inappropriate to learning as it is formally organized. Certainly learning to ‘become pupils’ (Willes, 1983) is very much a matter of mastering an interactional code, the rules of which are regularly acted on by teachers and pupils but rarely explained.

1
The Educational Status of Classroom Talk

We need to begin by examining the nature of the language experience in the dialogue between teacher and class… By its very nature a lesson is a verbal encounter through which the teacher draws information from the class, elaborates and generalizes it, and produces a synthesis. His skill is in selecting, prompting, improving, and generally orchestrating the exchange (Bullock Report ‘A Language for Life’, 1975, p. 141).

Learning from words is, of course, only one form of instruction. There are many societies in which children learn mainly by observing and imitating their elders. Such learning from experience is then practised without adult criticism or evaluation, and its results are displayed publicly only when the learner feels a sufficient sense of mastery to do so (Phillips, 1983; Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz 1982). Formal schooling, however, normally means lessons, and most lessons are ‘Verbal encounters’ orchestrated by the teacher.

It is only relatively recently, however, that the quality of those encounters has received close attention. Although talk has long been the principal medium of instruction in the schools, the aim of fostering pupils’ powers of verbal expression and the valuing of their talk for its contribution to learning have emerged much more slowly. Traditional education put its stress on written language; it is the skills of literacy, not oracy, which figure among the ‘3 Rs’. The transmission of information was achieved mainly through the teacher’s ‘talk and chalk’, and the pupils’ note-taking and written exercises. Their talk was largely confined to chanting in chorus, or reciting what had been learned by rote, and answering questions that tested memory and attentiveness. And it was talk from which the ‘language of the playground’, and in many circumstances the language of the home too, was expected to have been properly filtered out.

Over the last twenty-five years or so, however, the status of classroom talk has changed markedly. It has been accorded a central place in the processes of learning. What linguists term ‘the primacy of speech’ has been translated by educators into a new respect for talk that has received strong academic support in psychology, child development, sociolinguistics and sociology. An extensive literature on language in education’ has emerged, much of it focused on problems associated with linguistic ‘disadvantage’ but much of it looking critically too at how language is organized and used in classrooms. Official reports have urged teachers to scrutinize language ‘across the curriculum’, and to plan deliberately to extend the range of opportunities available to pupils when listening and speaking no less than when reading and writing. George Sampson’s statement of 1934 that ‘every teacher is a teacher of English’ has acquired, in the UK and the USA, resonances he could scarcely have predicted.

While changes in pedagogic practice have not kept pace with the prescriptions, the ideas themselves have achieved a large measure of penetration into both the initial and in-service training of teachers (for example, Farrer and Richmond, 1981), and have found official sanction at a high level—most notably in the Bullock Report of 1975 and then in the National Oracy Project and the National Curriculum. Although no studies of classroom language were commissioned by the Bullock Committee itself, its Report has particular interest because its terms of reference were set at a time of increasingly fierce debate about ‘standards’ and the supposed threat to them from over—‘progressive’ methods of teaching. On the one hand, the Report can be seen as a significant early contribution to a shift towards more central control over the curriculum (Ball, 1985). For the teaching of English especially, it is in this light a ‘publicly- conducted procedure of boundary definition’, in which some innovations were commended while others were censured as ‘excessive’. On the other hand, those innovations which the Report did sponsor can be seen as remarkably radical in their underlying insistence on extending the range of uses to which language is put in classrooms so as to provide richer opportunities for children to ‘learn by talking and writing’ ( ibid. 1975, 4.10). What is more, the injunction to take seriously the learner’s language (particularly talk) was intended to apply to all areas of the curriculum, and therefore to require ‘whole-school policies’ in the development of which teachers’ consciousness of classroom language would be raised with far-reaching pedagogic consequences. Thus what had been one of several competing models of English teaching —dubbed by Ball (1985) the ‘English as language paradigm’—not only received strong backing in itself, but was identified as a relevant model for other subjects.

The first main sources of this view of language as being central to the processes of school learning were psychological and psycho-linguistic. Of particular influence were Kelly, Bruner and Vygotsky, all of whose ideas found eloquent interpretation in the UK through James Britton (1970), himself an important contributor to the Bullock Report. Similar views underlay the early seminal studies of classroom talk by Douglas Barnes (Barnes, Britton and Rosen, 1969; Barnes, 1976). Indeed, something very like Barnes’ model of ‘exploratory’ pupil talk appears in several subsequent Reports. For example, pupils need more opportunities than were observable in most primary classrooms to ‘find their own solutions to the problems posed’, to follow a sustained argument and discuss it afterwards, and to ask questions as well as answer them (HMI, 1978, pp. 27, 46–7). The ‘best work’ seen in English lessons, as elsewhere in the secondary curriculum, was marked by ‘a teaching style which allowed for the free expression of ideas, refined by frequent and sustained discussion and a good deal of individual contact between teacher and pupils’ (HMI, 1979, pp. 74–5). Even very young pupils should engage more often than they seemed to do in most classrooms in ‘the kind of talking and listening which is engendered by shared experiences’ (DES, 1982, 2.34). Much older pupils often suffered from a sharp decline in orally-based lessons at the very time when they needed to achieve ‘a near-adult level of articulation’; teachers should therefore take care to act more often as consultants and less often as mere transmitters of information, should recognize discussion as a proper form of ‘real work’, and should encourage pupils to generate their own questions and to explore alternative answers (ILEA, 1984, p. 70).

While outlining in the Introduction how ‘constructivist’ theory has provided a coherent justification for these views, we disclaimed any intention of being prescriptive ourselves. Our concern is with methods of investigating the quality of classroom talk so as to understand more clearly how language is used and organized in various modes of teaching and learning. From this perspective, it has to be admitted that prescriptions, and even diagnoses of what is wrong, have tended to run far ahead of the evidence. We review in later chapters the rapid growth of classroom-based educational research since the late 1960s, and we want here to make only two preliminary comments.

Those early studies which reported scenes from classroom life certainly had a more attractive flavour of ‘reality’ about them than could be found in the numbers, tables and matrices produced by researchers working in the Systematic tradition (compare, for example Flanders, 1970 and Jackson, 1968). But language received attention only as a more-or-less transparent medium through which to observe and record social interaction. Where language was explicitly the focus of investigation was in the difficult and politically-explosive debate about ‘linguistic disadvantage’ and its educational consequences. But here the disadvantages from which lower-class or ethnic-minority children were said to suffer in coping with classroom demands were identified with almost no empirical reference to what those demands typically were. Deficiencies or differences identified in their language, or in their experience of using language, were then ‘matched’ against the very demanding forms and uses of language which it was assumed must face them in school. But almost all the direct evidence relevant to revealing contrasts and continuities came from the language of the home (A. Edwards, 1976, pp. 145–7). While careful investigation of school demands certainly began in the early 1970s (for example, Cazden, 1972; Cazden et al, 1972), Stubbs still ended a cogent review of the ‘deficit’ debate by listing eight broad areas of classroom language in which evidence was almost entirely lacking. He prefaced that list by claiming, justifiably, that—‘We still know very little about what actually happens in classrooms between teachers and pupils, and have little basic information about teacher-pupil dialogue in different teaching situations’ (Stubbs, 1976, p. 114; original emphasis).

That sentence remains unmodified in the second edition of his book (1983), which seems unfair in the light of the very considerable advances in knowledge and understanding made in the intervening years—advances for which Stubbs himself can take some credit, partly for having pointed the way and partly for his own contributions to developing one of the relevant methods, that of discourse analysis. While there is truth in his observation that research has concentrated too much on formal instruction in conventional contexts, there has been other work too which has advanced both our knowledge of school processes and the power of available research instruments. Most methods of investigating classroom talk which we review have been developed or applied since the early 1970s, so that direct evidence of its forms and functions is no longer as impoverished. Significantly, in their own revised version of persistent problems and gaps in classroom research, Delamont and Hamilton (1984) base their updated cautionary advice on the knowledge that research in real settings has burgeoned so that many of their earlier suggestions of what was needed have now become a kind of orthodoxy (Hamilton and Delamont, 1974). Similarly, Wolcott (1982) worries that the fashion for ethnographic investigation of classrooms in the United States may lead to the approach being ‘usurped for the purposes of quick and dirty program evaluation’, instead of the careful and detailed ‘contextual description’ which ethnographers should feel obliged to undertake.

2
The Status of Talk As Evidence

At this point in our account, it may still be unclear why talk, rather than some other indexical features of classroom life, is held to be so rich a source of data. It is because ‘the process of learning how to negotiate communicatively is the very process by which one enters the culture’ (Bruner, 1984). It is largely through talk that we develop our concepts of self, as members of various social ‘worlds’ which can be brought into focus and in which we can locate ourselves and recognize the values, rights and obligations which permeate them. As we listen and as we talk, we learn what it is necessary to know, do and say in that area of social life or that setting, and can display the competence necessary to be accepted as a member.

It is for these reasons that talk is so important as a source of data. Since so much is constituted in and through it, its close inspection should reveal the very constituting processes themselves. In classrooms, that means making ‘Visible’ the curriculum in both its ‘manifest’ and its ‘hidden’ forms. It should bring into view the declared agenda of lessons, together with those other meanings to be drawn from them about what it is like to enter given areas of human thought, how the apparent experts behave and use their knowledge, how it feels to be inducted into parts of ‘their’ knowledge, how pupils define and display their sense of their own capacities and personal worth in their struggle to assimilate school knowledge, or to reject it. While all that may be open to scrutiny through analysis of talk, there is much more to see; for participation in classroom events also depends on habits and expectations derived from wider, non-school contexts which are still actively relevant within the classroom.

Reviewing this book, Tony Burgess (1988) commented that our rationale ‘tends to slide between “talk” and “language” as the mediating force in people’s lives’, and that our emphasis on oracy had led us to neglect literacy. Certainly ‘presuppositions about literacy and about the forms of written language’ shape classroom communication through the relative priority given to speech and writing, and the extent to which talk is treated as preparation for more ‘serious’ work. A strongly hierarchical view of that relationship was certainly apparent in ministerial reactions to the initial recommendations about English in the National Curriculum, and the English Working Group had to struggle hard to defend the equal weighting it gave to ‘speaking and listening’ (Cox, 1991, pp.125–132). The strength of ministerial resistance is only explicable in the context of wider debates about standard language, and about the importance of upholding ‘correct usage’. We therefore agree with Burgess that the analysis of classroom language should relate forms of talk to ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Social Research And Educational Studies Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors Preface to the Second Edition
• Glossary of Essential Terms
• Introduction
• 1 A Rationale for Researching Classroom Talk
• 2 Characteristic Patterns of Classroom Talk
• 3 Research Purposes, Practices and Problems
• 4 Coding Classroom Interaction
• 5 Interpreting Classroom Communication: Turns, Sequences and Meanings
• 6 Analyses of Classroom Discourse
• 7 Conclusion
• Annotated Bibliography
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index