ABSTRACT
So far, the talk that goes on in classrooms has been considered as essentially orderly, and the familiar analogy of a game, constituted by its rules, has been used more than once. In this chapter I want to consider more closely what is meant by ‘well-ordered’, predictable, and rule-governed, and to describe the model which, of those already referred to (in chapter 2 above) I find more comprehensive and more applicable to my purposes than others currently available, and to do so in more detail, and in a more systematic way than my references to it so far have allowed me to do. I shall want to give some account of the description developed by the Birmingham team and published under the title Towards an Analysis of Discourse: the English used by Teachers and Pupils (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975, abbreviated from this point to TAD), and to make some reference to later and current developments of it. In conclusion, I shall offer some samples of text which is analysed using the coding system derived from the description.
