ABSTRACT
The difference between home talk and school talk is particularly apparent in whole class teaching, a setting for talk alien to the home. This chapter begins our discussion of whole class teaching and how it has and might be changed. It also raises the problem of why somewhere around 20 per cent of pupils gain little from their primary schooling. From the teacher’s perspective, the majority of time in primary school is occupied by whole class teaching and has been since the introduction of mass education. While it is true that group and individual work are and have been used as a percentage of total time, they use very little of it. So it would not be unreasonable to ask why we need to spend time discussing what is an obvious thing and why we are urging teachers to do something they already do. In fact, what we need to do is to decide what kind of talk during whole class teaching will promote pupils’ learning. We also need to be able to describe what kind of talk pupils use that will promote their learning. The language of whole class teaching is not simply a matter of the instructions that teachers give; it is also a matter of values, in that the relationship between pupils and teachers differs when we change the nature of talk. Put crudely, authoritarian teaching does not engender quality learning.
