ABSTRACT
The subject matter of this chapter contrasts with Chapter 3 in that psychotherapy talk is interactive by definition, but university lectures are traditionally monologic. However, like all the other case studies in this book, both lectures and psychotherapy are describable as time-based contexts involving the strategic use of language. Psychotherapists and teachers have in fact been compared to each other (Tharp, 1999) since both impart information and respond to clients or students in strategic and goal-directed ways. It is thus unsurprising that just like psychotherapy, classroom discourse has been the subject of sustained research interest from a variety of approaches. Many studies based on paradigms such as systemic functional linguistics, conversation analysis and the ethnography of communication favor microanalytic scrutiny and rich contextual understanding of examples (Zuengler & Mori, 2002). Others search for more general patterns in a broader range of linguistic forms, functions and classroom contexts (Biber, 2006). Despite their methodological differences, both approaches have observed that interpersonally oriented, “non-informational and subjective aspects of discourse” play a central role even in monologic classroom settings (Barbieri, 2015).
