ABSTRACT
As teachers we all have special moments of insight, ‘epiphanies', when something we had never thought of or noticed before becomes crystal clear and nothing is ever the same again. Years ago, I was a part-time tutor on an Open University education course called Language and Learning. One of the assignments I had to mark was part of a study unit called Language in the Classroom, written by Douglas Barnes (1973). At the time, in this unit broke new ground, by asking teachers to focus on the idea of ‘classroom communication’, o f ‘the classroom as a context for language’ and o f ‘talking in order to learn’; these were new and challenging ideas for many teachers. Although teachers of English in both primary and secondary schools, at that time, were likely to feel comfortable about promoting interactive talk in the classroom, teachers in other curriculum areas tended to give small group collaborative talk a fairly low priority. Indeed, pupil talk was more likely to be in response to teacher questioning than initiated by the pupils; the amount of pupil talk in the classroom was very much related to issues of control and discipline.
