ABSTRACT
To judge from the amount of time teachers' talk, they do not doubt that the medium is the message. In fact language in some form or other tends to be the dominant feature of classroom life. In most classrooms, despite the trend towards less formal methods of organization, the teacher's speech is ubiquitous. Analyses of classroom activity suggest strongly that two-thirds of all such activity is likely to be taken up by talk, that two-thirds of the talk will be teacher-talk, and that two-thirds of the teacher-talk will be stereotypical teacher activities such as lecturing, giving directions, criticizing children or justifying the teacher's own activity. This chapter presents various examples of the use of language in teaching and learning illustrates its two-edged nature. It also presents actual classroom transcripts but which takes further the examination of problems of children's concept formation and problems of teachers' misconceptions of children's understanding of concepts.
