ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the use of the English language as a medium for education in school, a setting which can have a powerful influence on the intellectual, social and linguistic development of older children. Two related themes are important throughout: the role of language in the process of teaching and learning; the relationship between English and other languages in the classroom. The structural element of classroom talk was first described by the British linguists Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) and is usually known as an Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) exchange. IRF exchanges can be thought of as the archetypal form of interaction between a teacher and a pupil – a basic unit of classroom talk as a continuous stretch of language or 'text'. In circumstances where English is being used as a classroom language but where the pupils’ first language is not English, a teacher may codeswitch to the first language if problems of comprehension arise.
