ABSTRACT
Giving instructions is one important functional competence. In any classroom, children often help each other with their academic work. In research terms, several hypotheses should be further explored. First, that the greater the psychological distance between a teacher and her pupils, the greater will be the constraints on children's language, specifically on children's answers to her questions and on their tendency to ask questions of her. Second, within any one teacher-pupil relationship, these constraints will be greater in more formal large-group situations, and less in more informal settings and more collaborative activities. Eventually the some strands of analyses of children's functional competence and the language of teaching must come together so that we can understand how the ways in which teachers use language to structure the social environment affect the ways in which children use language. The combination of power and cultural solidarity occurs in some of the most effective schools: the Jewish shtetls in Eastern Europe.
