Approaches to classroom knowledge and talk

A multidisciplinary army of researchers has gathered data in schools over the years. Represented in its ranks are not only teachers and other educationalists (i.e. researchers with a practical interest in curriculum content and teaching methods) but also anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, and researchers from a number of different schools of sociological thought. Despite all this activity, however, until recently, little interest was shown in the observation and analysis of classroom talk. The 1960s ended with very little being known about the particular and peculiar characteristics of educational discourse.