ABSTRACT
Classroom talk is one instance of talk in general, one kind of social interaction, and so has properties which are common to all conversations and interactions. Before we deal with specifically educational matters, then, we shall deal briefly with the more general business of how people share understandings through conversation. This will not be about the psychology of language comprehension, of how people analyse and interpret sounds, words, sentences and texts. Our interest is in the more general ‘pragmatic’ rules that speakers and hearers must in some sense know and abide by in order to engage in conversation. The notion of ground-rules refers to a set of implicit understandings that participants in conversations need to possess, over and above any strictly linguistic knowledge, in order to make proper sense of what each other is trying to say, or trying to achieve in saying something. We have encountered an instance in chapter 2, the notions of ‘given’ and ‘new’ information. We shall now put those notions into a larger frame.
