ABSTRACT
The dependence of classroom talk on a given context of shared experience, activity, physical surroundings and talk itself is a common discovery in studies of classroom communication (e.g. Cooper 1976; Edwards and Furlong 1978; Mehan 1979). In all of our own samples of classroom talk, ranging through clay-modelling lessons, computer programming, science, social studies and mathematics, we found such talk to be heavily dependent on a context of physical props and activities. But this is not simply a discovery about classroom communication and language. It is a property of the educational process. As we emphasized in chapter 3, much of primary education (especially) in Britain since the 1960s has become systematically oriented towards practical activities - a development based on prevailing notions of the importance of individual activity and direct experience to the processes of learning and of cognitive development. The dependence of school language on context is therefore an inherent feature. This must create problems for analysts who focus on the linguistic properties of discourse (e.g. Sinclair and Coulthard 1975; Stubbs 1976), and for those who have argued for the inherent ‘context-disembeddedness’ of educational language (e.g. Bernstein 1971; Tough 1977; Donaldson 1978). In this chapter we shall explore the nature of the context-dependence of classroom discourse. We suggest that education is best understood as a communicative process that consists largely in the growth of shared mental contexts and terms of reference through which the various discourses of education (the various ‘subjects’ and their associated academic abilities) come to be intelligible to those who use them.
