Introduction

Books about children’s language designed for teachers are by now numerous and the production of another may be thought to require some explanation. This one owes much to the students with whom I have worked during the years it was in preparation. It is my hope that it will be found useful by their successors, and that it may in addition interest experienced teachers, particularly those engaged in one of the various forms of in-service professional education now available, and those concerned with teacher education. It is a book about talk, talk as the joint production of teachers and pupils. It takes for granted a good deal that, in a book designed to assist relatively inexperienced teachers in practical ways, it would be necessary to argue. It assumes, for example, a recognition that language, spoken and written, is central to the processes of education and that we are all in some sense indebted to the Bullock Report (1975) for authoritatively asserting that this is so, and for elaborating this conviction in some detail. This book assumes too that any notion that language is important only or chiefly because it is the means by which knowledge is transmitted between the generations is pretty well discredited. Talking in class, for so long the commonest of all juvenile misdemeanours, is recognised now as an indispensable means by which learning takes place. I am not of course suggesting that all the chatter in which children engage is educationally productive, nor that making opportunities and occasions for educationally useful talk is easy. On the contrary, to do it successfully requires a degree of attentiveness and discrimination and sensitivity much harder to attain than is the authority required to impose attentive silence on a class. Talking to learn is very far from being an easy option. There is a literature in which ways of doing it are explored and discussed and in which examples of good practice are examined in helpful detail (Barnes, Britton and Rosen, 1971; Barnes and Todd, 1981; Tough, 1973; Rosen and Rosen, 1973). This book is sympathetic to the approach taken by these authors. My own approach and purposes are, however, rather different. The basis of that approach and those purposes is a conviction of long standing that has survived changes of fortune and fashion. It is this: that however variously and imaginatively teachers make use of what used to be called (collectively) ‘visual aids’ in their teaching, language is for all of them the major means of communication; the primary, essential, indispensable mode of professional functioning. They need to know about it; as they gain experience in deploying it effectively, they need to reflect on what it is they do. In some sense of course they do know about it, and they always have. The experience of educated, literate adults includes a very great deal of knowledge about operating at least one language – often more than one. Most of them are able to do so capably, variously and appropriately; some do it with wit and style. In addition every teacher shares with other adults in the community a complex of opinions and beliefs and values relating to language. Not all of these stand up to critical scrutiny. My belief is that developments in linguistics and its applications in the most recent half-century have made significantly more than this attainable by teachers, and that it should be made accessible to them. Such knowledge is not simply more detailed or more up to date; it is qualitatively different from that which is absorbed as part of the process of growing up in an advanced society, with long traditions of learning and literacy. Knowledge attained by deliberate study, subjected to discussion, tested and modified in application, is available for critical scrutiny. It is changed, or discarded, in the light of fresh evidence, or fresh interpretation of old evidence. It can be used in making decisions and in evaluating them. This constitutes, to my mind, the case for teachers undertaking a study of classroom language that is linguistics-based and linguistically defensible. It is the justification for my decision, in writing this book, to give much space in the first two chapters to linguistic studies of the processes by which language is acquired by children and the processes of conversation are understood by them. It determines, too, the themes of the book, and in the interests of clarity I should say here what these are. This is a book about a second stage of the process of acquiring language and learning simultaneously to participate in discourse, that stage for which, in our own country and others in which the upbringing of children is similarly institutionalised, the classroom is the setting, and learning goes on in interaction with a teacher and with other children of the same age. It is about a part of the development of what is termed, in the literature to which I shall refer in the opening chapters, communicative competence, and a part in which teachers play a crucial role. The stance taken is that conversational exchange, including the sort of talk that goes on between teachers and children, normally seems to participants to be spontaneous, random, and unpredictable, and is in fact none of these things. People engaged in talk are as unaware of the rule-governed nature of the activity as they are of the rules of the sound system and grammatical system of the language they speak. The professional work of linguists includes observing the regularities that occur and articulating them, identifying and formulating the systematic nature of the process. I am especially indebted to work done in this area by a team led by Professor J. McH. Sinclair and Dr R.M. Coulthard, and I shall later make detailed and frequent references to their work. For the teacher who has access to such studies, who recognises that newcomers to school are in the process of finding out what the rules of classroom talk are, who knows (as of course pupils do not) what these rules are in some degree of detail, there are, I believe, possibilities of valuable insight. This, broadly, is the position I shall want to examine in what follows.