ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 is focused on the classroom environment and its role as the centre point of a discourse community within educational practice. As such it opens with a detailed discussion of teaching and learning as social practice with specific emphasis on socioculturalism and the work of Vygotsky which constitutes the overarching theoretical framework of research presented here. Building on this, the focus moves to the features of educational discourse in a section that offers an overview of approaches to analysing classroom talk before introducing and elaborating on the core triadic structure of Initiation–Response–Feedback (IRF). Following on this, the linguistic characteristics of educational discourse in university and school contexts are explored and the concept of teacher language awareness examined with particular focus on the language dimension of mainstream subjects and the teachers’ role as models of disciplinary literacy. Finally, and in order to further highlight the link between discourse and subject matter learning, the concept of the classroom as a discourse community is fully explored.
