ABSTRACT
By far the largest amount of teaching activity in educational settings involves telling things to students, whether orally or in print. Traditional instruction characteristically uses the lecture method, along with plentiful reading assignments. Even in more “progressive” educational settings which avoid the lecture method, much of the teacher’s activity consists of asking questions and imparting information verbally. To be sure, verbal instruction is often accompanied with supplementary aids—diagrams on the blackboard, charts, pictures, film strips, motion pictures, demonstrations, field trips, and the like. But language still functions in many of these. A picture without a caption is usually meaningless, and most educational films would be unintelligible without sound track or titles. It seems obvious that meaningful verbal discourse is the primary tool of teaching. We expect our students to learn most things by being told about them.
