ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the key strategies employed by teachers and pupils in the classroom, which reveal the kaleidoscopic complexity of the interaction. The teacher's strategy is to make her expectations for the classroom explicit, and to state and restate them frequently. The pupils' first strategy is to find out what the teacher wants and give it to her — assuming that they can see a pay-off for themselves, in terms of grades, eventual jobs, or peace and quiet. It is possible to make generalizations about the sum total of pupil talk — about overall pupil strategies. Public talk in the formal classroom is one of the ways pupils can test their definition of the situation against the teacher's, as the extracts from F. Bream and the St Luke's geography lesson show. In most classrooms, playing the teacher's game means responding — that is, answering the teacher's questions, preferably correctly.
