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| pupil interaction |
Teachers do a lot of talking in classrooms. They often get criticized for this because they are not giving pupils enough opportunity to talk. But we need to consider first the purposes for which teachers use talk m the language classroom. It is through our talk that the teaching gets done. We manage the classroom through talk we instruct pupils what to do, we control them, we motivate them, we provide feedback. We also provide language input for learning. But it is not just what we say that is important, it is also how we say it which may be important m terms of what pupils learn and how they learn. It is through our tone of voice, use of pausing, use of facial expression that we convey our attitudes to our pupils and our interest m them or lack of it.
Teachers tend to use some types of talk a lot more frequently than others, eg for managing, checking answers and controlling, while other types of talk are neglected, eg asking for real information about the children, praising, getting children to think.
It is important to consider which types of talk you use m the classroom because this affects the kind of learning environment you create. If you mainly use talk for controlling, giving information, providing examples, and testing, then you are doing most of the talking and your relationship with children will probably be quite formal. Consider what would happen if you used talk for other kinds of purpose as well. For example, what would the pupils' response be if you asked for real information about them more often or joked more often or asked thinking questions' Delwar, a Bangladeshi teacher trainer, worked with a group of primary teachers to improve the way in which they responded to pupils' answers by encouraging them, and showing more interest m what pupils said. He found that later when he visited those teachers, classrooms, pupils were much more willing to speak than they had been on previous visits So one of the effects was to increase the amount of talking children did They were also more enthusiastic about their lessons.
One of the points to keep in mind here is that the teacher's talk provides the main or only form of language input for children in a foreign language situation. So if we restricted our input in English to only giving them examples of the language and we didn't use English for the other purposes listed above, eg joke with them, give instructions, etc, we would be providing them with a very limited range of input. This is an issue which we will discuss more in the next section.