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Richard Cullen

Teacher talk:
quantity and
quality

Until comparatively recently, teacher talk in the EFL classroom was

considered to be something of a danger area for language teachers, and
trainee teachers were warned to use it sparingly. 'Good' teacher talk
meant 'little' teacher talk, since it was thought that too much teacher
talking time (111) deprived students of opportunities to speak. Interest
in teacher talk within the profession has since shifted away from a
concern with quantity towards a concern with quality: while the question
of how much teachers talk is still important, more emphasis is given to
how effectively they are able to facilitate learning and promote
communicative interaction in their classroom through, for example,
the kind of questions they ask, the speech modifications they make when
talking to learners, or the way they react to student errors (see, for
example, Nunan 1989).
There are a number of good reasons for this shift in emphasis. Firstly,
teacher talk is now generally recognized as a potentially valuable source
of comprehensible input for the learner. Since this is essential for
language acquisition (Krashen 1981), getting teachers to reduce the
amount of their talk would not necessarily be in the interests of the
learner. Secondly, so far all attempts by trainers to root out the 111
phenomenon have failed. This is particularly true in parts of the world
where the teacher's role is traditionally one of transmitter of knowledge
and values, and where a preoccupation with reducing 111 would be
unrealistic, as well as culturally inappropriate. Thirdly, there is evidence
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In the era of communicative language teaching, analyses of teacher talk

typically focus on the characteristics that make, or fail to make such talk
'communicative'. In most cases, the criteria for communicativeness are
taken from what is felt to constitute communicative behaviour in the world
outside the classroom. Thus, communicative classrooms are held to be
those in which features of genuine communication are evident, and, by
exclusion, classes where they are not present are considered to be uncommunicative. In the case of teacher talk, similar criteria might be used to
assess such aspects of classroom language use as the kind of questions
teachers ask their students, or the way they respond to student contributions. In this article, I argue that this analysis of teacher talk is oversimplistic, and ultimately unhelpful to teachers since its attempt to
characterize communicativeness only in terms of features of authentic
communication which pertain outside the classroom ignores the reality of
the classroom context and the features which make for effective communication within that context.

from classroom research that aspects of teacher talk, such as the kind of
questions teachers ask, can significantly affect the quantity and quality of
student interaction in the lesson (Brock 1986), and are also amenable to
the effects of training (Long and Sato 1983).
The notion of
communicative
teacher talk

genuine communication is characterized by uneven distribution of

information, the negotiation of meaning (through, for example,
clarification requests and confirmation checks), topic nomination and
negotiation of more than one speaker, and the right of interlocutors to
decide whether to contribute to an interaction or not . . . In genuine
communication, decisions about who says what to whom are up for
grabs. (Nunan 1987: 137)
Using characteristics such as these as criteria of communicativeness,
Nunan's conclusion from his own investigations into classroom practice
was that 'there is growing evidence that, in communicative classes,
interactions may, in fact, not be very communicative at all' (ibid.: 144). A
similar conclusion is reached by Kumaravadivelu (1993: 12-13):
In theory, a communicative classroom seeks to promote interpretation, expression and negotiation of meaning . . . [Learners] should be
encouraged to ask for information, seek clarification, express an
opinion, agree and/or disagree with peers and teachers . . . In reality,
however, such a communicative classroom seems to be a rarity.
Research studies show that even teachers who are committed to
communicative language teaching can fail to create opportunities for
genuine interaction in their classrooms.
In these arguments, the criteria for assessing the communicativeness of
classroom discourse and, by extension, of teacher talk, are taken from
what is perceived to constitute communicative behaviour in the world
outside the classroom. The fact that genuine communication appears to
comprise characteristics such as 'negotiation of meaning' and 'topic
nomination by more than one speaker' becomes de facto a reason for
incorporating them into classroom discourse, and for judging the
communicativeness or otherwise of classrooms according to whether
or not these features are present. The argument I wish to develop in this
article is that attempts to define communicative talk in the classroom
must be based primarily on what is or is not communicative in the
context of the classroom itself, rather than on what may or may not be
communicative in other contexts; and that the application of criteria of
communicativeness solely on the basis of social behaviour which exists in
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Recent studies (e.g. Thornbury 1996) have tended to focus on the extent
to which teacher talk supports a communicative environment in the
classroom, and specifically on how authentic it isjudged by how far it
shares features of so-called authentic communication outside the
classroom. Thus Nunan (1987) attempted to evaluate whether classes
which purported to be communicative really were so by determining the
extent to which genuine communication was evident in them. He
suggested that

certain contexts outside the classroom could result in an inappropriate

and ultimately unattainable model for the majority of language teachers
to follow, similar to the earlier preoccupation with teacher talking time.

This is not to deny the importance of analyses of the properties of

spoken discourse found in contexts outside the classroom (e.g. Hoey
1992) in shedding light on what our wider teaching goals should be, and
to that extent suggesting ways in which the discourse of the classroom
could be moderated, in order that these goals might be more successfully
achieved. But that is a rather different matter from suggesting that
classrooms only need to replicate communicative behaviour outside the
classroom in order to become communicative.
features of
teacher talk

If we pursue the case for replicating communicative behaviour outside

the classroom, there are a number of characteristics of teacher talk
which we might identify as being communicative (see Thornbury 1996).
Some of these are:
1 The use of 'referential' questions, where the teacher asks the class
something (e.g. 'What did you do at the weekend?') to which he or she
does not know the answer, and which therefore has a genuine
communicative purpose. This is in contrast to typical 'display' questions
(e.g. comprehension questions on a reading text) to which the teacher
already has the answer, and only asks so that the class can display their
understanding or knowledge. Insights from analyses of discourse inside
and outside the classroom (e.g. Long and Sato 1983) have revealed very
marked differences between typical classroom talk and non-classroom
talk in this respect.
2 Content feedback by the teacher, where the teacher's response to
student contributions focuses on the content of what the student
saysthe messagerather than on the form (e.g. the correctness of the
grammar or pronunciation).
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Communication and One might, to start with, take issue with the description of authentic
context communication on which the argument is based. Would it be true to say,
for example, that in genuine communication, decisions about who says
what to whom are 'up for grabs'? It might be generally true of informal
gatherings of groups of friends, but certainly not of more formal
gatherings, such as staff or board-room meetings. Communication at
such events tends to follow a very different pattern, determined by their
own rules and conventions, but that does not make it any less 'genuine'
or authentic. Similarly, the classroom, typically a large, formal gathering
which comes together for pedagogical rather than social reasons, will
also have its own rules and conventions of communication, understood
by all those present; these established patterns are likely to be very
different from the norms of turn-taking and communicative interaction
which operate in small, informal, social gatherings outside. Any analysis
of the characteristics of the communicative classroom needs to take
these differences into account.

3 The use of speech modifications, hesitations, and rephrasing in the

teacher's own talk, e.g. when explaining, asking questions, giving
instructions, etc.
4 Attempts to negotiate meaning with the students, e.g. through
requests for clarification and repetition, and giving opportunities for
the students to interrupt the teacher and do the same.

1 Exclusive or excessive use of display questions.

2 Form-focused feedback, i.e. feedback by the teacher which only shows
interest in the correct formation of the students' contributions (rather
than the content).
3 'Echoing' of students' responses, when the teacher repeats what a
student has just said for the benefit of the whole class (something which
rarely happens in social intercourse).
4 Sequences of predictable IRF (initiation-response-feedback) discourse chains (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975) in which the teacher
initiates the chain (typically by asking a question), a student responds,
and the teacher then gives feedback to the student (e.g. 'good') before
initiating another chain with another question. The structure of spoken
discourse outside the classroom is usually more complex and flexible
than this (Hoey 1992).
The classroom
context

The problem with this analysis is that defining communicative teacher

talk purely in terms of the norms of communication outside the
classroom ignores the context of the classroom itself, and what is
communicative within that context. It thus presents us with a onedimensional view of classroom talk, ignoring the fact that 'the
classroom is a unique social environment with its own human activities
and its own conventions governing these activities' (Breen and Candlin
1980: 98).
In what way does this uniqueness affect the discourse of the classroom,
and teacher talk in particular? If we look at some of the characteristics of
teacher talk in List B above, it is not difficult to see how they may, in
fact, perform important communicative functions in the classroom
context. Take the phenomenon of echoing students responses. The
teacher may have perfectly valid communicative reasons for doing this,
such as making sure that everyone in the class has heard what Student A
has just said, so that a discussion can continue with everybody following
it. In a large class, echoing by the teacher may be the quickest and most
effective way of doing this. Equally important is the convention in many
classes throughout the world that the teacher's repetition of a student's
response acts as a signal confirming that the response is correct. The
students understand this convention, and the teacher's failure to observe

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I shall refer to the features listed above as List A. Conversely, there are
a number of features of teacher talk which would be regarded as noncommunicative, in that they do not represent the way language is used in
many situations outside the classroom, and which I shall refer to as List
B. Examples of these features are:

it may well result in puzzlement, insecurity, and hence a malfunction in

classroom communication.

Teacher talk in
action

The following fragment of a secondary school English lesson in Egypt,

transcribed from a video recording of the lesson, illustrates the point that
what appears to be non-communicative teacher talk is not necessarily so
in the classroom context. The context is a third-year class in a mixed
preparatory (lower secondary) school in Cairo. There are about 35
students in the classroom, seated at individual desks, facing the teacher
at the front of the class. The teacher is preparing the students for a
reading passage in their textbooks about the Egyptian writer Tahaa
Hussein. The classroom interaction recorded here is heavily teacher-led,
and thus very typical of the classroom discourse of large classes
throughout the world:
T:
SI:
T:
S2:
S3:
T:
S4:
T:
S4:
T:
Ss:
T:
Ss:
T:

All right. Who can give me . . . er . . . a name of a great writer in

the English-speaking world? In the English-speaking world? The
name of a great writer. Right.
Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens. OK. What novel are we studying from Charles
Dickens this year?
[indistinct reply]
A Tale of Two Cities.
A Tale of Two Cities. All right. We say that Dickens is a writer.
Who can give me another name for the word 'writer'a more
specialized term for the word 'writer'?
Shakespeare, [indistinct reply]
Er .. . Um . . . That's not what I want. Shakespeare also is a great
writer, but I want . . . Yes?
Novelist?
A novelist. That's what I want, Mazin. So I want the word
'novelist'. So we have the word 'novel', [writes on blackboard] We
say that A Tale of Two Cities is a . . . ?
Novel.
A novel. And the writer of A Tale of Two Cities is a . . . ?
Novelist.
A novelist, [writes on blackboard] Is a novelist. OK. He saidwas
it you, Mazin, who said 'Shakespeare'? Is Shakespeare also a
novelist? Is Shakespeare a novelist?

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In the same way, few (with some notable exceptions) would deny that
providing feedback on form has a place in language teaching. If this is the
case, there must be ways of providing it which are more or less effective,
and more or less communicative, in the sense of communicating clearly
and successfully to the students concerned. Rather than regard such
discourse as essentially uncommunicative, it would seem more productive
and more realistic in terms of our expectations of teachersto
consider how to provide feedback in a way which is as communicative as
possible in the context of the classroom and which assists in the
attainment of the pedagogical purposes for which the students are there.

If we use the descriptors of communicative and uncommunicative

teacher talk outlined in the foregoing discussion, this would probably be
classified as an essentially uncommunicative fragment of classroom
discourse. There would appear to be few, if any, List A characteristics
and plenty of List B ones. The teacher's questions are all display
questions, since their purpose is to find out what the students know
about the writers he introduces, thus enabling them to display their
knowledge. Feedback from the teacher to the students' responses is
either an acknowledgement that the answer is acceptable (e.g. by
echoing, or by a comment such as 'fine') or an indication that it needs
correcting ('Er . . . blindness. Er . . . do we say Tahaa Hussein was
blindness . . . ?'). The extract also contains a good deal of echoing, and
the structure of the discourse follows a very distinctive IRF pattern.
In the context, of the classroom, however, one could argue that many
communicative aspects of the discourse are illustrated here. The teacher
is following a carefully structured sequence of questions leading to clear
pedagogical goalsthe teaching of the vocabulary items 'novelist' and
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Ss: Yes.
T: Er no. I don't agree with you. Shakespeare used to write plays. He
used to write . . . ?
Ss: Plays.
T: Can you remember some of his plays?
S5: Hamlet.
T: Hamlet.
S6: As You Like It.
T: As You Like It. Fine.
S7: The Tempest.
T: The Tempest, fine. We say Shakespeare was a 'play . . . wright'.
[writes on BB] A playwright. Remember this is not 'write', W-R-IT-E. This is playwright, W-R-I-G-H-T. A playwright. He was a
writer of plays. Now about our great writer Tahaa Hussein, Tahaa
Hussein. Who can give me one word to describe Tahaa Hussein?
As many words as you can. Everybody knew him or nobody knew
him or few people knew him? Who can give me a word to describe
him?
S8: Blindness.
T: Er . . . blindness. Er . . . do we say Tahaa Hussein was blindness or
Tahaa Hussein was . . . ?
S9: Blind.
T: Blind. OK. Tahaa Hussein was blind. I'm looking for a word to
describe his fame. A word to describe his fame. So we say that he
was a . . . ?
Ss: Popular.
T: Popular. He was . . . ?
Ss: Popular.
T: Tahaa Hussein was popular. Popular. All right, can you give me
the name of a popular actor in Egypt? Popular actor in Egypt.
Popular actor.

'popular'. He tries to find out what the students know before telling
them himself, and in the process responds on the spot to an unexpected
student response ('Shakespeare'), and makes a small teaching episode
out of it. The feedback he gives the students is clear and unambiguous,
and it is equally clear from the video recording of the lesson that he has
their undivided attention. One could argue, too, that his use of echoing
helps to ensure that this attention is not lost as he moves the class
towards the vocabulary items he wishes to focus on. The teaching, in
short, is effective, and the teacher's talkhis use of questions and his
feedback movesis supportive of learning.

I do not wish to imply from this that there is no place in the classroom
for the kind of features of genuine communication described in List A,
or that teachers will not benefit from an awareness of different ways of
operating in the classroom involving, for example, the increased use of
referential questions, and responding to the content as well as the form
of what students say in class. The inclusion of such features might well
enhance this particular teacher's effectiveness by stimulating more
productive and varied use of English by his students. To that extent, the
study of discourses outside the classroom can serve to enrich the
interaction and the pedagogical effectiveness of what goes on inside the
classroom. But we should not conclude from this that the absence of
features of communication characteristic of discourses in the world
outside the classroom automatically renders classroom discourse
wrtcommunicative, since to do so is to ignore the peculiar nature and
purpose of the classroom encounter.
Categorizing
teacher talk: a
way forward

With regard to defining the notion of 'communicative teacher talk', I

would suggest that rather than comparing the way teachers talk in the
classroom with the way people talk outside it, a more productive
approach would be to identify categories of teachers' verbal behaviour
in the classroom, and attempt to determine what it means to be
communicative in each one, and what might constitute a communicative
balance of behaviours for different teaching and learning purposes. The
following six categories are adapted from a list of categories of
classroom verbal behaviour in Bowers (1980), cited in Malamah-Thomas
(1987), identified through a process of classroom observation and
analysis of lesson transcripts:

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Within the context of the classroom therefore, and the norms of

communication that operate there, it is surely meaningless and unhelpful
to classify this, and other similar examples of pedagogically effective
classroom discourse, as uncommunicative, simply because they fail to
exhibit features of communication which are found in contexts outside
the classroom. Communicative language teaching means communicative
teaching as well as communicative use of language, and defining the
notion of 'communicative' in relation to teacher talk must therefore take
account of the teacher's dual role as instructor as well as interlocutor.

questioning/eliciting
responding to students' contributions
presenting/explaining
organizing/giving instructions
evaluating/correcting
'sociating'/establishing and maintaining classroom rapport.

There .are three important advantages, as I see it, in this approach to

describing and evaluating teacher talk. Firstly, the categories of verbal
behaviour are rooted firmly in the reality of the classroom and on what
typically goes on there. Secondly, the criteria for assessing communicative use of classroom language in each of these categories are
likewise based on what it takes to be communicative in the context of
the classroom itself, rather than in some outside context. The model of
communicative teacher talk emerging from such an approach should
thus reflect the primary function of teacher talk, which is to support and
enhance learning. Providing a model of the way language is used for
communication in the real world may be an important part of that
function, but it is not the only way in which teacher talk supports
language learning: it is a means to an end rather than an end in itself.
Thirdly, a model of communicative language teaching which recognizes
the importance of the pedagogical function of teacher talk within the
classroom context, and what it means to be communicative within that
context, is likely to be a more realistic and attainable model for teachers
to aspire to than one which insists on the replication of features of
genuine communication as the only measure of genuine communicative
teaching.
Received July 1997

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In order to determine how communicative a teacher's use of a particular

category, such as questioning, is in a particular lesson, one would take
into account not only the extent to which particular questions engaged
the students in meaningful, communicative use of language, but also the
pedagogical purpose of the questions asked, and the teacher's success in
communicating this purpose clearly to the learners. In the same way, a
teacher's classroom instructions might be assessed as being more or less
communicative according to how clearly they were understood and
followed, whether they were sufficient or even superfluous, and whether
the teacher allowed opportunities for the students to seek clarification
and to 'negotiate meaning'.

Malamah-Thomas, A. 1987. Classroom Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nunan, D. 1987. 'Communicative language teaching: making it work'. ELT Journal 41/2: 136-45.
Nunan, D. 1989. Understanding Language Classrooms. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall.
Sinclair, J. and R. Coulthard. 1975. Towards an

Analysis of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thornbury, S. 1996. 'Teachers research teacher
talk'. ELT Journal 50/4: 279-89.

The author
Richard Cullen is a Senior Lecturer in the
Department of Language Studies at Canterbury
Christ Church College. He has worked for the
British Council as an English Language Teaching
Officer in teacher education on development
projects in Egypt, Bangladesh, and Tanzania. He
has also taught and trained teachers in Nepal and
Greece. His professional interests include teacher
and trainer-training, classroom discourse, phonology, and the teaching and learning of grammar.
E-mail: <r.m.cullen@cant.ac.uk>

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Quarterly 20/1: 47-59.
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Hoey, M. 1992. 'Some properties of spoken
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Kumaravadivelu, B. 1993. 'Maximizing learning
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