8 Inner and outer: spoken discourse in
the language classroom
Jane Willis
In 1979 and 1980 I set about recording a variety of classrooms where
English was being taught as a foreign language. My purpose was to develop
a method of analysing and describing the language used in foreign language
lessons in such a way as to enable objective comparisons to be made
between the discourse resulting from different classroom activities and
different teacher styles. This research, based on an adaptation and extension
of the Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) model, is fully reported in J. Willis
(1981). In this chapter, I shall concentrate on one basic concept in that
research, which I hope will help to shed light on how language is used by
teachers and students in language teaching classrooms. Implications and
adaptations for the more ‘communicative’ classrooms of the 1990s are
also discussed.
CONTENT LESSONS AND LANGUAGE LESSONS
Most classroom researchers would agree that the classroom talk of language
lessons is more difficult to analyse and describe than the classroom talk of
‘content’ lessons. Despite the fact that there are many different ways of
teaching language, most language classrooms have one thing in common:
language is used for two purposes; it serves both as the subject matter of
the lesson, and as the medium of instruction. It is precisely this dual role
that makes language lessons difficult to describe.
The model devised by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975), later revised by
Sinclair and Brazil (1982) (and outlined in this volume, Chapter 1), can be
used to analyse most typical ‘content’ classrooms. It preserves the flow of
the interaction and reveals its structure, highlighting common patternings
and revealing breakdowns. As it stands, however, it does not handle the
two-level structure of the mainstream language classroom.
In order to produce a clear and useful description of the structure of
language-classroom discourse, it is necessary to have an analytic model
which can distinguish and separate out these two uses of language, but at
the same time, preserve the flow of the interaction and reveal the relationship
between the two.