This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
In some ways these benefits did take place. With a bit of encouragement from Kelvin, students listened to each
other more of the time than before. They also diversified their tasks and responsibilities within each group, and
they seemed to learn from each other in the course of preparing projects. Participation in the unit about children’s
play reached an all-time high in Kelvin’s twenty years of teaching at university. Yet even still there were problems.
Some groups seemed much more productive than others, and observing them closely suggested that differences
were related to ease of communication within groups. In some groups, one or two people dominated conversations
unduly. If they listened to others at all, they seemed immediately to forget that they had done so and proceeded to
implement their own ideas. In other groups, members all worked hard, but they did not often share ideas or news
about each other’s progress; essentially they worked independently in spite of belonging to the group. Here, too,
Kelvin’s experience corroborated other, more systematic observations of communication within classroom work
groups (Slavin, 1995). When all groups were planning at the same time, furthermore, communication broke down
for a very practical reason: the volume of sound in the classroom got so high that even simple conversation became
difficult, let alone the expression of subtle or complex ideas.
Communication styles in the classroom.......................................................................................................
Teachers and students have identifiable styles of talking to each other that linguists call a register. A register is
a pattern of vocabulary, grammar, and expressions or comments that people associate with a social role. A familiar
example is the “baby-talk” register often used to speak to an infant. Its features—simple repeated words and
nonsense syllables, and exaggerated changes in pitch—mark the speaker as an adult and mark the listener as an
infant. The classroom language register works the same way; it helps indicate who the teacher is and who the
student is. Teachers and students use the register more in some situations than in others, but its use is common
enough that most people in our society have no trouble recognizing it when they hear it (Cazden, 2001). In the
following scene, for example, the speakers are labeled only with letters of the alphabet; yet figuring out who is the
teacher and who are the students is not difficult:
A: All right now, I want your eyes up here. All eyes on me, please. B, are you ready to work? We are
going to try a new kind of math problem today. It’s called long division. Does anyone know what
long division is? C, what do you think it is?
C: Division with bigger numbers?
A: Any other ideas? D?
E (not D): Division by two digits.
A: ...I only call on people who raise their hands. D, can you help with the answer?
D: Division with remainders.
A: Close. Actually you’re both partly right.
In this scene Person A must surely be the teacher because he or she uses a lot of procedural and control talk, and
because he or she introduces a new curriculum topic, long division. The other Persons (B, C, D, and E) must be
students because they only respond to questions, and because they individually say relatively little compared to
Person A.
Educational Psychology 169 A Global Text