Analysing Classroom Talk

In his inaugural definition of a ‘sociological linguistics’, J.R. Firth defined its task as the description of the speech appropriate to the relevant social roles in ‘contexts of situation which are typical, recurrent and repeatedly observable’ ( Firth, 1957 ). In so far as classrooms constitute such typical contexts, they have seemed to be a suitable case for sociolinguistic treatment. Some of the resulting studies have been concerned with the general task of showing ‘how language is organised to serve social ends’, and with developing methods of discourse analysis applicable to any situation where social relationships are ‘sufficiently well-defined for us to expect clear evidence of this in the text’. 1 More applied research has examined (for example) the difficulties confronting children unprepared for, or unwilling to display, the communicative skills appropriate to formal learning, and has treated ‘repeatedly observable’ features of classroom talk as evidence of teaching strategies or the permeability of knowledge boundaries.