Using Talk Effectively in the Primary Classroom

Richard Eke, John Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134291939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Drawing on their research into the quality, quantity and type of talk that happens in the everyday primary classroom, the authors offer insights into the most effective ways of using talk to improve teaching and learning. They consider broad classroom-based issues, such as:

• what is important about talk
• what children know about talk when they get to school
• the voice of authority and the voice of the learner
• whole class teaching for diversity
• the experience of boys and girls, and children with special needs
• using talk in the Literacy and Numeracy Hours
• using talk in science and ICT.
  

Packed full of quotes from teachers and pupils in action, this innovative guide presents a range of practical ways that teachers can develop their interactions with their pupils to raise standards in all primary schools.

Part One

In this part of the book we discuss the importance of talk and how you can describe what is going on in classrooms, including your own classroom. It is easy to make statements such as ‘talking and listening are very important’. The challenge is to show what kinds of speaking and listening are better ways to ensure pupils’ learning. We need to be able to argue the case for talking against a tradition of trying to make the children silent in classrooms. There is also a strong tradition that only values pupil talk when it is a direct response to a teacher’s question of fact. The challenge we face is both how to get pupils to use talk and how we can view it as valuable and valued. In brief, how we can identify when talking is learning in the formal sense.

In the closing years of the last century and at the beginning of this one, teaching from the ‘front’ has been eulogised. Alexander, Rose and Woodhead (1992) and Reynolds and Farrell (1996) made strong cases for a type of whole class teaching that prioritised the role of the teacher as the only transmitter of knowledge and skills. A range of researchers have examined these views and you will find reference to them later in the book. It is our view that recognising the importance of whole class teaching does not mean accepting one viewpoint nor does it exclude the use of children’s own ideas in lessons. We want to argue that whole class teaching is better when we have a more sophisticated idea of how talking and learning relate to each other and how skilled teachers are able to focus attention on learning in its broadest sense. This matches the professional standards for England which state that, in order to qualify as a teacher, student teachers must evaluate the impact of their teaching on the progress of all learners. This means being able to identify pupils’ cultural, linguistic and emotional development.

The book discusses children’s linguistic, social and cultural development, but we focus here specifically on the linguistic and – just as important – how we can describe what talk is like in classrooms. In the chapters in this part we draw attention to how we can ‘take account of, and support pupils’ varying needs so that girls and boys from all ethnic groups can make good progress’ (TDA 2002). In the context of whole class teaching, we argue that it is very important to be able to analyse what is happening in classrooms so that we can learn lessons from good practice. So we begin by looking at some of the research that has examined what happens in classrooms. We do not claim to review everything, only that work relevant to our own way of working. We will show in each chapter how research conducted by others relates to what we are proposing and indicate how you can use it yourself.

In this part, you will meet material that will enable you to meet the relevant Training and Development Agency (hereafter TDA) standards for initial teacher training and professional development. These standards demand that those in training learn how to reflect on and improve their practice and, after qualification, be able to improve practice through professional development. Advanced skills teachers are required to be able to research and evaluate curriculum practices and the research reviewed in this part will help in doing this. The chapters will also contribute to your understanding of the way that pupils’ learning relates to their linguistic development and to your understanding of the importance of language in classroom planning.

In order to research your own practice and the curriculum, you need to develop research skills. First, you need to know about methods that are relevant to and usable by the practitioner. There are a number of methods you will already be familiar with – perhaps the most prominent is ‘action research’ – but what we offer in this book is a way of getting at the fine detail of classroom talk. In this part, you will find references and commentary on a range of research methods alongside the ones we have used. We hope that by the time you have read Part One, you will appreciate the ways that talk has been researched and the possibilities of your embarking on your own reflective research aimed at improving the quality of talking and learning in your class and your school.

So in the first chapter, you will find accounts of research that shows what children can do with talk before they come to school. It also asks you to look carefully at some data and think about what they tell you. Other research introduced here shows how some children come to school, as it were, equipped with ‘school language’. In the second chapter you will find how school talk might be commented on and how it is very different from ordinary language. The third chapter introduces you to some research and research methods that have shown us what life in primary classrooms is like if looked at via talk. Here you will find activities asking you to con sider ‘teacher talk’. In the final chapter of this part, we continue to explore class room interaction with a look at ‘scaffolding’. It is in this chapter, as we explore what scaffolding means, that we set out in detail our methodology and mode of analysis.

Chapter 1
The talk accomplishments of children starting primary school

Children are always children, but they have to learn to be pupils. Before they become pupils they can do many things, so before looking at classrooms let’s see what children can do with talk and what schools do with it.

In this chapter, we introduce you to the following ideas:

• Nearly all children come to school as effective talkers.
• They use talk to make meaning.
• The making of meaning is a social activity.
• School knowledge is different.
• School talk is ‘strange’ and specific to school.
• For some children, there is a gap between talking for meaning and talking for school.
• The way teachers talk to children can change the size of this gap.
• The work of Basil Bernstein and some of his critics is relevant.

In this chapter you will find something about how children develop language, and how they use talk to develop their thoughts. You will also find some reference to the way that Basil Bernstein describes school knowledge as being encoded in a kind of ‘school language’ which is different from everyday language.

Let’s look at some of the evidence that shows what children can do with talk before and just as they enter school. Children come to school as thinkers because they use language to make meaning, communicate meaning and symbolise their experiences. The psychologist Vygotsky argues that language and thought are inextricably linked and that all children, by using language in social settings, become thinkers. He believes that as children’s thought develops in more and different ways, they need more differentiated forms of talk.

The evidence collected by linguists, language development researchers and educationalists interested in the very early years all indicates that children enter formal schooling with the accomplishment of skilled language users. This is true even in England, where children generally begin formal schooling as early as four or four-and-a-half years old.

What do we mean by ‘accomplishment’ here? Let’s start by saying what we don’t mean. We do not mean that all children come to school equipped to follow and join in with the talk conventions so often found in classrooms. In a later chapter we describe how strange and artificial classroom talk is in comparison to everyday talk.

Linguists interested in children’s talk have shown that even comparatively young children are rather sophisticated users of language. They are able to use the grammar of the language to make themselves understood and are also able to use grammar creatively. More than this, they seem to have an understanding that grammar is a set of descriptive rules that can be drawn upon. For instance, although English-speaking four-year-olds often use the past tense of ‘ran’, they tend to generalise the grammatical rule and say ‘runned’. So contrary to what some teachers believe, and believed in the past, children’s linguists and language development scholars on the whole argue that children’s language is not an inferior sort of adult talk but that it is a form of its own. We have used here a very wellknown example of a four-year-old’s use of a verb that we now know most of them have grasped and can use. Linguists such as Chomsky point to the ‘error’ of using ‘runned’ as evidence that the child knows and can use complex grammatical rules governing the nature of the verb.

Activity
‘Dada allgone’
Make a list of possible meanings for this expression.

‘Daddy allgone’ is typically produced by children aged about eighteen months. When using the phrase ‘Daddy allgone’, a parent could attribute a range of possible meanings that will be linked to the context. The mother may confirm that daddy has gone to the shop or somewhere else if she treats it as a question. She may treat it as a statement and say ‘that’s right, he’s not here’. Daddy may be being told that the child has finished their lunch or be being asked if they have finished it. We can note that it is at about two years of age that children produce utterances in which their meaning is clear from their talk.

How do you think the meanings and the talk are related?

What do you think the following mean?

Is it easy to define meaning without knowing the context?

Issy eat

Dada jump

Eat biccie

Johnny sock

Horse doggie

All gone

All broke

Poor teddy

Children’s talk is a little different from adult talk in that it is almost always tied to particular situations. The richness of their developing language use seems to arise from their interaction with adults eager to understand the child’s meaning. Michael Halliday (1975), in his study of language development, shows how children and adults combine to make sense of even the youngest child’s approximations of talk. What seems to happen is that the meanings of a young child’s sounds are established in the ‘space between’ the child and the adult. So the linguistic development of the child is part of their development as a social being; they do not develop language use by themselves. Here is a well-known example – when a child first produces the ‘da da’ sound, their mother may well say ‘Daddy’s not here’. Let’s look at another example. ‘Mummy gup’ is an interesting phrase, if you think about it. It could mean that the child is pointing and saying ‘That is mummy’s cup’. Let’s try another context for the same phrase, such as when the child holds out their hand and their words take on a new meaning – ‘Mummy, can I have a cup?’ In this kind of talk, the object referred to, the ‘gup’, is present; talk becomes even more sophisticated when the person or thing referred to is absent. This is really the beginning of the use of language to describe and convey ideas. In this case, the object is not physically present and cannot be pointed at.

As the child’s language develops, we can see them experimenting with sounds and with a range of grammatical structures. What is also happening is that the child is learning to make meanings by interacting with an adult in a familiar context. Here is an example of an interaction between a child (C) and her mother (M):

C: (Wearing a jacket and pointing to her neck.) Up up.

M: What?

C: Neck up.

M: Neck? What do you want? What?

C: Neck.

M: What’s on your neck?

C: (Points to zipper and lifts her chin up.) Zip zip zip. (Wells 1987)

What we can see here is how the child is struggling to make herself understood; the mother joins in by asking pertinent questions. This child is not merely learning to answer questions in order to be understood, she is also learning the nature of this kind of conversation, the rules of social conversation. When she has acquired these rules, she can use them herself to establish the meanings that others make. Many of you will have encountered the child who has mastered these particular rules and enjoys continuously asking ‘Why?’ questions.

McLure (1992), using ‘snippets of chat’ which are not particularly remarkable, demonstrates how effective and efficient the language use of five-year-olds is. She notes that, apart from a few children who have particular difficulties, five-year-olds do not merely have a large vocabulary and the ability to use the majority of adult grammar, but they are able to play with language and are already developing an awareness of the genres of adult talk. Five-year-olds are well able to tell jokes; the jokes they tell are usually dependent on a sophisticated understanding of lexical and or structural ambiguity. Try these examples of lexical ambiguity, for instance:

What do you call a cow who munches on your lawn?

A lawnmooer.

What has four wheels and flies?

A rubbish lorry.

This kind of linguistic playfulness is the commonest that children use. But they can also appreciate structural ambiguity, and we know this because they tell and laugh at jokes like this:

Girl: Last night I opened the door in my nightie.

Boy: That’s a funny place to keep a door.

In this case, the joke depends on whether ‘in’ modifies ‘door’ or ‘nightie’. You have to be a sophisticated user of the language, with an understanding of the rules of grammar, to laugh at this joke; children do laugh. Both kinds of jokes challenge verbal and conversational conventions. This indicates that children ought not to have trouble with the language of schooling, but some appear to have such trouble. So you will, perhaps, already be thinking that not all children come to school with the kind of cultural capital that enables them easily to engage with formal school knowledge. The puzzle is why these adept language users often become monosyllabic and even mute after a relatively short experience of formal schooling.

All of this language learning has been accomplished, by children, in a context where their meanings have been prioritised. Schools necessarily are unable to prioritise the meaning of every individual child, because it is the job of schools to transmit formal knowledge – that is, in the case of English primary schools, knowledge about arithmetic, reading, writing, art, history etc. There is also pressure on schools and teachers to inculcate knowledge that can be tested and, because of this, schools may ignore what children actually know and treat them as though they had very little skill in language use. Unfortunately many adults, including some teachers, treat children as though they have a very restricted use of language.

What schools expect is that children easily move into language use that, while less creative, makes very different demands. Instead of being able to negotiate meaning and explore language with an adult in a familiar environment and in an individual manner, the child has to deal with a set of meanings that are determined already and do so as one of a crowd.

We have shown you that research – and probably your own experience – indicates that most children are very good communicators. What needs to be thought about now is the critical difference between home and school. School makes demands on children which home does not, although for some children the languag...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• Appendix
• Bibliography