Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Language in the language teaching classroom
Are language teaching classrooms different from other classrooms? Craig Chaudron
(1988) cited figures from various sources which show that teacher talk takes up 
77 per cent of the time in bilingual classrooms in Canada, 69 per cent in immer-
sion classes, and 61 per cent in foreign language classrooms. Werner Hullen
(1989) found that 75 per cent of the utterances in German classrooms came from
the teacher. A massive amount of the language of the classroom is provided by 
the teacher.
The L2 teaching classroom is unique, however, in that language is involved in
two distinct ways. First of all, the organization and control of the classroom take
place through language; second, language is the actual subject matter that is being
taught; if the teacher asks ‘How old are you?’ in the second language, the student
does not know whether it is a genuine question or a display question practising a
question structure. A school subject like physics does not turn the academic sub-
ject back on itself. Physics is not taught through physics in the same way that lan-
guage is taught through language.
This twofold involvement of language creates a particular problem for L2 teach-
ing. The students and teachers are interacting through language in the classroom,
using the strategies and moves that form part of their normal classroom behaviour.
But at the same time the L2 strategies and moves are the behaviour the learner is
aiming at, the objectives of the teaching. The teacher has to be able to manage the
class through one type of language, at the same time as getting the student to
acquire another type. There is a duality about much language teaching which is
absent from other school subjects, because language has to fulfil its normal class-
room role as well as making up the content of the class; it functions on two levels.
N.S. Prabhu (1987) suggests dealing with this problem by treating the classroom
solely as a classroom: ‘learners’ responses arose from their role as learners, not from
Language and interaction inside the classroom 157

---

assumed roles in simulated situations or from their individual lives outside the
classroom’: the real language of the classroom is classroom language.
The teacher’s language is particularly important to language teaching. Teachers
of physics adapt their speech to suit the level of comprehension of their pupils,
but this is only indirectly connected to their subject matter. The students are not
literally learning the physics teacher’s language. Teachers of languages who adapt
their speech directly affect the subject matter: language itself. Like most teachers,
I have felt while teaching that I was adapting the grammatical structures and the
vocabulary I used to the students’ level.
But is this subjective feeling right? Do teachers really adapt their speech to the
level of the learner or do they simply believe they do so? What is more, do such
changes actually benefit the students? Observation of teachers confirms there 
is indeed adaptation of several kinds. Steven Gaies (1979) recorded student-
teachers teaching EFL in the classroom. At each of four levels, from beginners to
advanced, their speech increased in syntactic complexity. Even at the advanced
level it was still less complicated than their speech to their fellow students. Craig
Chaudron (1983) compared a teacher lecturing on the same topic to native and
non-native speakers. He found considerable simplification and rephrasing in
vocabulary: ‘clinging’ became ‘holding on tightly’, and ‘ironic’ became ‘funny’.
He felt that the teacher’s compulsion to express complex content simply often led
to ‘ambiguous over-simplification on the one hand and confusingly redundant
over-elaboration on the other’. Hullen (1989) found the feedback move was
prominent with about 30 per cent of teacher’s remarks consisting of ‘right’, ‘ah’,
‘okay’, and so on.
What does this high proportion of teacher talk mean for L2 teaching? Several
teaching methods have tried to maximize the amount of speaking by the student.
The audio-lingual method fitted in with the language laboratory precisely because
it increased each student’s share of speaking time. Task-based teaching methods
support pair work and group work partly because they give each student the
chance to talk as much as possible. Other methods do not share the opinion that
teacher talk should be minimized. Conventional academic teaching emphasises
factual information coming from the teacher. Listening-based teaching sees most
value in the students extracting information from what they hear rather than in
speaking themselves. One argument for less speech by the students is that the sen-
tences the students hear will at least be correct examples of the target language, not
samples of the interlanguages of their fellow students.