Communication in the Classroom.

Introduction to communication in the Classroom.

As a teacher, you face almost continual talk at school, supplemented by ample amounts of non-verbal communication - gestures, facial expressions, and other "body language".

Often the talk involves many people at once, or even an entire class, and individuals have to take turns speaking while also listening to others having their turns, or sometimes ignoring the others if a conversation does not concern them.

As the teacher, therefore, you find yourself playing an assortment of roles when communicating in classrooms: Master of Ceremonies, referee - and of course a source of new knowledge.

Your challenge is to sort the roles out so that you are playing the right ones in the right combinations at the right times.

Often, you will indeed be more sincereand brief, and you will find that minimizing power differences between you and students is a good idea.

CLassroom events are so complex that just talking with students can become confusing. It helps to think of the challenge as a problem in communication - or as one expert put it, of "who says what to whom, and with what effect." (Lasswell, 1964).

In classrooms, things often do not happen at an even pace or in a logical order, or with just the teacher and one student interacting while others listen or wait patiently.

While such moments do occur, events may sometimes instead be more like a kaleidoscope of overlapping interactions, disruptions, and decisions - even when activities are generally going well. An example of this may be seen on the next slide.

Scenario of Overlapping  Interactions

One student finishes a task while another is still only halfway done. A third student looks like she is reading, but she may really be dreaming.

You begin to bring her back on task by speaking to her, only to be interrupted by a fourth student with a question about an assignment. While you answer the fourth student, a fifth walks in with a message from the office requiring a response; so the bored(third) student is overlooked for a while longer.

Meanwhile, the first student - the one who finished the current task - now begins telling a joke to a sixth student, just to pass the time. You wonder, "Should I speak now to the bored, quiet reader or to the joke-telling student? Or should I move on with the lesson?"

While you are wondering this, a seventh student raises his hand with a question, and so on.

One way to manage situations like these is to understand and become comfortable with the key features of communication that are characteristic of classrooms.

One set of features has to do with the functions or purposes of communication, especially the balance among talk related to content, to procedures, and to controlling behavior.

Another feature has to do with the nature of non-verbal communication - how it supplements and sometimes even contradicts what is said verbally.

A third feature has to do with the unwritten expectations held by students and teachers about how to participate in particular kinds of class activities - what will later be known as the structure of participation.

After completing this module you will be able to:
Identify the different purposes and functions which communication serves in the classroom.
Identify the different types of communications.
Understand and define the term classroom register.
Understand and define the term classroom register.
Identify the differences between how a teacher uses communication and how a student uses communication.
Manage different situations in class through applying the different functions and types of communication.

classrooms are different from many other group situations in that communication serves a unique combination of three purposes at once (Wells, 2006):
- content;
- Procedures;
- Behavior control;
content talk focuses on what is being learned; it happens when a teacher or student states or asks about an idea or concept for example. or when someone explains or elaborates on some bit of new knowledge(Burns & Myhill, 2004).
Usually content talk relates in some obvious way to the curriculum or to current learning objectives, as when a teacher tells a high school history class, "As the text explains, there were several major causes of the American Civil War."

But content talk can also digress from the current learning objectives; a first-grade student might unexpectedly bring a caterpillar to school and ask about how it transforms into a butterfly.

Procedure talk is not primarily about removing or correcting unwanted behavior, although certain administrative procedures might sometimes forget to follow a procedure.
Instead it is intended to provide the guidance that students need to coordinate with each other and with the teacher.

What can make classroom discourse confusing is that two of its functions - content and procedures - often become combined with the third, control talk, in the same remark or interaction. For example, a teacher may ask a content-related question as a form of control talk.

She may, for example, ask, "Jeremy, what did you think of the film we just saw?" The question is apparently about content, but the teacher may also be trying to end Jeremy's daydreaming and to get him back on task - an example of control talk.
Or a teacher may state a rule: "When one person is talking, others need to be listening." The rule is procedural in that it helps to coordinate classroom dialogue, but it may also control inattentive behavior.