Notes
1.This point was made forcefully by Brumfit at the VIIth MEXTESOL Convention in Acapulco, Mexico (October 1980). The approach to teaching outlined in his 1978 article, however, does seem to suggest an overall strategy.
2.I am grateful to Jane Willis for comments on an earlier version of the nature of communication and the communication continuum.
3.It is not being suggested that Developing Strategies is in some ways a 'bad' book; merely that it is (like other popular textbooks which it has been chosen as an example of) often non-communicative.

References
Abbs, B. and I. Freebairn. 1980a. Developing Strategies: Teacher's Book. London: Longman.
Abbs. B. and I. Freebairn. 1980b. Developing Strategies: Student's Book. London: Longman. Allwright. R. 1976. 'Language learning through com- munication practice' in ELT Documents 76.3. London : The British Council.
Brumfit, C. 1978. ' "Communicative" language teach- ing: an assessment' in P. Strevens (ed.). In Honour of A. S. Hornby. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Byrne, D. 1979. Teaching Writlng Skills. London: Longman.
Geddes, M. and J. McAlpin. 1978. 'Communication games 2' in S. Holden (ed.). Visual Aids for Classroom Interaction. London: Modern English Publications.
Johnson, K. 1980a. 'Making drills communicative'. Modem English Teacher 7.4.
Johnson, K. 1980b. 'The deep-end strategy in com- municative language teaching'. Mextesol Joumal 4.2.
Littlewood, W. 1981, Communicative Language Teaching: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morrow, K. 1979. 'Asking questions'. ELT Journal 33.2: 97-9.
Munby, J. 1978. Communicative Syllabus Design. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Widdowson, H. G. 1972. 'The teaching of English as communication'. ELT Journal 27.7:15-19.

Teacher talk and the classroom context
Richard Cullen

In the era of communicative language teaching, analyses of teacher talk typically focus on the characteristics that make, or fail to make such talk ‘communicative’. In most cases, the criteria for communicativeness are taken from what is felt to constitute communicative behaviour in the world outside the classroom. Thus, communicative classrooms are held to be those in which features of genuine communication are evident, and, by exclusion, classes where they are not present are considered to be uncommunicative. In the case of teacher talk, similar criteria might be used to assess such aspects of classroom language use as the kind of questions teachers ask their students, or the way they respond to student contributions. In this article, I argue that this analysis of teacher talk is oversimplistic, and ultimately unhelpful to teachers since its attempt to characterize communicativeness only in terms of features of authentic communication which pertain outside the classroom ignores the reality of the classroom context and the features which make for effective communication within that context.

Teacher talk:
quantity and quality
Until comparatively recently, teacher talk in the EFL classroom was considered to be something of a danger area for language teachers, and trainee teachers were warned to use it sparingly. ‘Good’ teacher talk meant ‘little’ teacher talk, since it was thought that too much teacher talking time (TTT) deprived students of opportunities to speak. Interest in teacher talk within the profession has since shifted away from a concern with quantity towards a concern with quality: while the question of how much teachers talk is still important, more emphasis is given to how effectively they are able to facilitate learning and promote communicative interaction in their classroom through, for example, the kind of questions they ask, the speech modifications they make when talking to learners, or the way they react to student errors (see, for example, Nunan 1989).