The classroom context
The problem with this analysis is that defining communicative teacher talk purely in terms of the norms of communication outside the classroom ignores the context of the classroom itself, and what is communicative within that context. It thus presents us with a one-dimensional view of classroom talk, ignoring the fact that ‘the classroom is a unique social environment with its own human activities and its own conventions governing these activities’ (Breen and Candlin 1980: 98).

In what way does this uniqueness affect the discourse of the classroom, and teacher talk in particular? If we look at some of the characteristics of teacher talk in List B above, it is not difficult to see how they may, in fact, perform important communicative functions in the classroom context. Take the phenomenon of echoing students responses. The teacher may have perfectly valid communicative reasons for doing this, such as making sure that everyone in the class has heard what Student A has just said, so that a discussion can continue with everybody following it. In a large class, echoing by the teacher may be the quickest and most effective way of doing this. Equally important is the convention in many classes throughout the world that the teacher’s repetition of a student’s response acts as a signal confirming that the response is correct. The students understand this convention, and the teacher’s failure to observe it may well result in puzzlement, insecurity, and hence a malfunction in classroom communication.

In the same way, few (with some notable exceptions) would deny that providing feedback on form has a place in language teaching. If this is the case, there must be ways of providing it which are more or less effective, and more or less communicative, in the sense of communicating clearly and successfully to the students concerned. Rather than regard such discourse as essentially uncommunicative, it would seem more productive - and more realistic in terms of our expectations of teachers – to consider how to provide feedback in a way which is as communicative as possible in the context of the classroom and which assists in the attainment of the pedagogical purposes for which the students are there.

Teacher talk in action
The following fragment of a secondary school English lesson in Egypt, transcribed from a video recording of the lesson, illustrates the point that what appears to be non-communicative teacher talk is not necessarily so in the classroom context. The context is a third-year class in a mixed preparatory (lower secondary) school in Cairo. There are about 35 students in the classroom, seated at individual desks, facing the teacher at the front of the class. The teacher is preparing the students for a reading passage in their textbooks about the Egyptian writer Tahaa Hussein. The classroom interaction recorded here is heavily teacher-led, and thus very typical of the classroom discourse of large classes throughout the world: