If we use the descriptors of communicative and uncommunicative teacher talk outlined in the foregoing discussion, this would probably be classified as an essentially uncommunicative fragment of classroom discourse. There would appear to be few, if any, List A characteristics and plenty of List B ones. The teacher’s questions are all display questions, since their purpose is to find out what the students know about the writers he introduces, thus enabling them to display their knowledge. Feedback from the teacher to the students’ responses is either an acknowledgement that the answer is acceptable (e.g. by echoing, or by a comment such as ‘fine’) or an indication that it needs correcting (‘Er . . . blindness. Er . . . do we say Tahaa Hussein was blindness . . . ?‘). The extract also contains a good deal of echoing, and the structure of the discourse follows a very distinctive IRF pattern.

In the context of the classroom, however, one could argue that many communicative aspects of the discourse are illustrated here. The teacher is following a carefully structured sequence of questions leading to clear pedagogical goals - the teaching of the vocabulary items ‘novelist’ and ‘popular’. He tries to find out what the students know before telling them himself, and in the process responds on the spot to an unexpected student response (‘Shakespeare’), and makes a small teaching episode out of it. The feedback he gives the students is clear and unambiguous, and it is equally clear from the video recording of the lesson that he has their undivided attention. One could argue, too, that his use of echoing helps to ensure that this attention is not lost as he moves the class towards the vocabulary items he wishes to focus on. The teaching, in short, is effective, and the teacher’s talk - his use of questions and his feedback moves - is supportive of learning.

Within the context of the classroom therefore, and the norms of communication that operate there, it is surely meaningless and unhelpful to classify this, and other similar examples of pedagogically effective classroom discourse, as uncommunicative, simply because they fail to exhibit features of communication which are found in contexts outside the classroom. Communicative language teaching means communicative teaching as well as communicative use of language, and defining the notion of ‘communicative’ in relation to teacher talk must therefore take account of the teacher’s dual role as instructor as well as interlocutor.

I do not wish to imply from this that there is no place in the classroom for the kind of features of genuine communication described in List A, or that teachers will not benefit from an awareness of different ways of operating in the classroom involving, for example, the increased use of referential questions, and responding to the content as well as the form of what students say in class. The inclusion of such features might well enhance this particular teacher’s effectiveness by stimulating more productive and varied use of English by his students. To that extent, the study of discourses outside the classroom can serve to enrich the interaction and the pedagogical effectiveness of what goes on inside the classroom. But we should not conclude from this that the absence of features of communication characteristic of discourses in the world outside the classroom automatically renders classroom discourse uncommunicative, since to do so is to ignore the peculiar nature and purpose of the classroom encounter.