Categorising teacher talk: way forward
With regard to defining the notion of ‘communicative teacher talk’, I a would suggest that rather than comparing the way teachers talk in the classroom with the way people talk outside it, a more productive approach would be to identify categories of teachers’ verbal behaviour in the classroom, and attempt to determine what it means to be communicative in each one, and what might constitute a communicative balance of behaviours for different teaching and learning purposes. The following six categories are adapted from a list of categories of classroom verbal behaviour in Bowers (1980), cited in Malamah-Thomas (1987), identified through a process of classroom observation and analysis of lesson transcripts:

- questioning/eliciting
- responding to students’ contributions
- presenting/explaining
- organizing/giving instructions
- evaluatingicorrecting
-‘ sociating’/establishing and maintaining classroom rapport.

In order to determine how communicative a teacher’s use of a particular category, such as questioning, is in a particular lesson, one would take into account not only the extent to which particular questions engaged the students in meaningful, communicative use of language, but also the pedagogical purpose of the questions asked, and the teacher’s success in communicating this purpose early to the learners. In the same way, a teacher’s classroom instructions might be assessed as being more or less communicative according to how clearly they were understood and followed, whether they were sufficient or even superfluous, and whether the teacher allowed opportunities for the students to seek clarification and to ‘negotiate meaning’.

There are three important advantages, as I see it, in this approach to describing and evaluating teacher talk. Firstly, the categories of verbal behaviour are rooted firmly in the reality of the classroom and on what typically goes on there. Secondly, the criteria for assessing communicative use of classroom language in each of these categories are likewise based on what it takes to be communicative in the context of the classroom itself, rather than in some outside context. The model of communicative teacher talk emerging from such an approach should thus reflect the primary function of teacher talk, which is to support and enhance learning. Providing a model of the way language is used for communication in the real world may be an important part of that function, but it is not the only way in which teacher talk supports language learning: it is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Thirdly, a model of communicative language teaching which recognizes the importance of the pedagogical function of teacher talk within the classroom context, and what it means to be communicative within that context, is likely to be a more realistic and attainable model for teachers to aspire to than one which insists on the replication of features of genuine communication as the only measure of genuine communicative teaching.