Classroom Discourse

Classrooms and education in general have been in a constant process of evolution in the last years. One evidence of it is that the practices and conceptions that the educational system requires, nowadays are more focused on students’ interaction and communication than in simply answering teacher’s questions or even worse listening and writing or repeating. Communication is taking a principal role in classrooms around the world and with it the analysis of this communication becomes something absolutely necessary.

Classrooms are scenarios where discourse is generated in many different ways and sharing time is something that promotes that discourse production. According to scholars, sharing time can be categorized in two groups: traditional and nontraditional. First, in order to talk about the traditional sharing time, it is pertinent to mention that it can be also categorized in 2 groups: topic- centered and episodic. The topic centered sharing time, as it is indicated in its name, refers to the conversations or communication moments in which the main focus is a particular topic. On the other hand, the episodic sharing time includes shifting scenes, the topics and ideas are changing constantly and it generates longer and more diverse conversations. Moving to the nontraditional sharing time, it is relevant to mention that it is more related to research and how the teacher decides to use the conditions that are naturally in the classroom and manage them in order to create opportunities of communication and in this way help the students to keep on an improvement process.

Talking about the lessons, there is also a lot to analyze in terms of discourse. Both in traditional lessons and in which scholars have called nontraditional lessons, there are a lot of particularities in the use of language, in the expressions used, in the specific reactions that any comment or situation generates, classroom shows with enough evidence that they are excellent sources at the time to analyze the discourse. There are several situations in which research has been focused at the time to analyze particularly how discourse works. One of them for example is the turn that people have to speak. In relation to traditional and nontraditional classes it is possible to stablish differences in the way in which the students perceive the right they have to talk, in traditional classes for example, the turns are generally managed by the teacher. The students are generally waiting to be asked or to be given the opportunity to say something. While in nontraditional classes it works in a freer and more dynamic way. Another situation that has been analyzed is related to questions. How questions work and what impact they have depending on the way in which they are asked. Cognitive questions for example have proved to generate dynamic environments in which the students are able to create and connect their own ideas, while closed questions even when they are useful, do not generate the same impact in the learners, because they are limited only to take a single position. However there are also cases in which even when a question looks like a closed one, the person who is asking it, generally the teacher, is waiting for something more than a one word answer.

The feedback time, the interaction among students and the development of class activities are scenarios in which of course language plays an essential role and discourse can be broadly analyzed. The interaction among students, particularly, when they are presenting their oral assignments or speeches has proved to have positive impacts in the other student’s comprehension and performance. Additionally, the relationship among students and computers and their functions has also been deeply studied, taking into account that it provides different kinds of interaction, for example among students through virtual devices or in the same room, between the student and the particular coding of the software and between students and the materials that teachers have prepared carefully for them.

Another really important aspect that worth to be analyzed is related to the cultural differences among students. Having homogeneous classrooms creates very particular situations in which the cultural aspects that students keep with them as part of their culture, make very interesting contributions to the interaction and to how the others are perceiving the differences.

To sum up, it is absolutely necessary to understand the importance that the need analysis has in educational context, because based on the understanding of how students are communicating, teachers or researchers (or both) have the opportunity not only to understand better the populations that they are working with, but also to develop their labor is a more complete and deep way.