Teacher Talk and Student Talk: Classroom Observation Studies

The studies gathered and reported in this volume by Maria Lourdes S. Bautista represent the first sustained effort in this country going beyond one-time studies to fulfill the requirement of a masteral thesis or doctoral dissertation to study interaction in different classes of one institution and to look at the process for possible implications for language teaching. The pioneering set of studies uses both a qualitative description of the ethnography of speaking in a classroom setting and a quantitative counting of questions and answers summarized in percentage to yield proportions of teacher talk and student talk in different classrooms in literature, language, and English for Specific Purposes.
What the studies yield is insight into the actual instructional procedures that take place, the teacher behaviors, and the learner behaviors in terms of verbal responses.