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SOME PROPERTIES OF FORMAL TEACHER
AND
PUPIL
CLASSROOM COMMUNICATION*
BRYCE
B.
HUDGINS
AND
WILLIAM
P.
AHLBRAND,
JH.
Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville
Educational researchers probably know as much about classroom communi-
cation
as
they do about any other classroom phenomenon.
It
has repeatedly been
shown that teachers in secondary schools tend to do two-thirds or more of the
speaking in classes (Bellack
et
al.,
1963; Corey, 1940; Flanders, 1960; Stevens,
1912). The several research monographs cited here were published over a span of
50
years, covering virtually the entire educational research epoch. These particular
decades, encompassing the most active years of the progressive era in education,
were characterized by many educational innovations. Yet, as far
as
it is possible
to judge from independent investigations conducted
at
isolated periods over that
50
years, the pattern of teacher and pupil speech remains essentially unchanged,
at least by innovations in teaching, classroom organization, and methods
of
teacher
education as we have known them over the last half-century.
This paper presents the results of an inquiry into the properties of formal
communication in several junior high school classes. By formal communication is
meant public oral contacts of teachers and pupils with each other.
It
excludes all
nonverbal behavior of both parties, as well as those verbal contacts that are es-
sentially audible only to the teacher and an individual pupil. The term includes all
statements by any person in the classroom that would ordinarily be audible to all
those present. The properties that we chose to investigate include the time spent
speaking by teacher and by pupils, the length of pupil classroom speeches, the
range
of
individual differences in frequency and length of speech, the distribution
of voluntary and non-voluntary pupil speeches and their distribution among three
categories: management, substantive, and prohibitory. The management category
includes references by pupils to the operations and procedures of the classroom,
the substantive category deals with pupil statements about the content of the
lesson, and the prohibitory category deals with matters of discipline and pupil
behavior regulation.
Jackson and Lahaderne (1967) reported that contacts between sixth grade
teachers and their pupils are unequally distributed. They explain that the children
who interact least frequently with the teacher have interaction rates similar to
one another, probably reflecting the necessity for some minimal frequency of
interaction between the teacher and every child, but that the highest interaction
rates are disparate, perhaps indicating that they are
a
function of some set of
individual differences among pupils. The present authors have attempted to
describe with some precision the nature of the individual differences among teachers
and pupils, and some of the similarities among them, in formal classroom communi-
cation.
Sample and Data Taking Procedures
Nine intact English classes, three at each
of
the seventh, eighth, and ninth
grades, within
a
single suburban junior high school constituted the sample. Each
class, approximately
50
minutes long, was audio tape recorded for five days. The
*Tabular summaries
of
the data discussed in this article can be obtained
from
the authors.