Cazden, Courtney B. (2001)
Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning. 2nd edition.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Education is a social, interactive process in which language and communication skills play an important role. Effective teaching, dependent on effective communication, is critical to establishing the intellectual common ground between teacher and student that cultivates classroom discourse. Consequently, the language of teaching is an essential component of the learning process for both teachers and students.
In the first edition of Classroom Discourse, Cazden, Professor of Education Emerita at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an international specialist in child language and education, seeks to answer the following questions:
How do patterns of language use affect what counts as “knowledge,” and what occurs as learning?
How do these patterns affect the equality, or inequality, of students’ educational opportunities?
What communication competence do these patterns presume and/or foster? (p. 3)
The second edition, building on the research, concepts, and practice presented in the first, provides teachers and researchers with discussion articulating the complex social and intellectual issues that have impacted education. “Significant changes in the nature of the workplace and of civil society” (p. 4) as well as race, ethnicity, religion, and the conceptions of knowledge and learning have shifted the teaching emphasis from “products, facts or procedures to be learned by heart” (p. 5) to those that build on the development of higher order thinking skills. Cazden has done a masterful job of detailing the challenges for teachers and indicating techniques and strategies for addressing these issues and implementing changes in ways that benefit teachers and students.
Specific chapters explore wonderful transcripts of student conversations divulged in “sharing time,” excerpts from traditional and nontraditional lessons with discussion of the dimensions of structural and functional differences, descriptions of classroom discourse and related relevant topics, working with peers and computers, and equity and cultural issues and concerns.
The author presents a diverse variety of ideas, theories, analytical strategies, and empirical research representing many perspectives and viewpoints. Readers will appreciate the rich repertoire of relevant literature selected by the author based on “the importance of how the researchers did their research and what they found, their prominence in professional dialogues, and their position and perspectives as members of underrepresented groups” (p. 7). A list of references, and subject and name indexes complete the book. For those teachers and researchers interested in classroom discourse, this book is not to be missed. The discussions, research, and classroom applications give the reader a solid view of the diversity of classroom communication and the impact discourse plays on teaching and the learning environment.
