The Essential Teaching Exchange

In Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English Used by Teachers and Pupils, Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) present a system for analysing classroom discourse. This coding framework consists of five hierarchically ordered rank items. In descending order of scope, these are: the lesson; the transaction; the exchange; the move; and the act. Each of these items is further subdivided into a set of subcategories, as illustrated in Table 5.1.

Of the 22 classes of act, some of the most familiar include: the elicitation, or teacher's question, where the teacher asks a known-answer question to which students are invited to supply the correct response; the cue, where the teacher invites students to signal their willingness to respond, often through an established routine of non-verbal communication peculiar to the classroom context (e.g. 'Hands up'); and, on the students' side, the bid, where they compete to be selected to give the answer the teacher is looking for (e.g. by calling out 'Miss!' or 'Sir!').

This is the work which describes the structure of the 'essential teaching exchange', the initiation-response-feedback sequence, or IRF exchange for short. This begins with a teacher's question, such as 'What is the capital of Australia?', to which a student is selected to give the answer (e.g. 'Canberra'), which is followed by an evaluative comment by the teacher giving feedback on what the student has just said (e.g. 'Canberra, that's right', or perhaps 'John says it's Sydney – is that right?'). This is an important contribution to our understanding of classroom discourse, identifying a persistent and omnipresent feature of the way in which spoken language is used in lessons, and allowing us to recognise a type of interaction with which we are all familiar but had perhaps hitherto been unaware of. By drawing attention to the typical teaching exchange, the study also allowed later researchers to ask what alternative kinds of interaction might be possible in the classroom.