The view of teaching which has been widely held in the west for centuries is a predominantly verbal one. A teacher does things such as lecturing, explaining,
asking questions and telling students to do things. Students have a
largely complementary role of listening, understanding, answering and
basically responsing to the initiative of the teacher. Many people also hold
some version of the view that people learn things by expressing them in their
own words. This is why we distrust students' work if it is copied verbatim
from a book. And it appears reasonable that "talking through" a problem can
often clarify it. A widely held and often taken for granted view of classroom
behaviour is therefore based on some version of teacher-student verbal
dialogue, with a high value placed on the public, explicit, verbal expression
of knowledge. This view of education, with its equation of teaching and
talking, is of course, culture-specific. Not all cultures take it for granted that
the verbal channel is the primary channel for learning, but believe that
learning occurs through silent observation, participation, self-initiated testing,
experience, and so on. In addition, the western model of teaching has
often been attacked by educational theorists, but it has proved remarkably
resistant to such criticism. In a culture such as ours which assumes a close
relationship between teaching, learning and talking, an obvious application
of discourse analysis is to analyse the teacher-student classroom dialogue
itself. This is the educational process as it is experienced day by day by most
students. It is important that teachers have systematic ways of analysing
their own daily professional behaviour; and such reflection on the process of
classroom interaction itself is becoming a standard component of teachertraining
courses. For example, micro-teaching is now a common teachertraining
technique. Such training is also becoming increasingly common for
doctors, managers and other professionals.