Exploring the nature of classroom discourse in grammar class: Systemic functional grammar

In language classes all over the world instructional inputs are exposed to the students from many sources such as teachers talk, textbooks, multimedia sources, teacher made materials and etc. In a large percent of situations, it is the teacher who provides most of the instructional input to the students by his or her talk in the classroom. Both teacher s instructional talk and other sources of teaching, have specific situational and linguistics properties that distinguish them from other means of meaning making. In order to improve the classroom discourse, we have to consider these specific situational and linguistics properties. According to Young and Nguyen (2002), the specific question of how teachers construct meaning is a piece of more general question of the relationship between language and human experience. They argue that it is important to know how the language of a particular human activity influences the way people participate in that activity and understand it. The assumption is that the way language is constructed in a particular activity can be directly related to the experiences that the participants have of that activity.