The Persistence of the Recitation

Abstract

The classroom observational studies reviewed here are those concerned primarily with describing instructional practices, as opposed to describing the psychological concomitants of different practices. Several of the studies reviewed-favorably comparable to more recent research-apparently had been allowed to fade from the collective memory of the profession before the recent flurry of interest in observational research in the classroom, and we take pleasure in helping to resurrect them. In 1966, the authors assisted Professor Bryce Hudgins in the collection of data, including tape recordings of lessons, in the classes of nine junior high school English teachers (Hudgins and Ahlbrand, 1967; Hoetker, 1967). Because of a special interest of one of the authors in the work of Arno Bellack and his associates on the rules of the classroom language game (Bellack, et. al., 1966), forty-five hours of typescripts made from the tape recordings were coded according to selected parts of the category system devised by Bellack (Hoetker, 1967). The teachers in our sample, as may be seen from the comparisons summarized in Table 1, behaved very precisely according to Bellack's rules, and we raised three questions about this finding. First, why did the teachers behave as they did? Second, what were the effects of this sort of teaching upon the pupils? And,