Patterns of Language Use in Indian and American High Schools

One approach to studying the cultural norms and values that influence young people as they prepare for their life journeys is to focus on the verbal experiences they encounter at school, both in the classroom between teachers and students, and in the content of assigned textbook readings. This paper reports on an ongoing study of American and Indian high schools. Study 1 reports on observations of classroom discourse. We videotaped history and religion/morality classroom interactions in India (n = 14) and the U.S. (n = 6). Nine judges coded 3,762 Indian and 1,364 American utterances, based on the widely-used Flanders Interaction Analysis System. While the classroom interactions in many respects were remarkably similar across cultures, chi-square tests revealed that Indian teachers spoke more (p < .0001) and asked more questions (p = .001) than American teachers, while Indian students spoke less (p < .0001) and produced fewer student-initiated utterances (p < .0001) than American students. In Study 2, we undertook a content analysis of five high school history textbooks from each country. Two judges coded 648 American and 506 Indian sentences from the textbooks, focusing on the subject/agent and purpose/role features of the text. Despite many cross-cultural similarities, chi-square tests showed that in the American textbooks, the subject/agent was more likely to be an individual (p < .01) or social institution (p < .001) than in Indian textbooks. Thus, high school students’ classroom experiences in both cultures appear to reflect and support important societal values through both speech and writing.