Teacher talking time is the proportion of a lesson the teacher spends speaking; student talking time is the proportion the learners do. The pair is used to describe the balance of a lesson rather than to set a target, and the useful question is what the teacher’s talk is doing, not simply how much of it there is.
The short version
TTT and STT are the two halves of one measurement: who is speaking. They became a standard part of teacher training because a lesson in which the teacher speaks for most of the hour gives fifteen learners about two minutes each. The trap is treating the total as the finding. What an observer should record is the category of teacher talk, because instruction, modelling and feedback are the job, and echoing, repeating and filling silence are not.
Part of the TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.
What the two terms actually measure
Teacher talking time and student talking time are observation categories before they are anything else. They were designed to be counted by somebody sitting at the back of a room, which is why they are coarse: they record who is speaking and nothing about whether the speaking is any good. The table below sets out what each term covers and what it leaves out.
| Term | What it counts | What it does not capture | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Teacher talking time (TTT) | Every stretch in which the teacher is the one speaking: instructions, presentation, questions, correction, feedback and filler | Whether the talk was necessary, clear or well timed. Two teachers can post the same figure and run very different lessons | Observation feedback, self evaluation, initial teacher training |
| Student talking time (STT) | Every stretch in which learners are speaking, including pair and group work where several speak at once | Whether learners produced extended turns or one word answers, and whether they spoke in English | The same, usually quoted as the counterpart figure |
| The ratio | The split between the two across a whole lesson, quoted as a percentage | The shape of the lesson. Ten minutes of unbroken teacher talk and ten minutes spread thinly are not the same thing | A prompt for discussion after an observation |
| Category of teacher talk | The same minutes sorted into instruction, model, feedback and filler | Nothing much. This is the version that produces a usable action point | Self evaluation, and the more useful half of an observation |
The British Council’s teaching knowledge entry puts the definition plainly: teacher talking time is the time that teachers spend talking in class, rather than learners, and student talking time is the time learners spend talking rather than the teacher. Both, it notes, are useful categories for observation of teaching or for self reflection about teaching. That is the honest scope of the pair. They are lenses, not verdicts.
How it is used in practice
The arithmetic that made TTT a standard training topic is simple. Steve Darn, writing for the British Council, puts it this way: if the teacher talks for half the time in a 60 minute lesson with 15 students, each student gets only 2 minutes to speak. Nobody learns to swim in two minutes a week, and that is the whole argument in one line.
The argument on the other side is equally real. The same source lists the forms of teacher talk that earn their place: personalised presentations, questioning, natural conversation and storytelling. In a monolingual classroom the teacher may be the only source of natural spoken English in the room, and roughly tuned teacher speech is comprehensible input rather than dead air. Silence is also doing work. Darn notes that it provides processing time between instructions, during explanations, while waiting for a student to respond, and during monitoring of activities, and that prompting or rephrasing is often counterproductive when the learner simply needs a moment.
So the practical use is diagnostic, not prescriptive. Declan Cooley, also writing for the British Council, describes the problem as leakage rather than volume: unhelpful teacher talk can leak out in many small, often unnoticed, ways, and he names four of them, which are repeating instructions, saying far more than the learner when receiving a contribution, asking long and elaborately polite questions, and echoing answers the class has already heard. None of those four is a decision a teacher makes. They are habits, which is why measuring is the first step and why Cooley says the first step to reducing teacher talk is simply being aware of it.
Reducing teacher talk is mostly a matter of changing the interaction pattern rather than exercising restraint. Group work with the teacher monitoring raises learner output at a stroke, because several learners speak at once. So does eliciting instead of presenting, demonstrating an instruction rather than narrating it, and cutting the echo. The stage where teacher talk reliably balloons is the presentation stage of a presentation, practice, production lesson, which is one of the standing criticisms of that shape.
A worked example: coding one recorded lesson
A teacher records a 60 minute upper intermediate general English lesson, fifteen learners, and listens back with a timer, marking every stretch of teacher talk into one of four categories. The total came to 26 minutes, or 43 per cent, which by the usual rule of thumb is unremarkable. The breakdown is where the lesson is.
| Category | Minutes | What it was | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instruction | 7 | Setting up three activities, twice each, plus two restatements after learners started anyway | Too long. Every set of instructions was given, then given again in different words, which teaches the class that the first telling can be ignored |
| Model and input | 6 | A short anecdote leading into the target language, plus two clarifications at the board | Earning its place. This is the personalised presentation the British Council defends, and it is the input the class would not otherwise get |
| Feedback and correction | 4 | Delayed correction of six errors collected during the speaking task, plus praise | Well spent, and the shortest category, which is the wrong way round for a class at this level |
| Echo and filler | 9 | Repeating learner answers, filling pauses, narrating what the class could see, and thinking aloud | The finding. Nine minutes is more than a third of the teacher talk and it is the category with no defenders |
| Where it fell | n/a | The single longest unbroken block of teacher talk, 4 minutes, landed inside the 12 minute group discussion | The real problem. Monitoring out loud collapsed the one stage of the lesson designed to maximise learner output |
The finding that matters is the last row, and it is not the one the percentage would have surfaced. Forty three per cent is a defensible total; four minutes of teacher talk inside a twelve minute discussion is not, because the discussion was the part of the lesson where the learners were supposed to be doing the work. This is the argument for coding the talk by category and by position in the lesson, rather than reporting one figure. A teacher told to talk less will usually trim the anecdote, which was the useful part. A teacher shown this table stops monitoring out loud, which costs nothing and returns four minutes of learner speech immediately.
Commonly confused
| Teacher talking time is not | The difference |
|---|---|
| Teacher talk | Teacher talking time is a quantity. Teacher talk is the language itself and its quality. Cullen’s 1998 argument was that the profession had confused the two and had started treating less talk as better talk, which does not follow. |
| A target of 30 per cent | The figures in circulation are training heuristics, not findings. They are useful for making a novice notice the problem and useless as a standard to be assessed against, because the right proportion depends on the level, the stage and the aim. |
| Wait time | Wait time is the pause after a question before the teacher speaks again. It is one specific cause of excess teacher talk rather than a synonym for it, and it is the cheapest single fix available, because extending it costs nothing and requires no planning. |
| Student talking time in English | STT counts learners speaking. It does not ask which language they were speaking or whether the turns were longer than three words. A class can post a healthy STT figure while producing very little English. |
| The IRF exchange | Initiation, response, feedback is the pattern of most classroom talk: the teacher asks, a learner answers, the teacher evaluates. It is a structural reason why the teacher holds two turns in every three, and it explains the figure rather than being measured by it. |
| A judgement about the teacher | A high figure can mean a teacher who lectures, or it can mean a beginners class that genuinely needed modelling, or a group that would not speak. The number raises a question. It does not answer it. |
The confusion that causes most damage is the second one. Once a ratio becomes a target, teachers optimise for the target, and the easiest way to cut teacher talk is to cut the explanation and the anecdote, which were the parts a learner could not get anywhere else. The glossary entries on drilling and the affective filter describe the same trap from other angles: a measurable proxy quietly replaces the thing it was standing in for.
Where the idea came from, and the argument about it
The measurement predates the terminology. Interaction analysis in the 1960s, counting classroom moves with an observation schedule, established that teachers do most of the talking. Chaudron’s 1988 review of second language classroom research reports the first language finding that teachers tend to do most of the talking, about 60 per cent of the moves, and concludes that the language classroom studies confirm the standard finding of roughly two thirds of classroom speech being attributable to the teacher. Sinclair and Coulthard had already supplied the structural explanation in 1975: classroom discourse runs on an initiation, response, feedback exchange in which the teacher holds two of every three turns by design.
The terms TTT and STT themselves belong to communicative language teaching and to the initial training certificates that spread it. If the goal is communicative competence, and competence is built by using the language, then a lesson in which learners barely speak is failing on its own terms. Swain’s output hypothesis in 1985 gave that intuition a theoretical footing by arguing that producing language, not only receiving it, is what pushes a learner to process grammar rather than meaning alone.
Then the correction arrived. Thornbury in 1996 had teachers analyse their own classroom talk and found the useful variable was not volume but the kind of question asked and the kind of response invited. Cullen in 1998 made the case most directly: the profession had turned a reasonable observation into a slogan, and the right criterion for teacher talk is whether it is communicative in that classroom, not whether there is little of it. Walsh took the argument furthest, showing in 2002 that teacher talk can construct or obstruct learner participation depending on how it is used, and building a self evaluation framework so that teachers could examine their own talk against the aim of the moment rather than against a percentage.
Where that leaves a working teacher is unglamorous and sound. The figure is worth knowing once, because almost every teacher who measures it is surprised. After that the question is which category the minutes fall into and where in the lesson they land. A teacher who has never counted is probably talking more than they think; a teacher chasing a ratio is probably cutting the wrong minutes. Every technique named on this page has its own entry in the TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.
Sources
Five of the sources below carry a link, and each of those five was fetched and confirmed live on 18 September 2026. The rest are cited bibliographically without a link, because this site does not publish links it has not checked.
| Source | Reference | What it contributes |
|---|---|---|
| British Council, TeachingEnglish | ‘Teacher talking time’, Teaching knowledge database. Read the entry at TeachingEnglish. | The plain definition used at the top of this page, and the recommendation that a teacher start by recording themselves to find out when, why and how much they and their learners talk. |
| British Council, TeachingEnglish | ‘STT’, Teaching knowledge database. Read the entry at TeachingEnglish. | The counterpart definition, and the observation that group work with the teacher monitoring is the standard way to raise student talking time in an activity. |
| Darn, S. (British Council, TeachingEnglish) | ‘Pros and cons of teacher talking time’. Read the article at TeachingEnglish. | The 60 minute, 15 student arithmetic; the four defensible forms of teacher talk; and the case for silence as processing time. |
| Cooley, D. (2014) British Council Voices | ‘English teachers, are you talking too much in class?’, 3 December 2014. Read the article at the British Council. | The four unnoticed leaks: repeated instructions, over long responses to learner contributions, elaborate questions and echoing. Also the point that awareness comes before change. |
| Chaudron, C. (1988) | ‘Teacher talk in second language classrooms’, in Second Language Classrooms: Research on Teaching and Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Read the chapter at Cambridge University Press. | The empirical baseline. Reports the finding of about 60 per cent of classroom moves made by the teacher and confirms roughly two thirds of classroom speech as teacher speech. |
| Sinclair, J. and Coulthard, M. (1975) | Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English Used by Teachers and Pupils. London: Oxford University Press. | The initiation, response, feedback exchange, which is the structural reason the teacher holds two turns in three before anybody has said a word too many. |
| Swain, M. (1985) | ‘Communicative Competence: Some Roles of Comprehensible Input and Comprehensible Output in its Development’, in Gass, S. and Madden, C. (eds.) Input in Second Language Acquisition. Rowley: Newbury House. | The output hypothesis, which is the theoretical case for student talking time rather than merely the intuitive one. |
| Thornbury, S. (1996) | ‘Teachers research teacher talk’, ELT Journal 50(4), pp. 279 to 289. | Teachers analysing their own classroom talk. Shifts attention from how much to what kind, particularly the type of question asked. |
| Cullen, R. (1998) | ‘Teacher talk and the classroom context’, ELT Journal 52(3), pp. 179 to 187. | The central corrective. Argues that the criterion for teacher talk should be whether it is communicative in that context, not whether there is little of it. |
| Walsh, S. (2006) | Investigating Classroom Discourse. London: Routledge. See also Walsh, S. (2002) ‘Construction or obstruction: teacher talk and learner involvement in the EFL classroom’, Language Teaching Research 6(1), pp. 3 to 23. | The self evaluation framework. Teacher talk is judged against the pedagogic goal of the moment, so the same utterance can construct or obstruct learner involvement. |
In the classroom
- Record ten minutes, not the whole lesson. Ten minutes is enough to expose the habit and short enough that you will actually listen back. Mark each stretch as instruction, model, feedback or filler.
- Kill the echo first. Repeating a learner’s answer is the largest single category of avoidable teacher talk and the easiest to stop. Nod, or ask the learner to say it again louder, and the class learns to listen to each other.
- Watch where your talk falls, not just how much there is. Teacher talk during a speaking task costs far more than the same minutes during a clarification, because it is competing with the learners rather than preparing them.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good ratio of teacher talking time to student talking time?
There is no figure that holds across every lesson, and the ones in circulation, usually 30 per cent teacher and 70 per cent learner, are training heuristics rather than research findings. A beginners class needs more modelling than an advanced discussion class. The ratio is useful as a prompt to look at a lesson, and misleading as a standard to be marked against.
Is teacher talking time always a bad thing?
No. The British Council lists personalised presentations, questioning, natural conversation and storytelling as forms of teacher talk that earn their place, and in a monolingual classroom abroad the teacher may be the only source of natural English a learner hears. What displaces learning is unplanned talk: echoing answers, repeating instructions and filling silence.
How do I measure my own teacher talking time?
Record one lesson on a phone and listen back with a timer, marking each stretch of teacher talk as instruction, model, feedback or filler. The category matters more than the total. Most teachers find the overall figure is defensible and the proportion of filler is not, which is a far more fixable finding than being told to talk less.
What is the difference between teacher talking time and teacher talk?
Teacher talking time is a quantity, measured in minutes or as a percentage of the lesson. Teacher talk is the language itself and its quality, including how instructions are worded, how questions are framed and how feedback is given. Cullen’s argument in 1998 was that the second matters more than the first, and that a good lesson is not identified by a stopwatch.
How do I increase student talking time?
Change the interaction pattern rather than trying to speak less. Pair and group work with the teacher monitoring raises learner output immediately, because several learners speak at once instead of one at a time. Demonstrating an instruction rather than explaining it, eliciting rather than presenting, and waiting several seconds after a question all help.
Does teacher talking time work differently in online lessons?
Yes, and mostly against the teacher. Overlapping speech is harder to manage on a video call, so learners wait for a gap and the teacher fills it. In a one to one online lesson the split is naturally closer to even than in a class of fifteen, so the figure to watch is not the ratio but whether the learner is producing extended turns or only answering questions.
Related entries
Next in the glossary: presentation, practice, production, whose first stage is where teacher talk most reliably expands, and the affective filter, which explains why a silent class is not always a class with nothing to say. The full TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary holds every entry. For the qualifications and career terminology that sits alongside the teaching vocabulary, see the Institute’s TEFL qualifications and terminology explained, and for where this sits inside a wider method, its guide to the communicative approach in ESL teaching. Teachers working online will find the balance shifts again, which the Irish institute’s guide to starting out online lists among the first habits to correct.
How to cite this definition
tefl.ai (2026) ‘Teacher talking time vs student talking time’, TEFL Teaching Methods and Classroom Techniques: A Teacher’s Glossary. Available at: https://tefl.ai/teacher-talking-time/ (Accessed: 18 September 2026).
Last updated: 18 September 2026 · Written by: Tara Bourke, tefl.ai · Review cycle: definitions are re-checked against their cited sources every six months.
