What Does the School Lesson Reveal? A Corpus-Based Analysis of Classroom Structure and Teacher Discourse as a Basis for Practice-Oriented Methodological Tools

The aim of the study is to describe the structure of a school lesson and identify linguistic characteristics associated with effective teaching practices, based on recordings of real lessons in schools of the Russian Federation. Fifty-five audio recordings of lessons (Grades 5–9, six subjects, 2022–2024) were annotated for lesson structure, phonetic, lexical, and grammatical features, speech errors and self-corrections, and markers of communicative coordination. We used corpus methods, expert pedagogical annotation and automatic text processing. Focus group interviews and psycholinguistic experiments were conducted to validate linguistic features and clarify their role in students' perception of teacher speech. No statistically significant differences were found between more effective and less effective teachers in the number and duration of lesson stages or in the proportion of monologues. Qualitative analysis, however, showed that more effective teachers tended to maintain a faster overall lesson pace, make more coherent transitions between lesson stages, formulate lesson goals explicitly, include a clearly defined “setting the learning task” stage, employ motivational strategies, provide clear interim conclusions at each stage, and give prompt feedback. Their speech was also characterized by greater syntactic and lexical diversity, greater naturalness, a wider range of self-correction strategies, and more frequent use of vocatives. The findings provide a basis for the development of practice-oriented resources, including additions to classroom observation checklists, an infographic entitled "What's the Secret to an Effective Lesson?", and metrics for digital feedback services designed to support methodological practice and pedagogical reflection.