Based on research on verbal behavior and the relationship between teachers' verbal responses and student achievement and success, this document discusses the role of teacher language in motivating students and provides examples of classroom techniques that aid learning. The first section reviews ways in which teachers' use of language can facilitate student achievement, highlighting specific phrase constructions from the most facilitative which focus on feelings to the least facilitative which give advice or evaluate. The second section discusses the importance in a critical-thinking classroom of providing intensive, structured student interaction, examining the principles of collaborative learning, the value of group learning and methods for designing collaborative tasks, the teacher's role in collaborative tasks, and techniques for creating an interactive classroom. The third section focuses on the language used in asking questions in the humanities, illustrating proper word choice for knowledge-, comprehension-, application-, analysis-, synthesis-, and evaluation-oriented questions. The fourth section describes the following 10 types of questions used in classroom discourse: open-ended, diagnostic, information-seeking, challenge/testing, action, priority and sequence, prediction, hypothetical, extension, and generalization questions. The final section provides sample group tasks, including four separate classroom activities ("Genesis Creation Stories,""20th-Century Backgrounds,""The Parthenon, Part-to-Whole," and "Dante's Encounters with the Damned") and a sample discussion worksheet for Virgil's "Aeneid." (MAB)