How seven college teachers and their students discussed Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" is described in order to discover basic information about how different teachers approach the teaching of the same work. All of the classes were surveys of American literature taught by experienced teachers. The 24 class hours were tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim, and this discourse was then classified at two levels--by means of content analysis categories developed by Arno A. Bellack for the language of high school social studies classes and by means of four categories devised by Alan C. Purves to measure literary response. It was found that college classes generally followed the rules formulated by Bellack's study of teacher-student interaction. College teachers were also found to be much alike in their treatment of content--they concentrated on review and interpretation of the work, making few personal statements and even fewer statements of evaluation or literary definition. Students closely followed each teacher's lead as to substantive areas discussed; the only area in which students seemed more interested than their teachers was the literary context of the work. (Author/DI)