Classroom Discourse Analysis

This second edition of Classroom Discourse Analysis continues to make techniques widely used in the field of discourse analysis accessible to a broad audience and illustrates their practical application in the study of classroom talk, ideal for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in discourse analysis, applied linguistics, and anthropology and education. Grounded in a unique tripartite "dimensional approach," individual chapters investigate interactional resources that model forms of discourse analysis teachers may practice in their own classrooms while other chapters provide students with a thorough understanding of how to actually collect and analyse data. The presence of a number of pedagogical features, including activities and exercises and a comprehensive glossary help to enhance students‘ understanding of these key tools in classroom discourse analysis research. Features new to this edition reflect current developments in the field, including: increased coverage of peer interaction in the classroom greater connecting analysis to curricular and policy mandates and standards-based reform movements sample excerpts from actual student classroom discourse analysis assignments a new chapter on the repertoire approach, an increasingly popular method of analysis of particular relevance to today’s multilingual classrooms

This textbook shows how classroom discourse can be applied to develop and improve teaching. Combining examples from everyday practice with theoretical approaches, it provides a comprehensive account of current perspectives on classroom discourse.

This book in the NCRLL Collection provides an introductory discussion of discourse analysis of language and literacy events in classrooms. The authors introduce approaches to discourse analysis in a way that redefines traditional topics and provokes the imagination of researchers. For those who have limited knowledge of discourse analysis, this book will help generate new questions about literacy events in classrooms. For those familiar with this research perspective, it will map diverse new approaches. “Offers examples of classroom discourse with analyses that researchers and practitioners can use as the basis for pursuing their own analyses.” —Rob Tierney, Dean, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia “On Discourse Analysis provokes us to rethink discourse analytic approaches as generative tools that can open up new ways of seeing language and literacy events in classrooms. The authors richly illustrate the complexity and potential of discourse analysis studies with cases that orient us to foreground the local with broader cultural, historical, and social relations in ways that make evident what it means to be human. On Discourse Analysis provides a fresh approach to discourse analysis studies.” —Kris Gutierrez, University of California at Los Angeles

This accessible "how to" book about classroom interaction offers teachers powerful tools of discourse analysis as a way of understanding the complex dynamics of human interaction that constitute effective, equitable teaching and learning and guides them step-by-step through how to build their interactional awareness to improve their teaching.

This second edition of Classroom Discourse Analysis continues to make techniques widely used in the field of discourse analysis accessible to a broad audience and illustrates their practical application in the study of classroom talk, ideal for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in discourse analysis, applied linguistics, and anthropology and education. Grounded in a unique tripartite "dimensional approach," individual chapters investigate interactional resources that model forms of discourse analysis teachers may practice in their own classrooms while other chapters provide students with a thorough understanding of how to actually collect and analyse data. The presence of a number of pedagogical features, including activities and exercises and a comprehensive glossary help to enhance students‘ understanding of these key tools in classroom discourse analysis research. Features new to this edition reflect current developments in the field, including: increased coverage of peer interaction in the classroom greater connecting analysis to curricular and policy mandates and standards-based reform movements sample excerpts from actual student classroom discourse analysis assignments a new chapter on the repertoire approach, an increasingly popular method of analysis of particular relevance to today’s multilingual classrooms

This practical guide to doing classroom discourse research provides a comprehensive overview of the research process. Bringing together both discourse analysis and classroom discourse research, this book helps readers to develop the analytic and rhetorical skills needed to conduct, and write about, the discourse of teaching and learning. Offering step-by-step guidance, each chapter is written so that readers can put the theoretical and methodological issues of classroom discourse analysis into practice while writing an academic paper. Chapters are organized around three stages of research: planning, analyzing, and understanding and reporting. Reflective questions and discourse examples are used throughout the book to assist readers. This book is essential reading for modules on classroom discourse or thesis writing and a key supplementary resource for research methods, discourse analysis, or language teaching and learning.

The authors present a social linguistic/social interactional approach to the discourse analysis of classroom language and literacy events. Building on recent theories in interactional sociolinguistics, literary theory, social anthropology, critical discourse analysis, and the New Literacy Studies, they describe a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis that provides a reflexive and recursive research process that continually questions what counts as knowledge in and of the interactions among teachers and students. The approach combines attention to how people use language and other systems of communication in constructing classroom events with attention to social, cultural, and political processes. The focus of attention is on actual people acting and reacting to each other, creating and recreating the worlds in which they live. One contribution of the microethnographic approach is to highlight the conception of people as complex, multi-dimensional actors who together use what is given by culture, language, social, and economic capital to create new meanings, social relationships and possibilities, and to recreate culture and language. The approach presented by the authors does not separate methodological, theoretical, and epistemological issues. Instead, they argue that research always involves a dialectical relationship among the object of the research, the theoretical frameworks and methodologies driving the research, and the situations within which the research is being conducted. Discourse Analysis and the Study of Classroom Language and Literacy Events: A Microethnographic Perspective: *introduces key constructs and the intellectual and disciplinary foundations of the microethnographic approach; *addresses the use of this approach to gain insight into three often discussed issues in research on classroom literacy events--classroom literacy events as cultural action, the social construction of identity, and power relations in and through classroom literacy events; *presents transcripts of classroom literacy events to illustrate how theoretical constructs, the research issue, the research site, methods, research techniques, and previous studies of discourse analysis come together to constitute a discourse analysis; and *discusses the complexity of "locating" microethnographic discourse analysis studies within the field of literacy studies and within broader intellectual movements. This volume is of broad interest and will be widely welcomed by scholars and students in the field language and literacy studies, educational researchers focusing on analysis of classroom discourse, educational sociolinguists, and sociologists and anthropologists focusing on face-to-face interaction and language use.

This book offers a model of classroom discourse analysis that uses systemic functional linguistic theory and associated genre theory to develop a view of classroom episodes as 'curriculum genres', some of which operate in turn as part of larger unities of work called 'curriculum macrogenres'. Drawing on Bernstein's work, Christie argues that two registers operate in pedagogic discourse: a regulative register, to do with the goals and directions of the discourse; and an instructional register, to do with the particular 'content' or knowledge at issue. Each can be shown to be realized in distinctive clusters of choices in the grammar. The operation of the regulative register determines the initiation, pacing, sequencing and evaluation of the overall pedagogic activity. The book sets out the its methodology in detail by reference to a number of classroom texts, and a range of school subjects. Overall, schools emerge as sites of symbolic control in a culture.