Discourse Analysis Of Language Literacy Culture And Teaching

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

An essential text on discourse theory and analytic methods, this book demonstrates the possibilities of using discourse analysis to better understand language, literacy, culture, and teaching. Each chapter provides coherent, extended examples of individuals engaged in the process of doing discourse analysis. The narrative approach highlights the individual experiences of the discourse analysts and provides a unique, inside-the-mind view of the process and choices along the way. Across the book, stories describe processes involved in analyses, including identifying aims, formulating questions, selecting discourse, transcribing oral and multimodal discourse, translating discourse, chunking discourse, choosing and applying discourse and other theory, generating and supporting claims, and communicating findings. Chapters also feature sidebars with key theories and methods, recommended readings, and additional resources. This book is ideal for courses on discourse analysis, qualitative research, or language, literacy, culture, and teaching. Readers are invited to imagine the possibilities for using discourse analysis to answer their own questions.

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 fully-updated new edition engages with topics such as orality and literacy, the history of literacy, the uses and abuses of literacy in that history, the analysis of language as cultural communication, and social theories of mind and meaning, among many other topics. It represents the most current statement of a widely discussed and used theory about how language functions in society, a theory initially developed in the first edition of the book, and developed in this new edition in tandem with analytic techniques for the study of language and literacy in context, with special reference to cross-cultural issues in communities and schools. Built around a large number of specific examples, this new edition reflects current debates across the world about education and educational reform, the nature of language and communication, and the role of sociocultural diversity in schools and society. One of the core goals of this book, from its first edition on, has been to develop a new and more widely applicable vision of applied linguistics. It will be of interest to researchers, lecturers and students in education, linguistics, or any field that deals with language, especially in social or cultural terms.

Uniquely bringing together discourse analysis, critical literacy, and teacher research, this book invites teacher educators, literacy researchers, and discourse analysts to consider how discourse analysis can be used to foster critical literacy education. It is both a guide for conducting critical discourse analysis and a look at how the authors, alongside their teacher education students, used the tools of discourse analysis to inquire into, critique, and design critical literacy practices. Through an intimate look at the workings of a university teacher education course and the discourse analysis tools that teacher-researchers use to understand their classrooms, the book provides examples of both pre-service teachers and teacher educators becoming critically literate. The context-rich examples highlight the ways in which discourse analysis aids teachers’ decision making in the moment and reflections on their practice over time. Readers learn to conduct discourse analysis as they read about critical literacy practices at the university level. Designed to be interactive, each chapter features step-by-step procedures for conducting each kind of discourse analysis (narrative, critically oriented, multimodal), sample analyses, and additional readings and resources. By attending to the micro-interactions as well as processes that unfold across time, the book illustrates the power and potential of discourse analysis as a pedagogical and research tool.

Links fields such as linguistics, anthropology, sociolinguistics and education to illustrate how the problem of literacy is embedded in a social and cultural context. Most of the essays are based on primary research and highlight important concerns about the political nature of literacy.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the use of microethnographic discourse analysis for researching, theorizing, and reconceptualizing the uses of language and literacy in educational settings. The authors apply an ethnographic perspective to discourse analysis to emphasize how teachers and students use spoken and written language to construct knowledge, opportunities for learning, and social relationships. The authors demonstrate how microethnographic discourse analysis at different levels of scale can provide deeper understandings into the nuanced, complex social interactions and relationships that exist in and across educational contexts, including meaning-making, literacy practices, power relations, and the social construction of personhood. Each chapter offers philosophically and theoretically grounded principles for using microethnographic discourse analysis and example cases that reflect the principles presented. Ideal for researchers, teacher educators, and teachers, this essential text on discourse analysis, languaging, and literacy provides a grounding to further examine critical questions challenging educators.

This book examines new functional approaches to language and education, and the impact of these on literacy in the classroom. The first section looks at issues of multimodality, in which the definition of a text is expanded to include not only that which is written down, but also the interaction of writing, graphics, and audiovisual material. The contributors explores ways in which language education can be expanded to deal with multimodal discourse, whether in children's books, in textbooks, or on the web. The second section looks at how critical discourse analysis and appraisal theory can be used as tools for assessing the effectiveness of student writing and literacy achievement, and also for helping developing writers to write more successfully. The final section argues that corpus-based studies of language have changed the way we see language, and that the way we teach language should evolve in line with these changes. This appealing survey of new directions in language and education includes contributions from internationally renowned scholars. It will be of interest to researchers in systemic functional linguistics, or language and education.