Discourse Analysis Of Languaging And Literacy Events In Educational Settings

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 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

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.

Ethnographic case study of a "low income"/"low literate" family negotiating language and literacy; explores discourse forces that impact their lives, issues of power and identity, current debates about connections between literacy and society.

Applying a languaging perspective, this volume frames the teaching and learning of literacy, literature, language, and the language arts as social and linguistic actions that generate new questions to make visible social, cultural, psychological, linguistic, and educational processes. Chapter authors explore diverse aspects of a languaging framework, the perspective of language as a series of ongoing and evolving interactional social actions and processes over time. Based on their research, the authors suggest directions for addressing substantive engagement as well as the marginalization, superficiality, and violence (symbolic and otherwise) that characterize the educational experience of so many students. Responding to the need to foster and support students’ intellectual, social, and affective worlds, this book showcases how languaging relations among teachers and students can deepen interactions and engagement with texts; enhance understandings of agency, personhood, and power relations in order to transform literacy, literature, and language arts classrooms; and improve the lives of teachers and students in educational settings.

Literacy researchers at all stages of their careers are designing and developing innovative new methods for analyzing data in a range of spaces in and out of school. Directly connected with evolving themes in literacy research, theory, instruction, and practices—especially in the areas of digital technologies, gaming, and web-based research; discourse analysis; and arts-based research—this much-needed text is the first to capture these new directions in one volume. Written by internationally recognized authorities whose work is situated in these methods, each chapter describes the origin of the method and its distinct characteristics; offers a demonstration of how to analyze data using the method; presents an exemplary study in which this method is used; and discusses the potential of the method to advance and extend literacy research. For literacy researchers asking how to match their work with current trends and for educators asking how to measure and document what is viewed as literacy within classrooms, this is THE text to help them learn about and use the rich range of new and emerging literacy research methods.

Leaders in English Language Arts Education Research contains autobiographical essays by leading English Language Arts scholars throughout the world. In this volume, English Language Arts is presented as a complex and porous discipline—intersecting with writing, literacy studies, multicultural/multilingual education, digital and multimodal literacies, critical and social justice pedagogies, teacher education, linguistics and second language learning, and, not least of all, subject English, including teaching literature and drama. Contributors are retired or current professors in the following countries: Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, South Africa, and the United States. ELA scholars often begin their careers as K-12 teachers and then become teacher-educators at universities; due to this, they work at the intersection of theory and practice throughout their careers. Therefore, this volume will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate English Language Arts Education students as well as to in-service English practitioners. This volume will also appeal to ELA researchers at all levels since it contains first-hand, personal narratives of well-established ELA researchers as they reflect on their own development as scholars.