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Intoduction

This chapter offers a selective overview of some of the chief analytic constructs that have been employed in describing classroom interaction and some of the topics of discourse study in educational settings. It closes by considering how insights from discourse analysis in schools can help to make them better.

1. Focus on Linguistic Practices in Schools

Since the early 1970s, research on language in schools has moved from a focus on discrete chunks of language to a concern with “communication as a whole, both to understand what is being conveyed and to understand the specific place of language within the process” (Hymes 1972: xxviii). Highly inferential coding of classroom linguistic activity receded (though it persists still) as scholars with disciplinary roots in anthropology, social psychology, sociology, and sociolinguistics began to focus on structural cues by which interactants understand what is going on (e.g. Gumperz and Herasimchuk 1975; McDermott et al. 1978; Mehan 1979). The elicitation sequence composed of teacher initiation, student response, and teacher evaluation (IRE), proposed as a basic unit of instructional interaction, was tested against empirical evidence. For example, Mehan et al. (1976) had argued that the evaluation turn was optional, but Griffin and Shuy (1978) found it to be obligatory: when it does not occur, some reason for its absence can be located in the discourse by reference to interactional rules.

2 Topics of Discourse Analysis in School Settings

The rise in discourse analytic study of educational settings is part of a broader embracing of qualitative study in a domain long dominated by behavioral theory and quantitative research methods. Reasons for this shift are complex, but a prime influence came from the imperative – moral, legal, and economic – to educate a diverse population of students

2.1 Clasroom interaction as cultural practice

Discourse analysis has been instrumental in locating the educational failure of children from certain groups within classroom practices, particularly where the cultural background of the teacher and the pervasive culture of the school is different from that of the students. Microanalysis of classroom interaction shows mismatched frames (Tannen 1993) and participation style in classroom routines, with the result that over time students accumulate individual profiles of failure that mirror the statistics for their groups derived from standardized tests.

2.2 Classroom discourse and literacy development

Sociocultural studies have been concerned especially with the ways in which students develop literacy, broadly defined to include the acquisition and increasingly skilled use of written language, the interweaving of talk and text, and the genres or discourses associated with school. Often literacy studies also consider cultural norms, with a focus on explicating contrasts between school and community that constrain literacy success (e.g. Gee 1989; Heath 1983; Scollon and Scollon 1981). Michaels’s work on “sharing time,” the class meeting that has typified elementary classrooms, identified two patterns of thematic progression in children’s narratives: a topic-centered pattern and a topic-associating pattern (Michaels 1981). In the topiccentered pattern used by European American children, a narrow topic is mentioned and fixed in time to start the story, with subsequent utterances adhering to it. In the topic-associating pattern more usual with African American children, a general topic is put forth and other topics are raised in relation to it. The styles differ both in what can constitute the topic and in how topics are developed. From the perspective of the European American teacher whose classroom Michaels studied, the topic-associating style was illogical and deficient.

2.3 Discourse study of second language development

Discourse analysis has become an increasingly attractive analytic method for researchers in second language development because of what it can show about that process and what it can suggest about second language pedagogy\

2.4 Classroom discourse as learning

In recent years, discourse analysis has played an important role in testing and extending the theories of Vygotsky (1978) and other contributors to the sociocognitive tradition (e.g. Wertsch 1991; Rogoff 1991). While Vygotsky’s thinking has been interpreted in very different ways (Cazden 1996), some of his insights have been highly influential in research on teaching and learning: that individuals learn in their own zones of proximal development lying just beyond the domains of their current expertise, and that they learn through interacting in that zone with a more knowledgeable individual and internalizing the resulting socially assembled knowledge.

2.5 School as a venue for talk

School is also a site of social interaction that is not academic. Eder’s (1993, 1998) work on lunchtime interaction in a middle school shows that collaborative retelling of familiar stories functions to forge individual and group identities that partition young people from adults. Here school structures and participants – teachers and students – are recast as background for other socialization work that young people do together through discourse.

3 Application of Discourse Studies to Education

Most work on classroom discourse can be characterized as applied research: by illuminating educational processes, the research is relevant to critiquing what is going on in classrooms and to answering questions about how and where teaching and learning succeed or fail.

4 Conclusion

This chapter touches on some methodological advances and topical interests within the corpus of discourse analysis in education settings. This corpus is by now encyclopedic (Cazden 1988; Corson 1997; Bloome and Greene 1992), and that is both the good and the bad news. The good news is that many of the educational processes that are the very stuff of school are being scrutinized. We now have methods and researchers skilled in their use for asking and answering questions about why we see the educational outcomes that fuel funding and policy decisions. The bad news is that discourse analysis and other qualitative methods are not widely accepted even within the educational establishment. One way of bringing this scholarship into the mainstream of educational research is through research and development programs that make the applications of discourse analysis very concrete. There is a need for more interdisciplinary collaboration in research design, data collection, and analyses requiring close attention to talk. The challenge is to avoid an atheoretical, merely commonsense approach to the study of talk and text and to knit together and build in the rather disparate work so far amassed.