Communicative Competence, Classroom Interaction, and Educational Equity

The Selected Works of Courtney B. Cazden

Courtney B. Cazden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315465357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international scholars themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces—extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and/or practical contributions—so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers thus are able to follow the themes and strands of their work and see their contribution to the development of a field, as well as the development of the field itself. Contributors to the series include: Michael Apple, James A. Banks, Joel Spring, William F. Pinar, Stephen J. Ball, Elliot Eisner, Howard Gardner, John Gilbert, Ivor F. Goodson, and Peter Jarvis.

In this volume, Courtney B. Cazden, renowned educational sociolinguist, brings together a selection of her seminal work, organized around three themes: development of individual communicative competence in both oral and written language and discourse; classroom interaction in learning and teaching; and social justice/educational equity issues in wider contexts beyond the classroom. Since the 1970s, Cazden has been a key figure in the ethnography of schooling, focusing on children's linguistic development (both oral and written) and the functions of language in formal education, primarily but not exclusively in the United States. Combining her experiences as a former primary schoolteacher with the insight and methodological rigor of a trained ethnographer and linguist, Cazden helped to establish ethnography and discourse analysis as central methodologies for analyzing classroom interaction. This capstone volume highlights her major contributions to the field.

Section II

Classroom Interaction

My 1974–5 return to teaching young children in San Diego led to two published reports: first, my personal teacher’s account (Chapter 2 here); second, a book, Learning Lessons (Mehan, 1979). This was a qualitative videotape analysis of the interactions between myself as the teacher and the students, made by our research collaborator, Hugh (Bud) Mehan. Because of what I learned from both my return to teaching and this research collaboration, the focus of my teaching and research shifted after I returned to Harvard in the fall of 1975. While I continued to pay attention to individual students’ language development, I now studied that development as it was expressed and/ or stimulated by discourse events in the classroom.

Of course, not all the talk by students is, or need be, directed to the teacher. The first chapter in this Classroom Interaction section, Chapter 7, describes three forms of deliberately planned talk between pairs of students that differ in the roles the children take toward each other. In the first role, one child knows more than another and is asked to act as a peer tutor; in the second, the give-and-take of equal status collaboration is expected; in the third, children are asked to take turns being a resource for their partner.

The next two chapters, both co-authored with research associates or graduate students, document “spontaneous” aspects of the language knowledge young children displayed in their speech or writing. In Chapter 8, children telling a narrative of personal experience during Sharing Time clarify referents in their narratives without requests from their listeners. In Chapter 9, writers show understanding of aspects of punctuation they have not been taught.

In 1983, I made the first of many professional trips to New Zealand. I went initially at the invitation of Marie Clay, developmental psychologist and literacy educator at the University of Auckland. Clay is best known for designing the Reading Recovery individualized tutorial program for children who have a hard time catching on to reading. The New Zealand program was imported into the United States, Canada, Australia, and England. Reading Recovery was later criticized in some places for its per-child cost. But many of its design features justify close study and can be described after the fact as examples of theories of learning Clay was not aware of during its development. Together, we wrote “A Vygotskian Interpretation.” Later, I included Reading Recovery as one of four programs exemplifying the “Invisible and Visible Pedagogies” of British sociologist of education, Basil Bernstein. These theoretical explorations constitute Chapters 10 and 11.

In that same first trip to the South Pacific, I also went to Australia, the first of many such trips that continued through 2013. One was for a conference on “Imaging Childhood: Children, Culture and Community” in early September, 2005 (just as hurricane Katrina was destroying New Orleans back home). Because the conference was held in Alice Springs, Australia’s “red center,” I realized the focus would be on indigenous children. I spoke on “Two Meanings of Culture in Formal Education”: the home cultures of children and their teacher, and the more temporary culture that is created in each classroom community over the course of their year together. That talk became Chapter 12.

7 Peer Dialogues Across the Curriculum¹

Courtney B. Cazden
Cazden, C. B. (1980) “Peer Dialogues Across the Curriculum.” In Goodman, Hausler, and Strickland (Eds) Oral and Written Language Development Research: Impact on the Schools. Proceedings from the 1979–1980 Impact Conferences sponsored by IRA and NCTE. (unpublished).

Most research on language in the classroom has focused on interactions between students and their teacher. To some extent, this focus is a result of research technology. It is much easier to hear and record a classroom lesson, when speakers talk (pretty much) one at a time and the rest of the room is reasonably quiet, than to overhear what children say to each other as they work and talk by themselves. Moreover, to many observers as well as to many teachers, these lessons are the prototypical teaching event.

Such research is unquestionably important. In any institution in any society, interactions between young, naive members and older, more knowledgeable members have special importance; and we need to know what happens in such interactions in those special institutions for the transmission of culture that we call “schools”.

But schools also are contexts for interactions among children. Potentially, children are much more available to each other than the teacher is to any of them. As a physically crowded human environment, classrooms have important resemblance to restaurants and buses—where many simultaneous conversations are the norm. But classroom conversation among children is usually considered just a nuisance, literal noise in the instructional system, illegal behavior to be tolerated if it can’t be silenced. And even if tolerated, the social organization of classroom life can make it a rare event, an increasingly endangered species.

Before considering the intellectual value of peer dialogue across the curriculum, it’s important to think about the extent to which they are being endangered in today’s classrooms. For a general picture of classroom life, consider a recent observational study of primary school classrooms in England. In 1967, the British Plowden Report recommended the extension of what we know as “Infant School” methods into the older grades. Now, Galton, Simon and Croll (1980)² have completed the first large-scale observational study of primary classrooms in England: a study of 58 classrooms in 19 schools in 3 educational authorities. In part their purpose was to see whether what Plowden recommended, and what its opponents feared, had actually come to pass. As you read the following summary of what they saw, think about its fit to elementary schools in the U.S. Here is my shortened version of Galton et al’s “Conclusions and implications”:

Primary schools have changed over the last 15–20 years to more flexible forms of classroom organization. But the character of that individualized teaching (or interaction) is overwhelmingly (72%) supervisory or routine; it is not the probing, questioning guidance that the Plowden Report had recommended. The main reason seems to be that when children’s work is individualized in classes of 30, the teacher’s interactions with individual children are largely in the service of keeping the class as a whole busily engaged. When the teacher’s task comments and questions (those with definite cognitive comment) to either individual children, small groups, or the whole class are further divided into higher and lower cognitive levels, all teachers use more higher level questioning with the whole class, presumably because here the teacher can give more of her attention to the intellectual content itself.

With respect to peer interactions, two findings are clear: seating in groups has replaced seating in rows but only the setting has been socialized, not the work. And those teachers who do use small groups for instructional purposes are not “feeding stimulating ideas and questions to their pupils and they are not stimulating high levels of pupil-pupil interaction on the tasks at hand. . . . There is no clear evidence that cooperative group work of the investigative, problem-solving, discovery kind . . . features more than sparsely in our primary schools” (precis from Galton, et al, 198 0, 155–165; quotes from 159 with emphasis added-CBC.)

It is my impression that 2 kinds of social organizations predominate in U.S. classrooms today: either traditional, large group instruction, with the teacher in control at the front of the room; or highly individualized work, with children alone at assigned tasks, and the teacher’s role changed to monitoring and checking their individualized progress. Communities, schools and classrooms of course differ in the relative frequency of these two types of social organization. But here, as in England, interactions among children focused on intellectual school tasks seem to occur only rarely in our schools.

Why does it matter? Why should dialogues among children be valued? What is the contribution that peers can make to each other? With all the pressures on teachers today, is there really justification for arguing that task-related social interactions among children are an important intellectual resource, to be consciously included in the teacher’s plans?³

The most obvious justification is the value of such interactions for social development in a pluralistic society. It makes no sense (and seems almost dishonest) to “mainstream” children across one dimension of diversity and “integrate” children across another dimension of diversity, unless the social organization of each classroom ensures the kind of equal status interactions from whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Beginnings and Endings: An Intergenerational Conversation
• SECTION I Communicative Competence
• SECTION II Classroom Interaction
• SECTION III Educational Equity
• Index