Teaching Language as Action in the ELA Classroom

Richard Beach, Faythe Beauchemin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000006940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores English language arts instruction from the perspective of language as "social actions" that students and teachers enact with and toward one another to create supportive, trusting relations between students and teachers, and among students as peers. Departing from a code-based view of language as a set of systems or structures, the perspective of languaging as social actions takes up language as emotive, embodied, and inseparable from the intellectual life of the classroom. Through extensive classroom examples, the book demonstrates how elementary and secondary ELA teachers can apply a languaging perspective. Beach and Beauchemin employ pedagogical cases and activities to illustrate how to enhance students' engagement in open-ended discussions, responses to literature, writing for audiences, drama activities, and online interactions. The authors also offer methods for fostering students' self-reflection to improve their sense of agency associated with enhancing relations in face-to-face, rhetorical, and online contexts.

1

Introduction

Language as Action in the ELA Classroom

Four twelfth-grade students—Sarah, Em, Pat and Kate—sit together in a group of four desks clumped together to conference on their papers. They’ve been asked by their teacher to look over and talk with each other about their argumentative essays on a topic of their choice relating to a modern-day issue. Sarah starts the group conference and quickly says, “I need to write my paper completely over” in a low, almost procedural matter-of-fact tone as she holds her gaze on her friends in front of her. She then slumps her body down, slows her voice, and in higher-pitched confession states, “I just like.” Repositioning how she holds herself in a confident, upright position she continues, “Do you guys like want to be like everyone else because you don’t want to be who you really are?”

As she talks her voice quickens and she languages her question in a tone that suggests she believes that the other girls in the group have had similar thinking. Maybe they have talked about this before or she feels that she is drawing upon thoughts that are common to teenage girls in her peer group. Sarah’s searching question significantly breaks through the writing event as a routine, academic procedure by inviting her peers to participate in a different kind of relationship and learning in which they discuss deeply felt issues that matter to her and her peers about belonging and becoming in the world as teenage girls.

Another girl in the group affirms her comment and says, “Yeah.” Hearing this affirmation, Sarah continues, “Cause like I do that all the time” as she motions her palms outward hands toward herself, underscoring the significance of that statement for her. She continues saying, “You know all those trend setting things” as she moves her hands outward. She concludes presenting her problem to her conference peers by confessing, “I just don’t know how to like” and then she pauses for a moment and unfolds her hands to emphasize her point, widens her eyes, and slowly languages “to say that in my paper.”

Her emphasis on “say it in a paper” underscores the divide between the ideas about her own self-expression that she wishes to explore and completion of the assigned argumentative essay. She then motions her hands to draw her fingers back toward her saying, “I know what I want to say.” Her words trail off with a lingering voice as if she is ready to say more. As Sarah has been talking, another girl, Em, has been sitting beside her and has been organizing her papers and water bottle on her desk while listening. Em interjects while shifting her body to lean into a gaze at Sarah from her side and says with a matter-of-fact tone that communicates she aims to be helpful, “Could you say it through a story?” This suggestion reflects one of the strategies that the students have learned through their argumentative writing project unit for completing their assignment.

Hearing the suggestion Sarah immediately moves her hand to her mouth and places her fingers curled between her nose and her lips. She presses then more tightly as she says, “I could.” Em looks directly at her for the uptake of her suggestion. Kate, sitting across the table grouping, says in a questioning tone, “I mean you could.” Sarah continues thinking about the suggestion and softly says, “I could and then” just as Em interjects with a confident, seemingly rational suggestion in a loud voice, “Like a really good hit home.”

As she talks she stresses and emphasizes each word as she underscores her perceived relevance of the suggestion. Kate—who originally affirmed Sarah’s previous searching comment about “not wanting to be who you really are”—now completes and echoes Em’s suggestion by completing her sentence “...hit home story.” What was once an attempt to language a relationship based on shared mutuality by bringing revealing and deeply personal ideas to the conference has now turned into a task of identifying a learned strategy to box and limit Sarah’s wondering into enacting an academic performance of completing the assigned argumentative essay.

Continuing to hold her hands over her mouth, Sarah’s hands are now curled over her mouth in a thinking pose. Em continues, “A story that goes.” Em then reaches out to touch Sarah’s arm and dramatically switches to a conversational almost gushing stylization of her voice while continuing her thought saying, “Oh my gosh that happened to you that happened to me” while pulling her hand back and shaking her head back and forth. Sarah still has her hand now curled in a fist over her mouth as Em continues, “Like I do that too.” Kate, sitting across from Sarah, adds in a monotone, procedural voice, “That would be a good piece of evidence right now.” Simultaneously, Em voices over Kate saying, “Cause this is going to be one of those essays that’s really emotional, like it hits on the emotions but then you are going to have the logic part that goes through it.” Em then touches Sarah’s paper continuing, “Then you are going to have the ethics part that make you want to be you” as Sarah moves her hand to tap her chest. She continues tapping her chest in a confident, assured tone as she says one-by-one, “Your morals and your values.”

The four girls continue to give Sarah strategies to craft her essay. Sarah questions whether she should use one story or stories from herself and her friends. The girls offer suggestions and then Em says in a confident, forceful tone, “As long as it hits on what your, what your point is. Does it make the point you’re trying to make? Like it has to be the evidence of that point.” As she talks she moves her hands up and down to the cadence of her talk to emphasize her suggestion. Sarah then nods her head in agreement with Em. A soft-spoken Kate across the table says, “What we’re saying when you fill it out…make sure you have concrete evidence” as she moves her hands back and forth side by side as she says “evidence,” emphasizing the importance of that point. Sarah then says, “Thank you” and her position deflates, hunching over her desk again. As they conclude with Sarah’s sharing of her argumentative essay, Em adds, “Everything is so much easier said than done.”

We share this interaction between Sarah and her peers to illustrate the limitations of how students often engage in English language arts (ELA) instruction based on responding to and creating text structures, what is known as a formalist approach that focuses on responding to or creating these text structures. Sarah’s peers deflect her interest in exploring larger interests in identity construction to adhere to the need to help her conform to the dictates of the writing assignment rather than explore her question of “Do you guys like want to be like everyone else because you don’t want to be who you really are?”

Adopting a Languaging Perspective: Using Language as Actions

In this book, we explore how a focus on language can never be separate from who we are to each other and how we are together. Through our talk we language connection and disconnection and particular ways of being and belonging together as illustrated by the underlying meaning of Sarah’s question that her peers do not want to pursue with her. Had her peers been interested in addressing her question, students would then have been engaged in collaboratively sharing their insights into issues of identity and relations to enact and explore novel, meaningful relations between them about their lives, as opposed to simply assuming their roles as students completing an assignment.

As reflected in our title, we focus on how students learn how to employ language as actions—as languaging to build relations with others. This shift to a languaging perspective moves from a traditional focus on language instruction in ELA classrooms to a focus on how people use language as a verb to creates relations with others (Linell, 2009). By “languaging” we mean a focus on using language as a verb—as social actions that people enact with and toward one another. Adopting a languaging perspective changes the understanding of language as a noun to that of a verb stressing the “doingness” and the activity of language as actions involved in interacting with others in speaking or writing. As Krista Tippett (2016) notes,

words have the force of action and become virtues in and of themselves. The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others. Words are one of our primary ways to reach across the mystery of each other.

(p. 1)

Languaging includes not only the verbal, but also use of emotions and embodied action to convey certain meanings in interacting with others, something we describe in more detail in Chapter 3. This assumes that emotions are more than personal feelings; they function as actions for enacting relations with others (Lewis & Tierney, 2013). People enact these emotions through use of embodied actions—body positioning, facial expressions, eye contact, use of gestures and touch, and, in digital interactions, use of images, videos, and emojis (Sidner, 2016). Sarah’s movement of her hand over her mouth and then curled up as a fist communicates her emerging resistance to her peers’ agenda of focusing on completing the assignment.

Using Languaging to Build Relations with Others

Adopting a languaging perspective assumes that to be a person is to be in a relationship with others who are acting and reacting to each other. A person cannot be a person alone but rather enacts being human through their connections and relationships with others—something Sarah is attempting to do with her peers. Importantly, enacting personhood through these kinds of languaging actions contributes to shaping the particular ways in which students and teachers are together for thinking about their work and their roles as well as issues of morality and rationality. As illustrated in Sarah’s experience, how they adopt certain personhoods can limit enacting relations, or, in other cases, can lead to enhancing personhood in classrooms as sites for the undeniable together-with-ness of the human experience.

Personhood also constructs the degree to which students are often defined as the autonomous individual. This emphasis on individualism can been found in a focus on students’ individualized test scores as well as outcomes and objectives pertaining to the learning development of students perceived solely as individuals in ways that served to exclude, as in Sarah’s iterations, a focus on relations based on mutuality and connectedness.

These notions of personhood are based on the need to consider the ethical dimensions of relations with others—what Buber (1970) defines as the state of being human as defined by relationships oscillating between the relations of “I–Thou” and “I–It.” “I–Thou” relations are rooted in a sense of mutuality and connectedness in which we bring our whole selves to relations with one another. “I–It” relationality reflects a state of objectification and represents the alienation of people from each other.

Sarah’s attempt to adopt an “I–Thou” relation with her peers through exploring the personal meaning of her life through her writing was mitigated by the need to adopt a more impersonal “I–It” relationship associated with conforming to completing a school assignment: “No longer is the discussion about understanding and seeing a part of oneself in the other. Sarah takes up the responses by Em, Pat, and Kate, as together all four create a series of I–It formulations of personhood (with each other, with themselves, and with their stories)” (Bloome & Beauchemin, 2016, p. 161). The students were more focused on completing their task of providing feedback to Sarah, while Sarah was initially more focused on achieving the relational goal of exploring issues of how having to conform to completing such tasks shapes her identity and relations with others. Sarah’s peers were also not engaging in “empathetic listening” by attending to

the speaker’s current state of being…to author the other, to hear not only the words as communicative acts but as history and art, as ethical claims. It is to ruminate on the other’s words from one’s perspective as outsider and to respond, thus positioning oneself in ways that allow others to respond as authors, too.

(Worthman, 2018, p. 46)

Had they engaged in “empathetic listening” of Sarah’s needs, they themselves could have engaged in potential co-authoring with Sarah of their own narratives portraying relational ways of being in response to her question about how one wants “to be like everyone else because you don’t want to be who you really are?”

Using Languaging Actions to Enact Relations in the Classroom

Contrary to the notion of people actions being driven by an autonomous, individual mind, languaging actions are always done with one another in a collaborative performance to build relations with others (Bakhtin, 1981). Our enactment through languaging reflects the fact that language “never is our own, but always already comes from the Other to which it returns. Language makes us live in and relive the thoughts of others” through a common dwelling in the same experiences or needs (Roth, 2018, p. 43).

This relationship between the person and the other involves an intersubjective relating of self and other through relational thinking and ways of being. In talking with others, students are continually anticipating the other’s responses to respond accordingl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Language as Action in the ELA Classroom
• 2. Languaging Actions to Enact Social Relations in Social Worlds
• 3. Enacting Emotions and Embodied Actions as Languaging
• 4. Relational Framing of Classroom Spaces and Time
• 5. Relational Framing of Classroom Talk-in-Interaction
• 6. Relational Responding to Literary Texts
• 7. Relational Writing for Audiences
• 8. Use of Relational Drama for Enacting Languaging Actions
• 9. Relational Framing of Online Interactions
• 10. Fostering Growth in Languaging Actions and through Professional Development
• Index