The Handbook of Classroom Discourse and Interaction

Numa Markee

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118531211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Offering an interdisciplinary approach, The Handbook of Classroom Discourse and Interaction presents a series of contributions written by educators and applied linguists that explores the latest research methodologies and theories related to classroom language.

•Organized to facilitate a critical understanding of how and why various research traditions differ and how they overlap theoretically and methodologically

•Discusses key issues in the future development of research in critical areas of education and applied linguistics

•Provides empirically-based analysis of classroom talk to illustrate theoretical claims and methodologies

•Includes multimodal transcripts, an emerging trend in education and applied linguistics, particularly in conversation analysis and sociocultural theory

Part I
Preliminary Matters

1
Introduction: Classroom Discourse and Interaction Research

NUMA MARKEE

1. Introduction

This book is written by and for educators and applied linguists who wish to get a comparative overview of research on classroom discourse and interaction. So it is concerned with both language learning and use, and how these domains of language are co-involved in understanding everything that routinely happens in language classrooms. More specifically, it is concerned with instructed second language acquisition (SLA) theory (see the eight chapters in the Cognitive–Interactionist and Sociocultural Theory Traditions in this volume, and Antón; Long, this volume), and is concerned with discourse analysis (DA) (see the 16 contributions to the Educational, Language Socialization, Conversation Analysis and Critical Theory Traditions in this volume); and how these perspectives overlap.

In addition, this book focuses on second, foreign and heritage language classrooms that are located in Canada, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Timor Leste, the United Kingdom, and the United States. However, in order to situate this volume within a broader educational perspective, some attention is also paid to academic and vocational classrooms in which content subjects are taught through the first language, as well as to the organization of talk in institutional contexts which lie somewhere in between traditional classrooms and completely informal contexts of language learning.

2. Rationale

The rationale for this Handbook is simple. First, even if we limit ourselves to English instruction—which this volume does not do: it also includes work on French, German, Spanish, Swedish and Mandarin data—the numbers of learners who formally study this language every day are huge. For example, in the People’s Republic of China alone, there were (as of 2012) 390 000 000 to 400 000 000 people who had learned or were learning EFL (Bolton and Graddol 2012; Wei and Su 2012). These figures comfortably surpass the total population of the United States, which has some 310 000 000 inhabitants. Reliable figures for the numbers of English teachers in China are difficult to obtain, but they are clearly in the 100 000s, if not more. And when we consider how many people study S/FLs of all kinds worldwide, we can easily see why understanding how classroom discourse and interaction work is a fundamental question for applied linguists and educators.¹ Note, however, that—as Appleby, this volume, compellingly argues—the way in which the use of English in particular actually plays out as a viable (or even desirable) resource for social, economic or cultural development in underdeveloped countries is an extremely complicated, not to say controversial, issue.

Second, while educators and applied linguists share common interests in understanding what happens in language classrooms, we probably do not read across the artificial boundaries of these disciplinary traditions as much as we should. This Handbook therefore aims to provide applied linguists and educators with an authoritative resource that enables us to compare—or more precisely, to engage in informed cross-disciplinary dialog about—how different perspectives may answer the question: ‘What does classroom discourse and interaction look like?’ In this context, Green, Castanheira, Skukauskaite, and Hammond (this volume) lay out detailed proposals for how to construct ethnographic meta-analyses of the literatures that inform each Tradition in this Handbook. The aim of such meta-analyses is to identify ‘how, if, when and under what conditions, and for what purposes different traditions can be brought together (or not), how the perspectives relate to each other (or not), and what each contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of what is interactionally accomplished in and through classroom discourse.’

3. Organization of the Volume

In order to provide such a comparative reading, the book is organized in terms of a preliminary Research Methods and Assessment section, followed by six ‘Traditions,’ specifically, the Educational, Cognitive–Interactionist, Sociocultural Theory, Language Socialization, Conversation Analysis, and Critical Theory Traditions. The chapter in the Final Words section chapter summarizes new research issues emerging from each Tradition. This comparative organization provides for a reasonably comprehensive overview of the most important contemporary approaches to answering the question posed above. At the same time, a careful reading of this Handbook will reveal how classroom research often transcends rather than merely conforms to a priori theoretical parameters and will thus show the extent to which the various Traditions are actually quite porous. Now this is not an original idea. Nonetheless, note that while Sociocultural and Language Socialization Theory are different because they emerged from Soviet developmental psychology and ethnography of communication, respectively, they also share a common core of Vygotskian and Bakhtinian ideas (see the overlapping references used by the contributors to the Sociocultural Theory and Language Socialization Traditions and by Antón, this volume). Furthermore, some researchers in, say, the Language Socialization Tradition are also ideologically committed to transforming current classroom practices (see, especially, Lee and Bucholtz; Talmy, this volume)—a perspective which is shared by Thorne and Hellerman (this volume) and some other sociocultural writers, and which is foundational to the Critical Theory Tradition (again, see the references used by the contributors to the Critical Theory Tradition section, and by Collin and Apple, this volume). In addition, researchers from different traditions often use methodological tools that cut across Traditions. So, it has become increasingly common for the fine-grained transcripts and methodological techniques of conversation analysis to be appropriated by researchers working within other Traditions (see Miller; Talmy; Thorne and Hellerman, this volume). And finally, there are certain intellectual themes that simply cut across the Traditions. Some of the most obvious examples include: 1) the trend to broaden the scope of terms such as the classroom (see Lindwall, Greiffenhagen and Lymer; van Compernolle; Kasper and Kim, this volume); 2) the emergence of multimodal approaches to discourse analysis (see Lindwall, Greiffenhagen and Lymer; Markee and Kunitz; Negueruela-Azarola, García and Buescher; Seedhouse; van Compernolle, this volume); and 3) interest in issues such as resistance (see, in particular, the interesting chapters by Miller and Talmy, this volume, who show that resistance is not necessarily a progressive or beneficial activity for the individuals who engage in it). These theoretical overlaps, methodological subtleties and cross-cutting topics complexify the disciplinary landscapes of research on classroom discourse and interaction in important ways and must be considered when trying to develop a comprehensive understanding of this important domain of education and applied linguistics.

Finally, let us now turn to the substantive issues of this chapter. First, what is DA, and relatedly, what is the difference between discourse and interaction? And second, if—as I argue throughout this chapter—the notion of context (a critical construct in all types of DA) crucially subtends all the Traditions in this Handbook, then what do we need to know in comparative terms about this theoretical construct in order to make sense of classroom discourse and interaction processes? The first question is answered in the next section, Discourse analysis, discourse and interaction; and the second is addressed in the final section of this chapter, Understanding context.

3.1 Discourse analysis, discourse and interaction

Skukauskaite, Rangel, Rodriguez and Krohn Ramón (this volume) show how these terms are actually used in the qualitative literature in education and applied linguistics, which is not necessarily the same thing as what these terms mean in the theoretical literature on DA. I therefore draw extensively on Mary Bucholtz (2003) (henceforth MB) to provide a theoretical overview of DA. I do this for five reasons. First, this chapter will allow us to develop a deep understanding of the diversity of approaches that count as DA work. Second, MB’s piece is an example of DA that is designed to fit a particular research program (feminist approaches to language and gender), and this idea of using particular kinds of DA to do particular kinds of work is crucial to the subsequent discussion of context in this chapter (see also Lee and Bucholtz, this volume for a Language Socialization perspective on how talk in and outside the classroom are related). Third, this discussion of MB’s work goes some way toward correcting the lack of feminist research in the body of this collection (see note 1). And lastly, I intend to use MB’s chapter as a foil for interspersing critical commentary on issues that are of particular interest to readers of the present Handbook.

MB notes that the terms discourse and DA are not amenable to broad, overarching definitions. In linguistics, discourse is typically a formal construct, and is treated as one of the four traditional levels of language (i.e., phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse). Thus, discourse is the level that specifically deals with how sentences are combined into larger units of spoken or written text and how it potentially organizes, or is organized by, these other levels of language. Other, more functional understandings of the term, according to which discourse is viewed as language in context (that is, how language is used in social situations), originate in developments in linguistic anthropology, sociology, text linguistics, and critical discourse analysis (CDA). These socially contexted approaches to DA are in general more useful than traditional linguistic accounts of DA for MB’s programmatic interests as a feminist discourse analyst.

Under the rubric of Discourse as Culture, MB discusses work in linguistic anthropology, which includes the ethnography of communication tradition pioneered by Hymes (1962, 1974) and the interactional sociolinguistics program developed by Gumperz (1982a, 1982b). Summarizing the contributions of these two linguistic anthropological traditions, MB notes that the former tradition emphasizes the fact that women are makers of culture, while the latter emphasizes how women’s discourse is produced by culture. She also point outs that, in this latter tradition, the primary point of comparison is between women and men, a perspective which has the effect of downplaying intragender variation and highlighting intergender variation in discourse (Bucholtz 2003, p. 50).

Under the rubric of Discourse as Society, MB reviews sociological work in ethnometho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Preliminary Matters
• Part II: Research Methodologies and Assessment
• Part III: The Educational Tradition
• Part IV: The Cognitive Interactionist Tradition
• Part V: The Sociocultural Theory Tradition
• Part VI: The Language Socialization Tradition
• Part VII: The Conversation Analysis Tradition
• Part VIII: The Critical Theory Tradition
• Part IX: Final Words
• Appendix: Transcription Conventions in Conversation Analysis
• Index
• End User License Agreement