Читать книгу Discourse analysis applied to english language teaching in colombian contexts: theory and methods - Wilder Yesid Escobar Alméciga - Страница 11

In this section I will include brief reviews about discourse analysis from the standpoint of traditional linguistic theory and from functional perspectives within the educational setting. The review will be as chronological as possible and will include feminist post-structuralist approaches to discourse analysis because of the educational settings and academic subjects these theories have normally dealt with (academic writing, mother tongue, etc.). In that sense, only two researchers will be quoted here. However, it is known that there exists a sizeable quantity of feminist literature appealing to the use of discourse analysis and other methods to analyze gender in several contexts that are not related at all to education. The review I am proposing is exploratory and does not pretend to be extensive in nature but rather illustrative of how general educational contexts have been studied through discourse analysis.

Bellack’s work (1966) could be placed at a foundational level for the studies of classroom language. It is a valuable piece of research not only for the interesting data analysis it provides but also for the theoretical framework used to support the research. Bellack bases his research on the concept of teaching cycle. The teaching cycle allowed him to describe classroom discourse “as current sequences in the verbal exchange among teachers and students” and this concept also allowed him “to describe the ebb and flow of the teaching process as it develops over time.” (Bellack et al, 1966, p. 5). The study was conducted while a unit of study was developed with 15 different high school classrooms involving 345 students. Bellack concludes that there is a strong correlation between dimensions of classroom discourse and dimensions of learning and suggests that research about discourse analysis in the classroom should address not only descriptive issues of such language but should also “describe the variety of outcomes that might be associated with classroom activity” (p. 235). Finally, the author asserts the existence of five rather general rules in the language game of teaching and frames language teaching within the theory of language games proposed by Wittgenstein. First, those rules imply that structuring, soliciting, responding and reacting are pedagogical moves and all of them are used in different proportions on a teaching unit. Second, it is the teacher who leads the game; students play a rather passive role in the game. Third, the teaching unit is about a substantial matter structured by the teacher. Fourth, players (teachers and students) use a referential approach to the subject matter and instead of interpretive tasks performed in the classroom there are just factual presentations and their corresponding explanations. Fifth, the degree of game success depends on the degree of commitment of both kinds of players: teachers and students. Interestingly enough, this research depended a lot on statistical analysis of frequency. Bellack’s major contributions to the field of discourse analysis are his concepts of teaching cycles and moves, both units of discourse. The latter unit included a hierarchical structure supported by different types of moves such as soliciting, responding, structuring and reacting which will later be redefined by Sinclair and Coulthard; these concepts will be explained below. The same research line was followed by a number of linguists whose work will be described in the following paragraphs.

In their seminal work, Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) point out that studies concerning classroom interaction started back in the 1940’s when some studies about conversation were also part of scholars’ interests. These two linguists define their analysis “as primarily sociolinguistic” (p. 9) under the influence of the theory of speech acts related to language functions. Potter (2004) argues that Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) took on the challenge of constructing a model “to make sense of discourse structures in a whole range of different settings” (p. 201). They followed Bellack’s concept of pedagogical move to characterize the limits among utterances. According to Bellack (1966, p. 6) classroom verbal behavior could be a language game. Any game implies a structure and requires from players strategic moves to accomplish goals as they play. Based on these ideas of moves to play a structured game Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) identified the initiation, followed by a response which is again followed by feedback as a typical classroom exchange. The next example shows how an exchange may have different moves:

Teacher	Can you tell me why you eat all that food? Yes.	Move 1
Pupil	To keep you strong.	Move 2
Teacher	To keep you strong. Yes.		Exchange 1
	To keep you strong.	Move 3
	Why do you want to be strong?	Move 4

Move 1 corresponds to a typical teacher initiation, a question in the example above, which is clearly limited by a type of boundary marked by the word ‘Yes ’; in oral speech, those boundaries could also be identified by rising or falling intonations. The initiation is followed by Move 2, which is a response provided by the student and corresponds to an archetypal answer that expresses purpose by using an infinitive construction. Finally, there is an immediate teachers’ reaction or feedback, represented by Move 3, which in the example corresponds to a variety of paraphrasing. The teacher repeats what the student has said, places a boundary again, and reiterates ‘to keep you strong’ to introduce Move 4 which is the initiation of an additional exchange. The example was taken from Sinclair and Coulthard (1975, p. 21) but the analysis is mine. It differs somewhat from the analysis provided by the authors for whom all the utterances in the example constitute a single exchange and to whom there appear to be only three moves. If I looked at the example again, I would have split the feedback move into two separate moves since the teacher is clearly marking a boundary between them. Yet, such minutia, 35 years later, does not affect the authors’ initial proposal and it would imply deeply re-examining Sinclair’s and Coulthard’s classification of interrogatives by situations and doing so is not the purpose of this chapter.

Additionally, moves are made of smaller units called acts; different exchanges construct a transaction and a group of transactions are part of a lesson. To sum up, acts, moves, exchanges, transactions and lessons are ranks that belong to the discourse level and each rank has its own structure realized by units at the rank below. Sinclair and Coulthard created their model while aware of the difference between what could be considered pedagogical and what could be called linguistic in a classroom situation. The former is a major unit like a course while the latter is a portion of speech or linguistic interaction with a specific purpose within a lesson, which is a discourse unit. Sinclair and Coulthard (1975, p. 24) illustrate those levels and ranks as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Levels and ranks of Analysis of Classroom Discourse (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975).

Non-Linguistic Organization	DISCOURSE	Grammar
course
period	LESSON
topic	TRANSACTION
	EXCHANGE
	MOVE	sentence
	ACT	clause
		group
		word
		morpheme

It is notable how Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) understand the level of discourse as a linking category between what is pedagogic (course, period, topic) and what is fundamentally grammatical (sentence, clause, group, word, morpheme).

Thus, there are a finite number of moves that are contained in a finite number of exchanges. Therefore, for Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) “Framing and Focusing moves realize Boundary exchanges [that are understood as exchanges with no pedagogical value at all, but they rather function as transitional exchanges between Teaching exchanges which are said to have pedagogical value] and Opening, Answering and Follow-up moves realize Teaching exchanges” (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975, p. 44). It should be recalled that the lesson is at the top rank of the discourse level. The lesson, understood as a complete pedagogical unit, is made of transactions consisting of exchanges. Figure 1 illustrates comprehensively the authors’ abstract system of analysis of the discourse level.

Figure 1. Sinclair’s and Coulthard’s System of Analysis of Classroom Discourse.

Figure 1 can be read using either a bottom-up or a top-down approach. I will explain it using the former. The teacher’s utterances ‘Well…’ and ‘Today we’ll talk about the accent’ structure, in the form of a marker, a silent stress and a meta-statement. They comprise two kinds of moves: respectively, the framing move and the focusing move. These two moves realize one possible boundary exchange in a lesson or a number of them. The moves of any pedagogical exchange are realized by acts, indicated in parentheses in the figure above. The teacher is making an opening move or initiation when eliciting an answer to ‘Do you know what we mean by accent?’ At this stage, a pupil uses an act of reply, stating ‘It’s the way you talk’ configuring the answering move or response. Finally, the teacher introduces an acceptance act and an evaluative act when saying ‘The way we talk/This is a very broad comment.’ This is the follow-up move or feedback. As a result, the opening, answering, and follow-up moves cause any pedagogical exchange or a number of them. A group of pedagogical exchanges combined with a number of boundary exchanges make up the lesson, which is Sinclair and Coulthard’s unit of study.

Sinclair and Coulthard’s study was conducted in an English-speaking mother-tongue environment with a class of primary school learners. Their main findings, after analyzing two types of texts from their corpus—a complete lesson and an excerpt from a lesson—are conducive to generalizations implying that discourse analysis studies should have a well-designed system of analysis. Additionally, they found out that most moves are initiated by teachers, and in that sense, a rigid structure of a class does not necessarily guarantee learning. Further studies in this area should be conducted. These two linguists also outline educational research topics or areas based on discourse analysis. These areas imply finding out how linguistic and social behavior are linked within the classroom, how to analyze different teaching styles, especially when the lesson structure is not rigid, how to give an account of peer talk, how to conduct cross-cultural studies, and how to cope with different kinds of discourse.

Discourse analysis applied to classroom language started generating more questions based on Sinclair and Coulthard’s (1975) findings. Scholars interested in the topic began to apply their model and to theorize about classroom language. One of those scholars was Cazden (1988) who defined the study of classroom discourse simply as “the study of that communication system” (Cazden, 1988, p. 2). Before Cazden’s study, however, the sociologist Hugh Mehan had published a major work on classroom discourse analysis.

Mehan (1979) offers a considerably critical piece of work on teacher-led lessons for the moment in which his research report was published during the late 1970s. It is interesting to notice that some sociolinguists replicated the structural analysis of classroom talk proposed by Mehan at that time. Mehan, as mentioned above, is a sociologist himself. His study was conducted in a public school where Cazden (1988), who has a transformational grammar background, was the leading teacher of the mixed grade 1-3 classroom being investigated (in California, USA). Mehan’s study “examines the social organization of interaction in an elementary school classroom across a school year” (1979, p. 1). The author adopted a constitutive ethnographic approach: “constitutive ethnographers study the structuring activities and the social facts of education they constitute rather than merely describing recurrent patterns or seeking correlations among antecedent and consequent variables” (Mehan, 1979, p. 18). The researcher, in order to frame his study from a theoretical point of view, followed four criteria because according to his analysis “the constitutive analysis of structuring school […] aim[s] for: 1) retrievability of data, 2) comprehensive data treatment, 3) a convergence between researchers’ and participants’ perspectives on events, and 4) an interactional level of analysis” (Mehan, 1979, p. 19).

The retrievability of data was handled by videotaping all the corpus of materials, which in this case comprised a total of nine lessons. Each lesson was given a name for analytical purposes and was transcribed. The transcriptions were also published as a strategy to facilitate retrievability. The comprehensive data treatment was conducted bearing in mind the goal of describing the organization of teacher-led interaction. To achieve this goal, Mehan “analyzed until a small set of recursive rules was located in the interaction that describes the corpus of materials in their entirety, and in terms that are oriented by the participants themselves” (1979, p. 33). This last procedure stresses the importance of following the criteria in order to make both researcher’s and participants’ perspectives meet. The analysis made the researcher conclude that both academic knowledge and social or interactional skills are entwined. In general, it was found that classroom organization is met by verbal and non-verbal actions conducted by the lesson members (teacher and students). Table 2 is a transcription provided by Mehan (1979, p. 38) which shows how students reply to the teacher by nodding, raising or lowering hands, moving around, etc.

Tabla 2. Sample transcription of Mehan’s corpus of materials.

Initiation	Reply	Evaluation
3:2T:	Now these four Please	Many: (move to Seats)	T: Good
3:3T:	Ok, this is some work for the people in these rows of chairs (gestures to first rows).	Many: (nod heads)	T: Good
3:4T:	Alberto, turn around so you can See the blackboard	A:(turns; teacher Assists)

Mehan’s (1979) initiation, reply and evaluation phases are present in all the transcriptions of the classroom structure in which the author distinguishes well-known components such as setting, opening, conducting, and closing the lesson. Those phases also hold different functions in the lesson. In the transcription above, for example, all the utterances in the initiation phase correspond to the setting of the lesson. We can see how the kinesthetic answers students provide in the reply phase and how the evaluation phase is structured out of the use of monosyllables. That is how both teacher and students construct an interactional sequence as preparation for another one in which the evaluation, mainly, plays a decisive role. Using the same excerpt quoted above, it could be argued that the use of such monosyllabic discourse in the evaluation phase contributes to balance the other two phases signaling the end of a sequence or a continuation. The first ‘good’ in the example shows the end to the instruction of arranging the rows as stated by the teacher and it is also a marking boundary to initiate a second instructional arrangement, which is evaluated by the word ‘good’ as well. “These pieces of interaction are sequences in the sense that one action follows another with great regularity. These sequences are distinctively interactional in that they involve the cooperative completion of activity by the participants involved. That is, teacher and students work in concert to assemble interactional sequences” (Mehan, 1979, p. 72).

This sociologist’s analysis goes beyond the description of common and ordered regularities of interactional sequences. There are also moments in the development of a lesson when what was planned is not working at all: that the turns of a student speaking are interrupted by other students, that students’ attention spans are lowered, among many other situations. All these practical circumstances influence the teacher’s choice of improvisational strategies to orient students within the flow of the lesson as it evolves. Mehan (1979) found that the combination of those improvisational strategies combined with turn-allocation procedures is part of a repertoire that belongs to an interactional mechanism. Classroom participants mutually conceive such an interactional system in order to maintain social order. According to the author, classroom participants “must bring their action[s] into synchrony with people who are already talking. To do so, classroom rules for taking turns, producing ordered utterances, making coherent topical ties, and participating in ritualized openings and closings must be negotiated” (Mehan, 1979, p. 169).

This co-construction of the classroom through interaction is also discussed by some of Mehan’s colleagues, among them Courtney Cazden, (1988) whose new definition of classroom discourse, mentioned above, is based on concepts expressed by Halliday (1978). In this concept, it is possible to “think of any social institution, from the linguistic point of view, as a communication network” (Halliday, 1978, p. 230). In that sense, Cazden (1988) concludes that “the study of classroom discourse is thus a kind of applied linguistics–the study of situated language use in one social setting” (Cazden, 1988, p. 3) where such a communicative network takes place. In the classroom, she mentions what is called ‘sharing time’: daily activity where children, (especially) inform peers about something new using a narrative. The author also points out a staged lesson structure in the different English-speaking educational contexts she explored but bears in mind the possibility of encountering variations of lesson structures and examines the relationships within context and speech. The author also explores the structure and variations of structures in lessons, peer interactions and teachers’ and students’ registers. In the first place, the researcher uses the concepts of initiation, response and evaluation to explain interactions in a well-staged and ordered lesson, but furthermore, she states that variations are possible and necessary according to learning goals, size of group and classroom participants’ backgrounds. Secondly, due to the limited proportion of moves initiated by students in the class, teachers should plan activities that involve students’ interactions among themselves. Thirdly, after analyzing some bilingual contexts, the author states that teachers’ registers should be adequate to create appropriate learning atmospheres for children and suggests that students need teachers’ help to learn how to express themselves intelligibly. She concludes that both teachers and students are “context-creating speakers” (Cazden, 1988, p. 198) and, since context is a never-ending, changing structure, it should be revisited constantly.

In particular, a somehow recent tendency as regards this topic has been promoted by feminist epistemology. One of the many interesting contributions from the feminist post-structuralist perspective on discourse analysis is MacNaughton’s (1988) idea of how discourse should be understood and analyzed. Discourse, framed in the feminist theory, is recognized as an everyday meaningful and social activity that goes further than just interchanging information by using utterances. According to MacNaughton, (1988) discourse implies cultural and historical categories by means of which meaning is constructed, life becomes praxis and social structures are constructed. Discourse consists, then, of three inter-related dimensions that refer basically to: 1) the categories used for understanding the social world, 2) the social practices which are derived from such categories, and 3) the investments of the emotional kind, which are made through social practice. Hence, discourse analysis “involves identifying relationships between individuals, social structures and institutions” (MacNaughton, 1988, p. 161). In her goal to provide educational gender equity tools, the author discusses two main types of activities for those interested in discourse analysis. Those activities entail processes of identification and evaluation. The former process involves the recognition of who the participants in the classroom are, the social practices they may share, the emotional meanings that may be conveyed through the use of language and how these three properties are intertwined in an institutional discourse and how they frame the institution’s educational practices. Consequently, the latter process refers to an assessment of the effects such educational practices have on how power relationships are shaped and their significance for different institutional discourses. MacNaughton’s (1988) ultimate idea seems to be the use of discourse understanding in an educational setting “to reflect critically on teaching practices for gender equity (MacNaughton, 1988, p. 162).” Her study was conducted in a mainstream English-speaking nursery school analyzing how staff could make decisions about gender equity work with children. This work, theoretical in nature, suggests that discourse analysis could provide nursery staff with observational focus to raise questions about educational practices and about how to set up teaching and assessment actions.

A reflection was made by Blackbourn-Brockman (2001) using discourse analysis to scrutinize the role gender manifestations play in written exercises. She is keen to examine both writing processes and written products. From a methodological standpoint, she categorizes female and male types of writing products according to previous feminist findings such as those obtained by Deborah Tannen (1990), Elizabeth Flynn, (1988) and Carol Gilligan (1982). Blackbourn-Brockman’s (2001) work is descriptive in nature and shows how students from a functional point of view use written discourse. The author mainly points out findings that reflect how male students always addressed the challenge of writing competitive documents such as proposals, fund-raising letters, etc.; and how female writers constantly remained within the same pattern choice of manuscript, writing noncompetitive documents such as newsletters. The dichotomy competitive/noncompetitive was defined in terms of how persuasive the documents were in nature. The author also points out serious classroom recommendations “to encourage a fuller awareness of gender, including the way gender intersects with other socially constructed values” (Blackbourn-Brockman, 2001, p. 29). Her research was conducted in an English speaking US high school.

Christie (2002) also takes a functional perspective towards classroom discourse analysis, but her view is framed within the systemic functional linguistic theory in various English-speaking educational contexts. She follows Halliday’s (1978) classic ideas of situated language and field, tenor and mode. Language is situated because it is produced within a particular context like a classroom. In such a particular framework, classroom participants use specific linguistic registers that reflect a type of social action (field) like eliciting, giving feedback, participating or replying. Classroom participants also establish relationships (tenor) between themselves and play roles like those of speaker and listener when performing specific types of social actions during a lesson. At the same time, classroom partakers determine textual patterns to be used in the interaction in order to contribute to a symbolic organization (mode) of the situation, which defines the classroom as a place to co-construct knowledge, for example. By appealing to all these theoretical constructs, Christie can formulate classroom work as a structured activity in which there are mainly regulative and instructional registers; classroom activity constitutes classroom genres, and those genres constitute macro genres. According to her, both classroom genres and macro genres are “staged, goal-driven activities, devoted to the accomplishment of significant educational ends. They are quite fundamentally involved in the organization of the discourses of schooling” (Christie, 2002, p. 22). In that sense she concludes, quoting Bernstein’s work, that it is necessary to examine pedagogic relationships in four related senses that embrace the analysis of the language used by teachers, the power relationships embedded in discourse, the special role of structuring pedagogic relationships conferred on teachers and the positioning students acquire in the pedagogic process. The latter is a relevant dimension to study since students are the ones “whose consciousness is shaped and who acquire various ways of behaving, responding, reasoning and articulating experience of many kinds” (Christie, 2002: 162). One type of experience is that of learning a second language. The next section will outline how discourse analysis has been applied to the analysis of learning English as second or foreign language.