Presentation - Discourse Analysis

Jen Theesfeld

Discourse Analysis of Mandy Smith, Page 79

1. What are the essay's main points?

·         “One implication of (the research she has done/agrees with) is that describing what happens in a classroom literacy event requires attention to the moment-by-moment unfolding of the event and how people build on each other’s actions and uses of language” (80).

·         “Since my interest was on how the teacher and students together created learning opportunities, I focused attention on what counted as knowledge and how the teacher and students created opportunities to construct knowledge.

·         In brief, this meant looking for how the teacher and students built on each other’s message units in a way that defined what counted as knowledge in the lesson and on opportunities to extend the knowledge already presented.

·         In some cases, this meant examining how the teacher and students defined what counted as reading and as evidence for an argument or claim” (81).

·         Basically, Smith is looking at how teachers and students react to each other during a classroom discussion and wants to prove that the IRE (interaction, response, evaluation) method is effective because it adapts to the people involved (teacher and students).

2. What theories does it draw from (the authors should mention them straight out)?

·         Theories in sociolinguistic ethnography - Gumperz, 1986; Hymes, 1974

·         Theories in interactional sociolinguistics – Bloome et al., 2005; Green & Wallet, 1981

·         Recent discussions of discourse analysis that bridge the micro and macrocontexts of student lives in and out of classrooms – Bloome & Clark, 2006; Gee, 1996

3. What "moves" does the analysis make (in terms of the particular features of language it focuses on, and the particular frames it uses = micro -macro correlations, socio-historical context, etc)?

·         Interactional Unit 1 – “Warranting claims with evidence from the text is the explicit goal of the lesson”

·         “an extended form of the traditional classroom conversational structure of teacher initiation followed by student response followed by teacher evaluation (IRE).”

·         IRE is adaptable (student and teacher may both adapt)

·         Some criticize IRE (encourages only short responses at best), but the transcripts disprove them – IRE allows “extended response and higher level thinking and argumentation” – shows that most conversational structures are adaptable

·         Conclusion (unit 1) – it is important to find out how teachers and students are adapting conversational structures

·         Interactional Unit 2 – “looking at Interactional Unit 1 in the context of Interactional Unit 2”

·         Rather than a basic IRE, the teacher asks questions to which there may not be only one answer – instead, she asks ambiguous questions that allow the students to gain different perspectives. The teacher solicits claims from the students, but then asks them to provide evidence to back up the claims they have made.

·         Opportunities from Unit 2 requires the examination of unit 3 – it’s important to use the entire conversation to gain from the context, to get a feel for what the subjects are really saying

·         Unit 3 allows questions to be “refracted” – examined and recast in a different way or from someone else’s perspective. The teacher selects a different student for “permission to talk”, providing another set of learning opportunities.

·         However, the student continues her opinion and changes the direction of the conversation without prompting (provides her own evidence and feedback, refers back to the book)

·         The book wasn’t the main focus of the discussion, but merely a “prop for initiating such discussion”

·         Although the student initiates her own conversation, the teacher still validates her and continues with the student’s point – this proves that IRE is adaptable – none of the comments were seen as interruption

·         Line-by-line analysis of this interaction helps research what happens in classrooms and how learning opportunities are created

4. How is this essay organized (name what kind of material is in each section)?

                Smith organizes the essay chronologically, based on the transcript of the classroom conversation. Each section picks apart a particular piece of the conversation. She uses the findings from the first section to build the second, proves the second section by referring back to the first, and then proves the third section by referring back to her findings from the first two sections.  She actually doesn’t analyze 3/4 of the transcript, because she has already proven her point and/or they do not fit her specifications for what she wants to prove.

                She constantly restates her hypothesis in the context of the section of the transcript she is analyzing. By continually referring back to her point and tying it in with whatever she is saying, she makes her adaptation of the transcript more important than the transcript itself.

5. What is this kind of discourse analysis good for? or - what kind of questions can it answer?

                Smith wants to prove that IRE is an ideal teaching method. Her discourse analysis focuses only on how the conversation proves what she wants to say, and ignores ways which it does not. This type of discourse analysis is good for discussing new ideas, such as controversial or new teaching methods, which are better explained in the context of the environment in which they would be used. If worded correctly, I would assume that this type of discourse analysis could answer any kind of question regarding discourse. It’s like a lawyer calling someone to questioning at a trial – by asking certain questions, they can make a person admit to something they didn’t do, or didn’t want to admit to, or provide evidence that would otherwise have been kept secret. Smith only wants to prove one thing, so she ignores a large part of the transcript to describe something she is interested in. I think that this type of analysis is necessary sometimes, but would probably be questioned by other researchers quite a bit because it is so particular to the person’s ideology and is so obviously biased.