INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSE III: EDUCATION

Question 1

HOW DISCOURSE IN EDUCATION HAS BEEN STUDIED

Answer 1

empirical sites for discourse research in education (Rogers, 2005):

• Textbooks constructing beliefs, values and identities
• Gender in learning
• Meetings: administrative, special education committee
• Classrooms of different kinds: science, social studies, literature
• After-school programs
• Home schooling
• Policy analysis at local, regional and national levels
• Testing and standards
• Book order forms
• Critical literacy
• Multimodality and new literacy texts

Question 2

MANY DISCOURSE PARTICIPANTS

Answer 2

• Teachers / lecturers
• Children / pupils / students
• Local management (head teachers, heads of department, heads of year, heads of subject)
• Parents and families
  + institutions

Question 3

THE SPOKEN GENRE OF CLASSROOM DISCOURSE

Answer 3

• Traditional patterns (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975)
  
  • Teacher keeps one-at-a-time rule
  • Allocating turns and controlling questions
• Re-establishing order when necessary
• Turn-taking structure of IRF/IRE
  
  • Initiation, Response, Feedback/Evaluation
• Little (spoken) competition for floor, few overlaps
• Longer gaps than in normal conversation
• Negative feedback mitigated

Question 4

TYPICAL IRE CLASSROOM PATTERN

Answer 4

Teacher positioned as
- keeper of knowledge
- controller of the interaction
- evaluator of what counts as knowledge in the classroom
- > Institutionally and interactionally powerful role
- Pupils positioned as
- displayers of knowledge
- subjects of evaluation
- > Unequal distribution of communicative rights and obligations
Consequences of traditional classroom discourse structure:
- Familiar, structured pattern
- Pupils may focus more on figuring out what the teacher wants to hear than on learning
- Interactional troubles when pupils can’t fill the R slot appropriately

Question 5

NON-TRADITIONAL CLASSROOM DISCOURSE

Answer 5

Collaborative learning, drawing on Vygotskyan perspectives (1978);
Consequences of non-traditional classroom discourse structure:
- Opens up other possibilities for learning
- Locus of control can shift to different participants at different times
- Can be difficult to negotiate for students coming from classrooms with more traditionaldiscourse structures

Question 6

REASONS FOR CHANGE IN CLASSROOM DISCOURSE

Answer 6

• Educational research
• Social change – decline of deference
• Parents’ agendas
• Pupils’ needs, experiences, situations
• Policy commitments
  
  • At national level
  • At local level
  • Mediated through inspection requirements