The Research Process in Classroom Discourse Analysis

Current Perspectives

Kim Marie Cole, Jane Zuengler, Kim Marie Cole, Jane Zuengler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351541022
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume gives intellectual space to a range of current perspectives on classroom discourse research and provides a forum for conversations about the research process. Classroom discourse researchers from different theoretical perspectives provide five separate analyses of the same instructional unit in a high school biology class, using the same set of data. Interwoven with the five research reports are several conversations among the editors and researchers regarding specific aspects of the research process. These conversations illuminate some of the actual decisions that researchers make when looking at data and crafting their analyses.

This book is intended for graduate students, researchers, and teacher educators across the fields of applied linguistics and education who are interested in studying classroom discourse and, more generally, language-in-use. With its focus on both the research process and the outcomes of research, as well as on the theory-method relationship, this book is relevant for courses in research methodology, language in education, applied linguistics, discourse analysis, language development, and multiculturalism in the classroom.

1

Introduction

Jane Zuengler

University of Wisconsin—Madison

KimMarie Cole

State University of New York—Fredonia

Rhetoric takes short cuts which almost make one forget that scientific practice never takes the form of an inevitable sequence of miraculous intellectual acts, except in methodology manuals and academic epistemology. (Bourdieu, 1980/1990, p. 16)

One of us editors recently took a three-week family camping trip to Alaska. Since we were told to allow one full week of driving to get there, it was necessary, on the way out and then on the return, to keep moving and stay no more than one night at each campsite. We found ourselves noticing, wondering, and asking whether it would rain each night as we pitched our tent. Our concerns about the rain were not about comfort only. Although we would stay dry as long as we remained in the tent, a hard rain would make the camp breakdown in the morning a wet, muddy mess. And because there was no time to dry it out, the camping gear would be wet for our next night’s stay. Thus, our spirits sagged in direct relation to the frequency and amount of rain we encountered.

But others whom we met along the way did not necessarily experience the rain as we did. Campers who were remaining at their sites for longer than we were, and therefore did not need to pack up in the morning, reacted with much less dismay to even a downpour. A parent was overheard telling a child, “Well, today we’ll go to town and do stuff.” Those families had options and were able to arrange their time and energy to see the sights, do laundry, read, or even venture forth into the rain. When we queried the local folks at gas stations and stores along the way, “Do you think it’s going to rain?” wishing they’d say “no,” their answer instead was, “Hope so. We really need a good one,” having in mind the parched fields caused by the drought in their area. Clearly, there was no single meaning of “rain,” either in anticipation of a storm or as the raindrops fell. Instead, what rain was, what it meant to people and how they understood its implications, depended on who they were, their circumstances, and their priorities—in short, their perspectives.

Recently, in professional meetings and articles in the fields of applied linguistics and education, there has been a growing recognition that, like our experience with rain on the way to and from Alaska, one’s theoretical perspective influences the research process and its outcomes. Many are calling for increased perspective-taking by researchers and theorists (e.g., Cameron, Frazer, Harvey, Rampton, & Richardson, 1992; Coffey & Atkinson, 1996; Green, 1992; Rampton, Roberts, Leung, & Harris, 2002; Wyatt-Smith & Cumming, 2000). These authors have challenged researchers to acknowledge the methodological and epistemological decisions they make and to be more explicit in reporting them, because what one looks for certainly influences what one sees. As researchers make claims about findings, readers should know how those findings were generated, particularly in settings such as education, where an accumulated weight of findings can lead to shifts in policy or curriculum, with consequences for students’ learning and lives.

The above-cited authors have also called for people to look beyond their own methodological boundaries to discover what additional information can be found and recognize how one’s understanding of research can be enhanced by these broadened perspectives. Such moves have extended into real time and space, beyond the pages of academic texts, with conferences organized to further communication and collaboration across disciplines. The 1999 “Children’s Ways with Words” conference held at the University of New Hampshire, for example, brought together teachers, researchers, and administrators from a variety of disciplines. This event was sponsored by the Chèche Konnen Center, the National Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Mathematics and Science, and the Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence. Organizers and participants discussed aspects of engaging in these cross-disciplinary practices in their joint 2001 newsletter. In the field of literacy, Beach, Green, Kamil, and Shanahan’s (1992a) collection of research papers represents “a dramatic broadening and revision of disciplinary and methodological perspectives” (p. 2). Actions such as these and others offer clear and positive opportunities to expand understanding of the purposes and functions of the work in applied linguistics and education beyond the polarizing dichotomies that often plague academic discussions.

The specific research area comprising classroom discourse analysis, which is the focus of this book, can benefit significantly from such activities involving efforts to understand various perspectives and their effect on the research process. To begin with, definitions of discourse in general “span a considerable range” (Jaworski & Coupland, 1999, p. 3). Furthermore, although the number of studies that draw on classroom discourse in particular have been growing, authors do not necessarily articulate what “discourse analysis” means in their research. (See Gee, 2004, for a discussion of some of the variation in meaning.) Further complicating the situation is the fact that research in education, the domain of a number of studies of classroom discourse analysis, comprises “no single theory of methodology [that] of itself [is] sufficient to inform [it]” (Wyatt-Smith & Cumming, 2000, p. 295). And applied linguistics, another field producing classroom discourse analyses, has been described as “a canonical case of interdisciplinarity” (Candlin, 2001, p. 79; see also Pennycook, 2001). Consequently, what classroom discourse analysts must avoid doing is asking “which [tradition] is best, but [asking instead] what each contributes and what could not be known without that particular perspective” (Green & Dixon, 2002, p. 404). Given the boundary-blurring and heterogeneity of the fields, as well as the recognition that one perspective alone cannot tell the whole story (Beach, Green, Kamil, & Shanahan, 1992b; Green, 1992), we must recognize that “to do language research is to have one’s hands in a theoretical, methodological, and political cookie jar much bigger than oneself” (Harste, 1992, p. ix).

In the pages of this volume we embrace these challenges by offering intellectual space to a variety of perspectives on classroom discourse research and providing a forum for conversations about the research process. As such, we hope to make more transparent and articulated how one’s theoretical perspective influences the research process and the outcomes generated. In the same way that travelers and locals may understand a summer rainstorm quite differently from one another, we start, in this volume, from the position that there is no one objective reality to a given classroom event or to what it means. Reality is multiple: “different perspectives give us different ‘truths’” (Harste, 1992, p. x). As a consequence, in considering discourse in the classroom, researchers can gain a great deal looking through a number of lenses, rather than just one (see, e.g., Denzin & Lincoln, 1998; Green, 1992; Green & Dixon, 2002; Rampton et al., 2002; Wyatt-Smith & Cumming, 2000).

Classroom Discourse Analysis as the Focus of Inquiry

In focusing this volume on classroom discourse, we address a large and growing research area of special concern to the fields of applied linguistics and education. Each of the five research chapters includes discussion of research relevant to the researcher’s perspective. Thus, in this chapter, we provide only a brief and general review for the reader. Starting primarily in the mid-1960s, researchers conducted classroom studies of the “talk,” “communication,” “conversations,” “interactions,” or “discourse” (with the term varying across disciplines) among students and teachers toward understanding the characteristics and functions of their communications, how they shape their interactions, what becomes meaningful for them, and what the implications are for learning. In the 1970s and 80s, researchers such as Sinclair and Coulthard, Mehan, Cazden, Barnes, Green, and others were major, early contributors to the understanding of classroom discourse. By the 1980s, the research area had become heterogeneous and broad based (Cazden, 1986). Some of the reviews of research on classroom discourse illustrate the size and complexity of the area.

For example, in her 1986 review, Cazden covered 20 years of research (1965 to 1985), focusing on sociolinguistic work and identifying, in the United States as well as the United Kingdom, what she referred to as “strands” or groups of researchers in each of the countries. These include, she documented, teachers of English, ethnographers of communication, sociologists of education, and linguists. In a more recent review, Luke (1995) selected for discussion classroom discourse research conducted from a critical perspective. Consequently, much of the work concerned itself with the relationship of classroom discourse to societal structures that transcend the school. Whereas Hicks (1995) similarly included research on the links between classrooms and the outside, her selection did not restrict itself to critical perspectives and included other focuses such as the intertextuality of classroom discourse. Gee and Green, in a 1998 article, reviewed classroom discourse that takes a dialogic perspective, representing ethnomethodology and microethnography. These and the majority of other reviews of classroom discourse research primarily have addressed studies of native-language-speaking children. As such, they reflect the bulk of the research on discourse in classrooms.

From at least the 1980s on, however, the scope of concern, in both applied linguistics and education, has expanded. Discourse analysts look at language use in classrooms that are increasingly linguistically and culturally heterogeneous, in foreign or second language classes. They study contexts where the learners may be adults or children, and in many different locations. (For example, see Bailey & Nunan, 1996; Chaudron, 1988; Hall & Verplaetse, 2000; Johnson, 1995; Tarone, Gass, & Cohen, 1994.) Given such diversity, it is not surprising that although research has already contributed much to the understanding of classroom discourse, there is nevertheless much more to learn. Consequently, classroom discourse remains a lively, major, and growing focus of investigation in both applied linguistics and education.

Despite the long tradition of research on classroom discourse, very little research literature contains the metamethodological and critical conversations among researchers, called for by Green and Dixon (2002), that bring multiple perspectives to the same data set. One of the earliest collections is Green and Harker’s (1988) volume. Significant in its metamethodological focus and its gathering of multiple analytical lenses on classroom discourse, the majority of its contents, however, did not analyze or focus on a shared data set. Related to but not limited to classroom discourse, Beach et al.’s (1992b) collection of literacy research had a metamethodological orientation and multiple perspectives, but each of the studies had its own data set. A more recent literacy-focused collection, Wyatt-Smith and Cumming’s (2000) special issue of Linguistics and Education, asked researchers from various perspectives to analyze a subset of data from the authors’ research project in Australian schools. With the four resulting studies presented as individual reports, the issue did not include a general, synthesizing metamethodological discussion of issues and implications. And, unlike the present volume, Wyatt-Smith and Cumming’s authors, although conducting their studies within the same larger research project, were each given a different data subset to analyze and report on.

Perhaps the most recent related work was a special issue of the journal Applied Linguistics edited by Zuengler and Mori in 2002. The theme, “Microanalyses of Classroom Discourse: A Critical Consideration of Method,” had, as is apparent, a metamethodological focus, containing critical discussion, by several sets of respondents, of each of three microanalytic methods. Three research reports served as exemplars of the methods: “ethnography of communication,” “conversation analysis,” and “systemic functional linguistics.” As such, the reports offered readers an important collection of (some of) the major, current methodologies for researching classroom discourse. Moreover, respondents’ articles foregrounded issues as well as theory and method relationships within and across each of the frameworks. However, although all the research reports focused on classroom discourse, each was a study based on a separate project, and none included any direct metamethodological conversations among the contributors and editors.

Consequently, we believe this volume will help build what has been a small, underattended though significant area of concern in classroom discourse research. Furthermore, by offering five perspectives of the same classroom event (see below), we allow the reader to more easily determine each contributor’s theoretical assumptions and their relationship to the research process. In addition, we have included several exchanges among the contributors and the editors about important decisions made in the research process. Such conversations, rarely included in publications, are increasingly important in light of the heterogeneity of disciplines; the boundary-blurring of fields, paradigms, and discourses; and the complex choices of theory and method that those embarking on classroom discourse analysis research need to make.

We bring together in this volume a diversity of perspectives in a series of analyses of the same classroom discourse event: a project on asthma undertaken over the course of a semester by students and their teacher as they interacted in a high school biology class. In selecting one event, the asthma project, we follow the current understanding of classroom discourse as occurring in and, therefore, necessarily examined as social practices within specific contexts (Beach et al., 1992b; Duff, 1996; Toohey, 2000). Asking all the contributors to share the same data set created a forum that highlights multiple perspectives and processes while maintaining coherence of focus in analyzing the same event (see also Wyatt-Smith and Cumming, 2000, and a section of Green and Harker, 1988). The shared data focus makes possible the drawing of an unusually rich picture of the classroom discourse event represented by the asthma project. At the same time, the attention to research process enables us to critically discuss and illuminate the shared, overlapping, or contrasting assumptions, concepts, and findings, along with additional issues that emerge from these discussions.

It is important to clarify why we chose the particular event: the asthma project. As we explain below, each of the contributors to this volume were, at some time, members of the research team conducting the larger project. Although our overall research question was a general one about how students were socialized into subject matter over the course of the academic year, our research team’s attention kept coming back to the asthma project in particular. Even though members of our team brought varying viewpoints to the classroom, it seemed clear that with the asthma project, something quite important—and sad—was going on. Given our varied theoretical backgrounds, we sometimes found ourselves talking “through” or “past” one another as we conversed about the asthma project. However, we shared a concern: each of us felt a growing discomfort as the students’ engagement in learning through the asthma project appeared to be compromised. Choosing the asthma project as the object of study for the diverse set of contributors not only helps us have a better idea of each contributor’s perspective in the five studies, but contributes a rich collection of insights into how, and why, the asthma project went so awry.

What Data Have Been Used?

Theoretical Considerations

Admittedly, the sharing of a data set is not an activity undertaken lightly or without risk. In fact, the sharing of a data set has caused us to ask and answer numerous times precisely what we understand data to be, not only in the physical sense of videotapes, field notes, interviews, or transcripts, but also in terms of their role in shaping our analyses. Most of us who do research think of the data as the “stuff we go and get.” For those operating from a positivist perspective, there may be an objective truth that the data uncover. For others, the data themselves may represent a series of decisions and choices the researchers make, which influences not only what they see but how they are able to see it. In this light, data are highly personal and, depending on how they are used, political tools in the enterprise of knowledge production. One early reviewer of this volume questioned how we could bring together a number of authors who did not generate their own data with their particular studies in mind. After all, what data are and what they mean are questions all researchers must confront and address in their individual work. For the purposes of this volume and the ways that we strive not only to “report” findings from the data but also to interrogate ourselves and one another about how we arrived at those analyses, this question of data sharing is one that we acknowledge and encourage authors and readers to consider.

Although one could make the argument that an editorial decision to ask contributors to analyze a set of data (which we selected) from a larger longitudinal study (of which we were the primary conductors) creates a somewhat artificial research task, that is not the case in this collection. Each of our contributors was a member of our research team at some point during the 4 years we were in the field. Some were there in the early days as we encountered questions of camer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Cultural and Political Context of Schooling at Jefferson High School
• 3 The Functions of Lexical Items in the Asthma Project Discourse
• 4 Conversations on the Research Process: Scope of Data
• 5 The Contextualization of Participation in the Asthma Project: Response Sequences in Classroom Talk
• 6 Conversations on the Research Process: Defining Discourse
• 7 Narratives of Relevance: Seizing (or not) Critical Moments
• 8 Conversations on the Research Process: Questions of Reliability and Validity
• 9 Where Reform and Interaction Meet: Spaces for Appropriation and Resistance
• 10 Conversations on the Research Process: Contextualizing the Researcher
• 11 Apprenticing into a Community: Challenges of the Asthma Project
• 12 Concluding Thoughts: Applications and Implications
• Appendix: Transcription Conventions in Conversation Analysis
• Author Index
• Subject Index