Using Discourse Analysis to Improve Classroom Interaction

Lesley A. Rex, Laura Schiller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135966782
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

This accessible 'how to' text is about classroom interaction – how to study it and how to use that knowledge to improve teaching and learning. Actually showing what critical, constructionist, sociocultural perspectives on teaching, learning, and schooling are and what they can do, it makes discourse analysis understandable and useful to teachers and other nonlinguists.

Using Discourse Analysis to Improve Classroom Interaction:

• offers teachers the powerful tools of discourse analysis as a way of understanding the complex dynamics of human interaction that constitute effective, equitable teaching and learning
• guides readers step-by-step through how to build their interactional awareness to improve their teaching
• includes 'Try It Out' exercises to engage readers in learning how to respond to the social dynamics of their classrooms for the purpose of improving classroom interaction.

Proceeding from simple illustrations to more complex layering of analytical concepts, short segments of talk, transcribed to highlight important points, are used to explain and illustrate the concepts. By the time readers get to the complicated issues addressed in this text they are ready to deal with some of teaching's toughest challenges, and have the tools to build positive relationships among their students so that all can participate equally in the classroom.

Part 1
“Reading” Conversations, Opening Possibilities

For every complex problem, there is always an answer that is simple, complete, and … wrong.

H. L. Menken

Dancers must prepare for improvisation. That doesn’t mean choreograph. It means know the music, decide which planes to work on, whether the surface, the floor, or flight. They’ve just got to know exactly what to do, and then they can improvise.

Nigel Lythgoe, So You Think You Can Dance (7.12.06)

Chapter 1
Talking and Learning

Ideal Classrooms Filled with Ideal Students

Teachers tell us that in a perfect school world, students would be engaged learners who respect one another, extend themselves to learn, do their homework, and earn high scores on assignments. Tension arises when one or more of these dream students falls short of our expectations.

A recent tense conversation with middle school colleagues may sound familiar. It’s close to the end of the school year. Laura is meeting with a core team of department leaders and the principal. Here is what she remembers:

We’ve co-planned staff development this year and are meeting to set direction for the next school year. Complaint fills our small meeting room. The gist of the conversation went like this: The staff are not interested in talking about professional development. Other issues have to come first. The list includes first addressing: rowdiness in the halls, students not putting their names on papers, pencils not brought to class, homework not turned in, students not in their seats when the bell rings, and students not reading and following directions. Before the staff are willing to talk about teaching and learning, they want to develop a consistent approach for handling student behavior.

This conversation coincided with the school’s need to decide on a new five-year cycle of School Improvement goals. Despite a year of studying ways to revise teaching to increase student learning opportunities and access to a rigorous curriculum, until student management issues were addressed, teaching and learning would remain on hold. As a staff developer, I was in a difficult position. From experience, I’d learned that when it comes to setting School Improvement goals, as soon as managing students trumps teaching and learning, the school slides away from a culture of learning to a culture focused heavily on control as a prerequisite for learning. We tend to get what we focus on. On the hot seat, in a moment of difficult conversation, I hoped to re-see the conversation as an opportunity. If the teachers and I could ask a different set of questions, perhaps different possibilities could become available.

Reframing to Re-see Possibilities

Viewing teaching from a management frame is one way teachers “read” their practice.

Framing and Reframing: A frame is a theory. It is a way of categorizing and seeing the world. What sense we make of a particular situation depends upon our frame of reference. Framing allows certain interpretations and rules out others.

It allows us to see some aspects of our instructional context. However, a management frame is not the only way to read what is happening in our classrooms and schools. Because Laura was familiar with reading or seeing teaching through multiple lenses, she was able to offer an alternative reading of the end-of-year frustration with student behaviors.

What if, she suggested, instead of viewing the situation through what students were doing, they read the situation from what teachers were doing? The lens, or perspective, shifted from student to teacher, leading them to ask different questions. They put up a wall chart with two columns: Issues and Approaches.

Issues	Approaches
No pencils	Golf pencils
No homework	Mailboxes for repeat offenders

They took each concern separately and identified which students they were talking about. They listed the issue and who exactly concerned them. Then, they listed approaches they could use or were using to address each issue.

It turned out that a majority of students were not causing a majority of the problems. Only a few students in each class repeatedly left their names off their papers. Short golf pencils available for the taking when needed solved the pencil issue. By identifying the types of directions students were not reading or following, the teachers thought of a way to scaffold complex directions by creating T-charts of actors, actions, and effects.

Actors	Actions	Effects

Even so, some Department Chairs continued to resist, believing that their role was to prepare students for the world of work and building responsibility was an important educational objective. Students not prepared for class should be penalized and the staff needed to decide on consistent punishment.

Not willing to give in with so much at stake, Laura acknowledged the concern and pushed for additional approaches. Most of the teachers decided what would work best with specific students. When they asked each other what they did when students were not in their seats, the list of effective approaches grew. By shifting the lens from student behaviors to teacher actions, more solutions appeared. Adopting an approach that shifted language from “these kids don’t” to “we could try” promoted teacher agency. After a lengthy discussion, even reluctant Department Chairs agreed they could facilitate team conversations using Issue Approach Charts. The fraught conversation shifted from management issues to teaching and learning for School Improvement goals.

Why would reframing the situation from a student-centered lens to a teacher-centered lens ever have occurred to Laura in the heat of a difficult conversation?

She learned about reframing conversations from discourse analysis methods.

To reframe means to offer a different or competing interpretation of events, a different angle previously not considered.

Discourse: A discourse is a way a particular group of people interact with one another. Think of a discourse as socially communicative practices. How do we talk, look, gesture? How do we think? How do we write? What we know or do or say is constrained by the numerous discourse groups that influence and are influenced by our participation.

Every conversation can be “read” from multiple perspectives. In this case, the teacher perspective was focused on what the students wouldn’t do. By realizing there are multiple actors in any conversation and knowing that those actors can be positioned in many ways, Laura was able to shift from the actions of the students to the actions of the teachers. Instead of “students can’t,” she rewrote the script to read “teachers could.” Framing and positioning are central concepts in discourse analysis.

Discourse Analysis: The study of spoken, naturally occurring speech or communication.

Once we ask ourselves “who” is doing the action, we can imagine alternative positionings.

By shifting actors and actions, we can move from passive to active roles and open up new possibilities.

Positioning: Through conversation, people situate themselves and others with particular rights and obligations. Speakers take up or resist positions others create for them.

Have you ever used the phrase, “You’re putting me in an awkward position”?

Try It Out: Reframe a Conversation

The next time you engage in a difficult conversation related to teaching, ask yourself, “Is there a way to reframe this conversation?” Think about who is doing the action. Could you turn the conversation inside out by asking who else could be an actor? Try starting with “What if …” and see if new possibilities become available.

Between the Ideal and the Real

It is widely recognized that the classroom teacher is the single most important factor in student learning. For decades, researchers have studied effective teaching and effective teachers. Richard Allington (2002) and a team of highly regarded researchers studied first and fourth grade teachers to determine why some elementary teachers are exemplary and get stellar results from their students.¹ Allington and colleagues identified time, texts, teaching, talk, tasks, and testing as critical features of effec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1 “Reading” Conversations, Opening Possibilities
• PART 2 Curriculum
• PART 3 Difference
• PART 4 Accountability and Assessment
• Epilogue
• Notes