Language, Learning, Context

Talking the Talk

Wolff-Michael Roth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136981784
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In what way do educators understand the language they use to make sense of the educational environment?

How does language enable educators and how can they consciously make the most of its potential?

Using the right language and setting the correct tone in the school classroom has repercussions for all involved; whether it affects the linguistic development of a student or the effective delivery of a lesson, language plays an important factor in any educational context.

As such, this innovative book focuses right at the heart of learning, arguing that current theories of speech in classrooms do not, and cannot, capture the essentially passive aspects of talking. Until now, these verbal and physical expressions of communication have been left untheorised, leaving the potential of an entire secondary area of language untapped.

Exploring his argument along three clear, but interrelated lines of investigation, the author focuses on our understanding, on language itself and finally on communication. Thus he argues:

• that language is unintentional and our understanding of it is limited
• as soon as we speak, language appears beyond us in a highly singular, situated context
• that communication cannot be reduced to the simple production of words.

Building on the work of linguistic philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Donald Davidson, Paul Ricœur and Jacques Derrida, these salient points are further elaborated to fully develop the relationship between thinking and talk in educational settings.

This invaluable book makes recommendations for the praxis of teaching and will appeal to students, researchers, and practising science and mathematics teachers, as well as those with interests in language and literacy.

1
Walking the walk

Wie west die Sprache als Sprache? Wir antworten: Die Sprache spricht … Der Sprache nachdenken verlangt somit, daß wir auf das Sprechen der Sprache eingehen. [How does language live/exist as language? Language speaks … To meditate on language therefore requires that we enter into/engage with the speaking of language.]

(Heidegger 1985: 10, original emphasis)

In everyday educational endeavors—teaching, learning, or doing research— we use language without reflecting on its nature and without reflecting how language enables us to do what we currently do. We say: “Hello, how are you? Nice weather today, isn’t it?” without reflecting even once about what we are saying and why. Yet we would immediately know if those words said by someone else make sense and are appropriate and true, that is, fitting in the present situation. Even among those who make language their main research topic, generally focusing on what we do with language—“making meaning,” “learning,” “positioning ourselves,” or “producing identities”—few ask the question Martin Heidegger asks in my introductory quote: how is language as language? Even a simple question such as “what is language?” already presupposes not just the three words but a whole system of language and difference (Derrida 1972), including an understanding of an utterance as a question. Heidegger answers his question by saying that language speaks, a statement he elaborates, among others, by stating that in our meditation on language we need to engage with and enter into language.¹ Would it be possible to get a book on language, learning, and context off the ground without always already presupposing the existence of language? This question recalls a statement by Friedrich Nietzsche (1954b: 805) about the highest form of experience: the possibility to “read a text as text, without intermingling an interpretation,” which is, he recognizes, “perhaps hardly possible.” Would it be possible to investigate language without presupposing something that is even deeper than language, something that in any imaginable case (cultural-historically, individual-developmentally) precedes language: such as the unthematized experiences in a world always already inhabited with others?

The epigraph to this chapter comes from a book entitled Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to [Toward] Language). Among others, Heidegger indicates with this title that it is not a self-evident thing to understand² and theorize language, as language itself is in the way as we are on the way to learn about it. To get to it, we have to speak/write in the same way as we think in order to get on the way to thinking (Heidegger 1954); my hearing/reading of speakers who appear in episodes/transcripts is of the same nature as that of the respondents in the episodes. As (applied) linguists and learning researchers interested in language, we always already find ourselves in language rather than independent of it. The simplest (linguistic) objects we can investigate already are a product of consciousness irreducibly bound up with language (de Saussure 1996). Moreover, this language that we are trying to understand and theorize is living—its understanding, in contrast to the understanding of a dead language, such as Latin—has to be treated, qua living, as something alive (Nietzsche 1954b). That means that we cannot, as do the experimental sciences or historians, presuppose the independence of researcher and research object, or object, method, and theory. This recognition is also central to ethnomethodology (e.g., Garfinkel 2002), a discipline investigating the mundane practices that reproduce and transform the world of our collective experience, the everyday world. Ethnomethodologists take as given that any social science researcher always, already, and ineluctably makes use of the very practices that they investigate and generally take to have an existence independent of them. But normally these practices are invisible. The researcher’s problem is to make these structures, for example, of language and context, explicit, visible, and, thereby, to bring to consciousness the competencies that produce these structures.

This entire book constitutes a walk (an engagement of the way) toward a theory of spoken language that takes into account our everyday experience of speaking. It is offered as an alternative to the rationalized and intention-prioritizing accounts of language that have a large resemblance with computer language and with the way in which computers make available the contents—express, read/print out—of their memory to human beings. This relationship between computers and humans is governed by the formal logic underlying computer science. But human relations are different: “The relationship between Me and the Other does not have the structure formal logic finds in all relations … The relation with the Other is the only one where such an overturning of formal logic can occur” (Levinas 1971: 156). Language is a mode of this relation. It is, therefore, important to uncover and disclose its nature so that we better understand the relation with the Other, for example, between students and their teachers, between friends, or between co-workers.

As I present in this book a perspective and mediation on language, learning, and context that differs considerably from the current educational canon—though my position is well founded in twentieth-century philosophical scholarship—I ground myself in everyday examples involving fragments of different conversations that I have recorded over the years in a variety of settings. I do this to walk the walk of talk, that is, to talk the talk—as the popular expression goes and as the subtitle to this book reads—because it is only in this manner that we can find our “way to language” and, therefore, to a viable theory of spoken language. I use these fragments to write/think about what they presuppose and, in so doing, both cover new terrain and show the limits of existing approaches to think language, learning, and context. I investigate language as it appears, that is, in the way “language lives/exists as language.” I thereby follow³ the way in which real human beings actually speak language, that is, the way language actually speaks through the speaking. But such writing always constitutes an oblique movement, in a way, for it “continuously risks to fall back into what it deconstructs” so that one has to “encircle critical concepts by means of a prudent and minutious discourse, marking the conditions, the milieu, and the limits of their efficacy, rigorously define their belonging to a machinery that they allow to undo in their constitution” (Derrida 1967a: 26).

To get us off the ground, ever so carefully so as not to fall into the traps that other theories of language have fallen, I presuppose my present audience to be capable speakers/readers of English, with the competencies to overhear everyday conversations, that is to say, to understand what speakers meant by saying what they said. Investigations of the texts produced in speaking lead us to the presupposed contexts—texts that go with (Lat. con[m]-) texts, texts that are ground against which the texts of interest appear as figure, texts with which the texts of interest are interwoven—that make any hearing of text possible. And understanding texts and contexts allows us to understand the phenomena denoted by the third concept in this book’s title—learning—as the result of talking the talk.

My way to the essence/nature of language always already is on its way, as my use of language, my writing, my thinking, my overhearing of the interlocutors that appear throughout this book, all are grounded in, traversed by, and irreducible to that which is properly linguistic in language. This reflexive nature of language to our hearing/reading, speaking/writing, and thinking/being-conscious should never be left out of sight/hearing range. It is our dwelling in life/language that allows us to meditate on language rather than the other way around.

A mystery conversation

Communication generally, and language particularly, are amazing phenomena. On the one hand, communication is very fast and yet we participate in it even when there is no possibility for a time-out to reflect (e.g., about strategy and next moves). On the other hand, communication presupposes such an extensive background understanding and shared knowing, that it is astonishing that we accomplish what we do with the speed and precision that we actually do. This is true not only for adult conversations but also for conversations between children, or the conversations involving children and adults. Let us take a look at the following exchange and then unfold the pertinent issues concerning language and communication layer by layer to find out what is involved in conducting a simple conversation. This investigation takes us several rounds of inquiry—of écriture, writing, and the displacement it produces—as we have to slow down the reading of this situation to come to understand just what is going on.⁴ Imagine finding the following “rough transcript” in which a research assistant only transcribed the sounds into sound-words that she heard. We now ask the question: what is being said here, not just the words, but what is the conversation about? Who are “T,” “C,” and “Ch,” or rather, what category of people do they belong to?

Fragment 1.1a

01	T: em an what did we say that group was about
02	C: what do you mean like
03	T: what was the what did we put for the name of that group whats written on the card
04	C: squares
05	T: square and
06	Ch: cube

Many individuals finding such a sheet of paper may not know what to do with it and would discard it without any further thought. Even though we may not have available any other information—which in itself is significant to evolving a good theory of communication generally, and language specifically—we can find out a lot about what is going on here. In fact, in my graduate courses on interpretive methods, I often enact exemplary illustrations on the basis of such “found” transcripts about which I have no further information. I ask my students to provide me with just that—a “raw transcript” of a mystery conversation and no other information. I then read, slowly, reading/listening as I go along, making inferences in real time about what is happening, and unpacking the tremendous background knowledge that participants to such a conversation have and make available for hearing others objectively, available to everyone looking at the transcript.⁵ I do so without actually “interpreting” what is said, practically understanding a conversation in the immediacy of the here and now. So what is being made available only in and with the words and in the absence of other identifying information, contextual details, identity of the speakers, intonations, and so on? The point is not to lay my interpretation or any one else’s over the transcript but to find out the sense the participants themselves express to each other in and through their talk, and I, as a bystander, simply overhear how they are hearing each other’s verbal productions, hearings that are made available again in verbal and non-verbal productions.

In the use of the interrogative pronoun “what” we might hear that T is going to ask a question (“an what did we say that group was about”)—but to understand the conversation it is not important how we hear the utterance but how the other participant(s) hear it.⁶ Because we are interested in interaction and learning of the situation to which the transcript is an index, we need to find out the internal dynamic. This requires us to know how the participants hear what others say, which is available only in how they react to an utterance or how they take up this and other preceding utterances in their own turns. In the present situation, the next turn begins with the same interrogative pronoun “what.” Therefore, we are confronted with two interrogatives; one following the other rather than with a question–answer sequence. We may ask, drawing on our cultural and linguistic competence, under what condition would we hear a question followed by another interrogative? Two immediate answers are: when the second speaker has not heard (understood) what the preceding speaker said, or when the second speaker did not comprehend (understand) what the first sp...

Table of contents

• Foundations and Futures of Education
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• 1 Walking the walk
• 2 Making context in talking
• 3 Speaking | thinking as distributed process
• 4 Agency | passivity in/of communication
• 5 Cultured conceptions
• 6 Talking identity
• 7 Culturing emotional contexts
• 8 When is grammar?
• 9 Con/textures
• 10 Différance
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index