Becoming a meaning maker

Talk and Interaction in the dialogic classroom

Christine Edwards-Groves, Christina Davidson

• Publisher: Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA)
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781925132373
• eBook ISBN: 9781925132380
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Becoming a Meaning Maker: Talk and Interaction in the dialogic classroomaims to provide core understandings that allow educators to say definitive things about talk and interaction in classrooms so as to bring about changes to their practices. This book is the result of a year-long research project, 'Researching dialogic pedagogies for literacy learning across the primary years'. This project was funded and supported by PETAA through the PETAA Research Grant (PRG) first awarded in 2015/16.

1	Children’s talk and interaction for meaning making

Sor:	okay maybe this-okay this video game gives him an idea on (0.2) to get up and help him to to get up and help his parents clean (0.4) so do you guys get what I mean?
Tch:	okay I don’t actually get it so can you explain a bit more Michaela (0.2) yeah
Mic:	um (0.2) like what Soraya said about the-him playing the game like that (0.2) I am just saying who (0.4) which kid would play instead of girls which boy kid ((laughs)) would play a clothesline game?

(Year 5/6, Aaron, Classroom recording)

Key terms

social semiotics, sociocultural, conversation, analysis, dialogic pedagogy, talk and interaction

Introduction

This chapter introduces considerations of children’s meaning making in two influential contexts: home and school. Our focus on classroom talk and interaction in these areas sits within an extensive research field in education. Overwhelmingly, research agrees that talking at home is qualitatively different to talking at school, where much of the talk is occasioned by teacher-led instructional monologues (Willes, 1983; Wells, 2009). In her study of language in early schooling, sociolinguist Mary Willes (1983), showed how teachers attempted, in the early months of students’ first year of formal schooling, to enculturate them into the ways of classroom talk. She concluded that teachers took a great deal for granted about children’s interactional knowledge and about the ‘naturalness’ of the classroom as an interactive environment, and that they therefore gave little explicit guidance to students in the talking procedures expected.

This chapter presents in brief some of the influential theories and research about meaning making through talk-in-interaction at home and at school. We draw on important perspectives and previous research to establish that:

•children come to school as meaning makers already competent at talk and interaction in their everyday lives

•students encounter a range of new or different talk and interaction practices at school.

Knowledge of these two intersecting dimensions of children’s everyday lives is essential for promoting and developing talk for meaning making in classrooms and helps disrupt the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ concerning children’s interactional competence. Consequently, we contend that capitalising on and responding to children’s interactional competencies requires a more open dialogic approach in classroom lessons. We follow these sections with an introduction to dialogic pedagogies.

Meaning making through talk and interaction at home

Here we focus on influential theories and research about children’s meaning making outside of formal educational contexts. For each, we present an outline of the theory and briefly consider studies that we think provide a core of knowledge about children’s interactional competence in out-of-school contexts.

Social semiotics and making meanings: A functional approach to language

When children learn language, they are not simply engaging in one kind of learning among many – rather, they are learning the foundation of learning itself. The distinctive characteristic of human learning is that it is a process of making meaning, a semiotic process.

(Halliday, 1993, p. 93)

One of the most influential theorists in language and literacy education is Michael Halliday, a British linguist who taught for many years at The University of Sydney. Although Halliday is perhaps best known in education for his foundational work on a functional grammar, his examination of language learning itself, made valuable contributions to understandings of how young children acquire or develop language (Painter, 1999).

Halliday drew on social semiotic theory to develop his own theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). This theory was also extended by the work of Ruqaiya Hasan. Halliday and Hasan defined semiotics to be the study of sign systems or ‘the study of meaning in its most general sense’ and social semiotics to encompass understanding of the social system as a ‘system of meanings’ and of the ‘relationships between language and social structure’ (Halliday & Hasan, 1985, p. 4). For Halliday, language was a resource for meaning that is ‘constructed and maintained interactively’ (Halliday, 1975). According to Eggins, another influential proponent of the SFL perspective, the ‘fundamental purpose that language has evolved to serve is to enable us to make meanings with each other’. She goes on to state that ‘language users do not interact in order to exchange sounds with each other, nor even to exchange words or sentences. People interact in order to make meanings: to make sense of the world and each other’ (Eggins, 2004, p. 11).

According to Halliday, people produce spoken and written texts that achieve meanings. Halliday considered these to be ideational meanings, interpersonal meaning and textual meanings. Briefly, ideational meanings ‘are meanings about how we represent experience in language’; interpersonal meanings are ‘meanings about our role relationships with other people and our attitudes to each other’, and textual meanings are ‘meanings about how what we are saying hangs together and relates to what was said before and to the context around us’ (Eggins, 2004, p. 12). These meanings are produced simultaneously and ‘have in turn engendered lexicogrammatical structures’ (Halliday, 1985, xvii). Halliday’s major work was the examination of those structures and the development of functional grammar to describe them.

Halliday theorised language according to contexts of situation and culture whereby language constructs reality according to its ideational, interpersonal and textual components (Halliday, 1994). Halliday took these understandings and developed a grammar that could be used to describe the linguistic systems and choices made by people in relation to what he termed field, tenor and mode. Christie (2005) describes these as encompassing:

•the field (the specific subject matter or topic being developed, e.g. space as in astronomy, or space as in mathematics)

•the tenor (the kinds of roles and relationships or the status, power, authority, equality and agency being enacted/present in a given situation; e.g. teacher or student, group leader and group member, student and student, team member and coach)

•the mode (the aspects of the channel of communication being used in a particular situation, e.g. monologic/dialogic, spoken/written, visual-embodied; or more broadly oral, written, visual, gestural).

The grammar developed according to these components can be applied equally to the analysis of spoken and written texts.

Halliday’s pivotal research examined the language development of his young son. Halliday preferred the term ‘language development’ rather than language acquisition (Painter, 2004) because for him language develops across the lifespan and never arrives at ‘a finite, unitary, monolithic unchanging phenomenon’ (Painter, 2004, p. 38). According to Halliday:

in learning how to mean, neither do children just collect something that is already there, ready made to be ‘acquired’, nor do they act alone: from infancy onwards, they actively co-participate in exchanges of meaning with someone in their immediate community.

(Halliday, 1975, p. 58)

Through this research, Halliday established the ways in which his son made meaning through interactions with others, long before he could produce words that were recognisable by his parents and other adults. Halliday termed the child’s invented vocalisations and gestures (Painter, 1999, p. 38) his protolanguage. Halliday showed how protolanguage enabled the child to function effectively – or mean – during interactions with others. The repeated use of a ‘small set’ of gestures and vocalisations results in adults interpreting or making meaning of these. Meaning making must therefore be viewed as ‘a joint concern’ (Painter, 1999, p. 39). Claire Painter (1991), a student of Halliday’s, also examined her children’s language acquisition in the home. Here we draw in some detail on her analysis of her son Hal’s language acquisition to flesh out some specifics of what he learnt to do, and how he learnt, as he shifted from protolanguage in the mother tongue. The transcript extracts used here were developed by Painter. We begin with what Painter terms the ‘naming game’ interaction. The following occurred when Hal was 19 months of age:

M: What’s this Hal?

H: Bunny

M: Yes; Bunny’s sleeping

(Painter, 1986, p. 66).

Later, Hal reversed the interactions so that he asked the questions of his mother. The following example occurred when Hal was 24 months of age:

H: What’s that?

M: Vulture

H: (scornfully) Not vultures, birdies

(Painter, 1986, p. 66).

Painter makes the important point that in using talk in this way the child is able to ‘take over language used’ on an earlier occasion and use it in ‘a new but comparable situation’.

Interactions enabled Hal to eventually produce longer utterances involving descriptions. For example, Painter shows how the first example here was preceded by numerous interactions that resembled the second example. In the first example, Hal is aged about two years and three months:

H: There’s /a/ rabbit. Got long ears. He’s eating /??/ carrots

(Painter, 1986, p. 68).

The second example:

M: What’s this here?

H: Deer

M: It’s got antlers, hasn’t it?

And what’s the deer doing?

H: Drinking /ɘ/ water

(Painter, 1986, p. 68).

The same causal links are noted between parents’ interactions with Hal at age 2 and then his own spoken explanations at 27 months:

H: Want to run again (pulling M & F by the hands)

F: No, we can’t run anymore. Daddy’s too tired and Mummy’s too tired.

(Painter, 1986, p. 69).

Hal’s explanation at 27 months:

M: Why don’t you get the little cars out?

H: Mummy play cars. I can’t play cars; I’m too tired.

(Painter, 1986, p. 69).

Similarly, Painter shows the ways in which interactions lead to children’s recounts of events and to the production of stories. It is through numerous interactions (as recorded by Painter) of jointly producing recounts and stories, with adults taking more responsibility for producing the texts, that children can independently produce these themselves.

In articulating the SFL position on learning, Painter eloquently states:

Making meaning, even when exploring the objective world, is achieved interactively, and in suggesting that the linguistic system is a tool shaped partly by the need to make sense of the world, it is recognised that the world is not available to the child ‘raw’, awaiting private understanding. From the beginning, reality is being continuously interpreted to and by the child with the ‘significant others’ of his/her first meaning group – the world available for knowing, including the child’s own subjectivity, is a semiotically, and hence intersubjectively, constructed one. And this semantic construction of the environment takes place with every instantiation of the meaning-making system in all the countless conversational and other semiotic exchanges in everyday life.

(Painter, 1991, p. 63)

As this quote emphasises, children’s learning about the world and language learning is developed through interaction and adults’ existing interpretations of the world are integral to children’s learning. What the child can understand about the real world is always tied to meaning making during interactions with others.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Preamble
• Contents
• Dedication
• Becoming a meaning maker: An introduction
• 1 Children’s talk and interaction for meaning making
• 2 Transcribing to explore talk and interaction
• 3 Moving toward student-student talk and interaction
• 4 Listening for responding
• 5 Questioning moves for student engagement
• 6 Agreeing and disagreeing in class discussions
• 7 Talking about talk and interaction: Metatalk in literacy lessons
• 8 Making meaning in the dialogic classroom
• Appendix
• References