Discourse in Activity and Activity as Discourse

A companion to Chapter 11 by Shawn Rowe

From the companion website for Rogers, R. (2011). An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education, 2nd edition. New York: Taylor and Francis at www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415874298

Aim of Presentation

To establish theoretic and analytic connections between Critical Discourse Analysis and and sociocultural approaches to learning.

To demonstrate a way of representing co-occurring talk and activity.

Why CDA and Sociocultural Theory?

A sociocultural approach to learning and language-in-use addresses CDA’s concern with transformation by focusing on the ways in which members’ resources are privileged, appropriated, rejected, and deployed as part ofparticipation in activity.

A critical approach to language, psychology, and activity is a crucial, but often neglected, addition to any sociocultural project that seeks to highlight the structure and realization in everyday activities of the inequitable distribution of power, authority, and valued cultural and physical resources that shape all social institutions.

Talk and Activity are Interrelated: Discourse Continuum that Reflects Salience of Language vis-à-vis Activity (Clark, 1996)

Highly Linguistic Highly Active

Telephone conversations

Newspaper items

Radio reports

Novel

Playing a string quartet

Waltzing

Playing catch

Face-to-face conversations

Tabloid items

TV reports

Science texts

Business transactions Plays, movies

Coaching demonstrations

Apprenticeship lessons

Bridge games

Basketball games Tennis matches Two people moving furniture

Making love

___________________________________

Significance of Intersections of Talk and Activity in Education Contexts

Example: Teacher at chalkboard uses gesture, gaze, and language to direct student attention as needed to content and relationship to content.

Academic identity is enacted through the interrelation and coordination of activity and language.

A Different Kind of Transcript is Required to Harness Communicative/Expressive

Aspects

How do both talk and action shape each other over the course of an activity?

How do people learn to use the linguistic and nonlinguistic stuff that makes up Discourse (the enactments of identity)?

Example: A Non-School-Based Learning Site

Visitors (A Family) Engaging with Interactive Museum Display

Authority is NegotiatedUtterances are Co-constructed

A representation that shows the relationships between utterances and actions, between utterances and other utterances, and between actions and other actions by including a person’s actions and utterances in one box of the table.

As on a music staff, these utterances and actions are shown across time.

1

B walking to right end of ramp; takes right wheel, carries to top Places wheel

M Approaches right top, puts hand on right wheel

2

B holding wheel with M Releases wheel

W approaches right top

M 1) You see how you can move these weights That makes it go faster or slower with B moves two weights takes hand off Steps back from ramp one step

From Transcript 2: Rolling

Helps analyst view learning as the appropriation of culturally valued mediational means or members’ resources as part of participation in active, distributed meaning making.

The key to understanding learning thus defined is analyzing how the appropriation of mediational means occurs across time and in interaction (or does not occur).

A Mulitimodal Representation of a Group Learning Activity

Suggested Readings

Clark, H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. London: Longman.Gee, J.P. (1999). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. New York: Routledge.Linell, P. (1998). Approaching dialogue: Talk, interaction, and contexts in dialogical perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Norris, S. (2004). Analyzing multimodal interactions: A methodological framework. London: Routledge.Wertsch, J.V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.