Social semiotic approaches to pedagogic discourse

Workshop

Kristina Love

The University of Melbourne

Overview• A brief history of classroom discourse analysis• Transcription and analysis as theory• The theory of social semiotics• Social semiotics and the institution of schooling:

the formation of social identities• Social semiotics and the enacted curriculum:

visible and invisible pedagogies• Social semiotics and the enacted curriculum in

cyberspace: transformation or reproduction?• Social semiotics and teacher stance: APPRAISAL

Classroom Discourse Analysis: a brief history

• Broadly interactionist (ie not linguistic) perspectives• Flanders’s (1970) focus on teacher talk

– Asking questions– Giving directions– Accepting feelings etc

• Barnes (1971): impact of patterns of teacher talk on student learning– Eg Teachers’ use of closed questions required one-word

answers – Student learning through small group discussion

• But interpretations often idiosyncratic

Sample 1

• Teacher directed lesson section

• Write your own transcript of this section

• What does the transcript tell/not tell about the interaction?

Sample 2

• Later in the same lesson

• What are some of the patterns of language use here?

• How are they different to those identified in the earlier stage?

• How may the earlier discourse patterns have set up the learning evident here?

Linguistic approaches

• An early ‘rank-scale’ model - Sinclair & Coulthard (1975)– Lesson– Transaction– Exchange (IRF/ IRE)– Move– Act

• Stubbs (1976, 1986)

T. Hey Dai. Just stop a minute. If he’s killed a white person what are they implying?

S. That if he’d killed a black person it’s not so bad.T. It’s not so important. Who are they saying is

probably more likely to be a killer?S. A black personT. A black person! So if you’re in the South and you’re

a male and you’ve killed a white person and are black, you’re in trouble, big trouble. Thank you for reading Dai. Catherine, in your hugest voice, please.

Workshop task

• Divide each turn into a ‘move’ (Initiating, Responding, Evaluating), including non-verbal moves.

• Identify the smaller functional units (‘acts’) within each move

• Discuss the value of the resulting description• What else is required of a description of the

discourse– above the level of exchange– below the level of act?

Above the exchange• Ethnographic linguistics: Mehan (1979) and Cazden

(1988)• Concerned with the routines or ‘rules’ (mostly tacit) of

classroom social organisation– Verbal behaviours– Physical dispositions – Patterns of movement and interaction

• Speech act theory: Gumperz & Hymes (1972) – Patterns of well defined classroom routines – eg greetings, storytelling

• But still the need for something more?– Veel transcript (1997)

T. What distance do you have to measure?S. The distance.T. Which distance?S. The distance from the vertex.T. Which vertex?S. (pointing) That one.T. Can you be more precise?S. The top left vertex.T. OK. So what do we measure?S. The distance from the top left vertex.T. Good. To where?S. The outside of the other shape. T. I’m not sure what you mean. Where on the other shape?S. The bottom left hand corner.T. OK. And what do we call that shape?S. The object.T. OK. So the line’s going to …S. The bottom left vertex of the object.T. OK. Put that all together and tell me what you’re measuring, what distance?S. The distance from the top left vertex of the image to the bottom left vertex of the object.

Below the ‘act’• Ethnomethodology: Scheggloff (1972, 1982), Sacks

(1992), Jefferson (1973)• Studies ‘human sociality’ at the micro-level of

individuals interacting with other, rather than starting from a model of ‘an external social reality consisting of a set of fixed norms, beliefs and values’ (Gardner, 2000).

• The ‘object’ of the enquiry is specifically talk, viewed as jointly accomplished activity

• Talk emerges moment by moment in highly locally organised ways, with speakers and listeners showing split second sensitivities to others’ contributions

CA analytical techniques and focus• Turn-Taking

– Transitional relevance points– Overlaps– Latching– Pauses (measured in micro-seconds)– Minimal feedback/Back-channel responses

• Adjacency pairs– Expansions via ‘insertion sequences’– Preferred and dis-preferred responses– Preliminaries

• Repairs– particular types of adjacency pair dealing with troubles of hearing,

production or understanding of talk

Some titles• Scheggloff, E. (1982) Discourse as an

interactional achievement: some uses of ‘uh hu’ and other things that come between sentences

• Scheggloff, E. (1980) Preliminaries to preliminaries: can I ask you a question?

• Gardner, R. (2000) Resources for Delicate Manoeuvres: learning to disagree (see transcript conventions in appendices)

CA and pedagogy

• Olympic swim race transcript– Note how the talk is co-constructed, moment by

moment in highly locally organised ways, with speakers showing split second sensitivities to others’ contributions

– Identify these unique accomplishments in each situation, rather than bringing beliefs about the local and institutional contexts to the analysis

• Conversation analysis and language teaching: minimal feedback tokens (see article by Rod Gardner and transcript p33)

CA transcription and analysis as theory

• The search for order in talk, which is achieved as one of the most important rule-governed activities of everyday life.

• A highly empirical approach to analysis, ie analyst uses no assumptions or pre-conceptions (eg about institutional roles, gender, etc)

• Nothing is dismissed as disorderly, accidental or trivial• The analyst becomes highly familiar with the text of the

talk before transcribing in microscopic detail• Context refers only to the immediate preceding and

subsequent talk, not to the wider social context (either of situation or culture).

Social semiotics

• Social practices, like CA, seen as enacted in language

• But so too is the construction of various ideological positionings ie language is never neutral, serving to both realize, and silence, a range of values

• Schools in particular work with and construct ideological positionings for their ‘pedagogic subjects’ (Bernstein, 1996)

The early school pedagogic subject

• What is the ‘ideal pedagogic subject’ under construction here?

• What verbal routines support this classroom social organisation?

• What physical dispositions (including location and movement) support this classroom social organisation?

Systemic Functional Theory

• Halliday, Hasan, Matthiessen, Martin

• Distinctive in at least 3 ways

• The metafunctional organisation of language

• Language as system

• The relationship between text and context

The metafunctional organisation of language

Experiential Interpersonal Textual

Language for construing experience

Language for enacting Language for constructing text

Experience is represented in terms of happenings, participants and

circumstances

Language is used for interacting with others, involving meanings about participants’ roles, relationships and attitudes.

Language is organised according to what will be understood as meaningful texts in distinctive contexts.

Transitivity Mood, Modality,Conversational

Structure

Theme, Reference,

Ellipsis

Language as a system

• At the lexical level– eg ‘My [progeny] is at home’

• Entry conditions

• Sets of possible options

• Realizations

Specify sex

Don’t specify sex

Son, boy

Child, brat, darling

Lexical choice, specifying sex

Specify attitude

neutral attitude

positive

Child, son

Lexical choice, specifying attitude

negative

At the syntactic level

• Eg ‘Close the door’

• Entry conditions - Mood

• Sets of possible options - indicative (declarative or interrogative), imperative. If interrogative - wh or polar

• Realizations

Language as ‘polysystemic’:Register

• Experiential, Interpersonal and Textual choices in one context of situation

• BUILT Unit 1A - cooking• Field: Transitivity, specialised lexis• Tenor: Mood and Modality• Mode: Theme, Reference and Ellipsis

Text, context and genre

• Spoken and written text

• Context of situation (Malinowski)

• Context of culture

• Genres as ‘staged, goal-driven social activity’ (Martin & Christie, 1987)

Curriculum genres in early primary

• Morning News Genre

• Initiation^[Nomination^(Greeting)^News Giving^Finish]n^Closure

• Teacher direction -> Student Activity -> Teacher direction

• Christie’s texts 2.1 page 38

Curriculum Macro-genres

• Curriculum Genres and macro-genres are ‘staged, goal-driven activities devoted to the accomplishment of significant educational ends … they are fundamentally involved in the organisation of the discourses of schooling’ (Christie, 2002)

The curriculum initiation of a macrogenre in Art

• The goal-setting stage

• Compare with the language of the prior initiating stage whose purpose is to engage students

Curriculum development: the exploration stage

• Student oral language related to their roles as ‘explorers’

• Teacher oral language for ‘point of need’ scaffolding and formulating

• Focus on internal and external reference

1. T. Alright, are you going to be able to actually make it?2. S. No, we were stuck while we were doing the front one. Because, we couldn’t pull it up.3. T. Okay, right, good.4. S. Look, we have this behind here and then we go ‘Woo …!!’.5. T. Alright, good. Okay, now, you need to describe … in words … on your paper how that actually works.6. S. Well, when you pull that up, that’s connected to that and it comes up.7. T. James, are you listening so that you can write down what they’re saying? 8. S. Yeah9. S. Well, they’re joined together ... it was pull the top James … you don’t pull the bottom, the top. 10. T. Have you all agreed on the way it works?11. S. Yeah, when you pull this and it comes up … 12. S. … this is attached … 13. S. … and in the middle of the tower, it’s joined behind, there’s a bit of paper so when you pull that it comes up and then

it goes ‘Waa… !’14. T. Alright, just read me what you’ve got.15. S. Um, when you pull the top, top object it pulls the bottom object upwards because it’s attached behind the thing.16. T. Would somebody who just walked into this room, if they read that, would that actually help them to … would they

know what you’re talking about?17. S. No.18. S. If they pull the fox up the ladder …19. S. How about if you say behind the tower, they’re joined by …20. T. Okay, that’s probably an important thing isn’t it? … that it’s a tower?

Curriculum Closure: the presentation stage

Note• Students’ more

confident use of technical terminology

• Students’ language less dependent on the context

• ie more ‘written-like’ in its use of ‘internal reference’ and complete sentences (cf Veel)

‘Field’ in the senior Art classroom

• Note the increased technicality and abstraction used in this Year 12 Visual Communication classroom

Identifying abstraction

1. T. Solution to what?2. S. To the problem being given.3. T. Problem, solution. Somewhere in between here, this sort of stuff might

happen (pointing to words on board - 'ideas', 'drawing with a specific purpose'). It might happen here. Or it might happen here. If we go along a continuum. Although it's rarely like that. We're not just talking about things are we? Anyone? I mean, you can't just go out and buy a dozen ideas.

4. S. It's a process. 5. Yep, a process (writes this on board). Alright, it's really, really important to get

hold of that idea. We're not talking about a thing, we're talking about a process. So if we're going to talk about what designers do, we're not talking so much about a product. We're talking about a process. And that sheet that I gave you, there's various sorts of titles, like Art Designer, Graphic Designer, Fashion Designer, Interior Designer, Furniture Designer.

Register in upper secondary• Field: increased language demands

– technical language (eg ‘continuum’)– abstraction (eg ‘product’ and ‘process’)– nominalisation (eg ‘design problem’)

• Tenor: a different ‘authoritative relationship– Contact– Distance– Affect

• Mode– Use of more ‘written-like’ spoken language– modes ‘ancilliary’ to the spoken

Methodology and SFL theory of human social behaviour

• Genre makes explicit the relationship between language and context

• Genre provides a principled basis for making selections of classroom text for analysis and interpretation

• Commitment to collect and analyse the ‘whole’ text, not just ‘mine the data’

• Allows examination of how the whole genre unfolds ‘logogenetically’

• And allows principled comparisons between curriculum genres, including those across year levels

Methodological Principles: Selection of ‘episodes’

• Located in the Curriculum development stage of a Health and Physical education curriculum macrogenre

• Focus on the nature of teacher scaffolding in a multimodal context

Other Curriculum Macrogenres

• Upper Secondary English• Whole Class Text Response Discussions• Foundational reading^Developing

Response^Consolidatin Response• David and Susan: visible and invisible

pedagogies

T. Okay, okay. Dai, now youÕre on your own ha ha, because PeterÕs not here today, ha ha ha. Does the Camus one change your view of capital punishment? You and Peter were the only ones [[who supported capitalpunishment]]. Does the Camus one change your view? Dai. A bit. T. A bit. Okay what aspects of it? Dai. What happens to the body. T Did you not know that? Dai. Yep . T But you still voted with, along with Peter, in favour of capital punishment? Because thatÕs fairly disgusting [[chopping someoneÕs head off]]. Dai It wouldnÕt be like that with electrocution. T Hm. But then, what do you imagine electrocution is like? Dai. Fast T You just switch it like that, Sir. T One switch and heÕll go away, thatÕs [[what you imagine]]. Dai They donÕt tell us. T They donÕt tell us.

Textual Metafunction

Foundational Reading

Developing Response

Consolidating Response

Organisationally overt teacher direction of the pacing and sequencing of talk towards the construction of a shared reading position.

Organisationally overt teacher direction of the pacing and sequencing of talk towards the construction of a shared moral position.

^ ^

X +

Less organisationally overt teacher direction of the pacing and sequencing of talk. Limited student-determined direction towards the articulation of a range of moral positions.

Experiential Metafunction

• Intra-textual focus on class text. •Explicit scaffolding of 'low-level' comprehension skills. • Implicit scaffolding of convergent moral stances.

• Extra-textual focus on class text. •Explicit scaffolding of 'higher-level' skills of Inferencing and argumentation. • Implicit and explicit scaffolding of both convergent and divergent moral stances.

• Intra-, Inter-, and extra-textual focus on class text. • Less explicit scaffolding of both lower and higher level literate skills. • Explicit scaffolding of convergent moral stances.

Interpersonal Metafunction

• Teacher, as ideal reader, explicitly in role as Primary Knower, scaffolding ' basic' literate skills. • Teacher, as ideal reader, implicitly in role as Primary Knower, scaffolding moral stances.

• Students, as emotive responders and arguers, ambiguously cast in role as Primary Knowers. •Teacher explicitly cast in role as Primary Knower of 'higher-level' skills of inferencing and argumentation. • Teacher implicitly in role as Primary Knower, scaffolding convergent moral stances.

• Teacher, as Primary Knower, explicitly scaffolding convergent moral stances. • Students as Primary Knowers assumed to share the teacher's moral values.

Figure 2 The contribution of each of the three metafunctions to the logogenesis of David's WCTRD genre.

Online discussions

• Social semiotics and the enacted curriculum in cyberspace: transformation or reproduction?

• Lunchtime presentation

Social semiotics and teacher stance

• Using APPRAISAL to track the evaluative stances in teachers’ ‘planning’ discourse

• Love & Arkoudis, 2006 ‘