Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

542 Part 6: Language and Interaction
She found that Indian students remained silent during teacher-fronted
events, but were highly involved in collaborative group work. By raising
awareness of how students participated differently in different events, she
illuminated elements of the Indian students’ communicative repertoire
that were unrecognized by many educators and thus not available as
resources on which to build further learning activities. Philips’s study
suggested that simple shifts in classroom arrangements for speech events
could have radical effects on the educational experiences of Indians on the
Warm Springs Reservation (see also Reyes, this volume).
Doing Classroom Discourse Analysis
These days, teachers inspired by these studies have begun to conduct
similar studies on their own classrooms. Teacher-researchers have been
especially drawn to the comparative framework exemplifi ed by Michael’s
work, comparing student repertoires within a single event. Steve Griffi n
(2004), for example, used Michael’s methods to study sharing time in his
elementary school classroom, investigating the troubling non-normative
and increasingly disruptive participation of one student. Eventually, his
own transcript analysis led him to change his sharing time procedures,
largely because he was able to describe the type of radical new story his
one troubling student was contributing. Soon after, all the students wanted
to experiment with this storytelling style and sharing time took on a lively
new quality, with everyone in the classroom expanding their communicative
repertoire.
While teachers-doing-discourse-analysis like Steve Griffi n are more
and more common these days, when classroom discourse analysis emerged
as a methodology, it was mainly the work of university researchers, who
schlepped around with mountains of recording equipment and spent
hours back at the laboratory transcribing and analyzing. Hugh Mehan
and his colleagues even referred to themselves as the ‘schleppers’ back in
the 1980s. Fortunately, recording equipment is now light, compact and
relatively inexpensive. There is nothing to stop teachers from clicking the
‘record’ button and seeing what they discover. As a result, the initial methodological
challenge for a teacher-researcher is largely conceptual: to
identify those events worthy of recording and then carefully investigated
that language once it is recorded. Following the tried and true steps taken
in discourse analyses can be an initial jumping off point for a novice classroom
discourse analyst:
(1) Spend some time identifying the different speech events in the classroom.
Identify either a focal event or relevant comparative events.
(2) Record the focal event and begin to characterize the language in that
event. To do so, you will not need to fully transcribe the talk. Start by