Learning Outcomes
Students are expected to:
• To develop rich and informed understandings of the processes by which literacy and literate identities are constructed in classroom contexts
• To be able to use various kinds of methodologies in the process of capturing classroom talk and the functions it serves
• To be able to analyze data from classrooms and capture the way oral discursive practices are implicated in the construction of specific social realities within classroom communities.
Course Content (Syllabus)
The processes by which identities are shaped and reshaped through peoples use of language is an issue of central concern in current discursively oriented research. Building upon this literature developed in diverse lines of discursively-based research, this course analyzes the way by which literate and social identities are shaped and reshaped through the practices created in classroom communities. The course presents in detail the various proposals developed with regard to the teaching of oral discourse, classroom interaction from sociocognitive perspectives and Conversation Analytic ones to others, more critically oriented, focusing on the way by which utterances and turn taking patterns as well as other forms (such as contextualization cues, etc.) are used in the negotiation of certain identities. Rather than these taken as static, attention is directed to how these are negotiated through the use of oral language and through the practices that are discursively constructed in local communities. The aim of the course is to illuminate the ways by which through oral discourse people bring in wider Discourses, develop their stances, and/or negotiate various alignments and disalignments towards them.
Additional bibliography for study
Rex, L.A. (Ed.), (2006). Discourse of opportunity: How talk in learning situations creates and constrains. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
De Fina, A. (2003). Identity in narrative: A study of immigrant discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ivanič, R. (1998). Writing and identity: The discoursal representation of identity in academic writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gibbons, P. (2006). Bridging discourses in the ESL classroom: Students, teachers and researchers. London: Continuum.
Hicks, D. (1996) Discourse, learning, and schooling. Cambridge: CUP.
Kostouli (2005). Co-constructing writing contexts in classrooms: Scaffolding, collaboration, and asymmetries of knowledge. In Kostouli, Τ. (ed.) Writing in context(s): Textual practices and learning processes in sociocultural settings. (Vol. 15). (93-116). Boston: Springer.
Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Mercer, N. (1995) The guided construction of knowledge. Multilingual Matters: Clevedon.
Sharpe, T. (2008). How can teacher support learning? Linguistics and Education, 19, 132-148.
Wells, G. (2001). Action, talk and text: Learning and teaching through inquiry. New York: Teachers College Press.
Wortham, St. (2005). Socialization beyond the speech event. Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 95-112.
Wortham, St. (2006). Learning identity: The joint emergence of social identification and academic learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.