A DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS OF ATTENTION IN MATHEMATICS CLASSROOM INTERACTION

Abstract

The notion of attention as a discursive practice has emerged as a key element of my approach to the analysis of students' participation in mathematics classroom interaction. The principal purpose of this paper is to describe and illustrate this approach, which draws on ideas from discursive psychology and conversation analysis and sees talk primarily as a form of social action. It is a principle of conversation analysis that what we say indicates something that we are attending to in that moment. Discursive psychology suggests that the way we use words, reflects the social actions in which we are engaged. By looking at what students attend to, and then at how this attention is rhetorically deployed, insights emerge into how students think together.