Reported Speech and Reported Mental States in Mentoring Meetings: Exploring Novice Teacher Identities

Abstract

In this study, we addressed the identity work performed by directly reported speech versus directly reported mental states (e.g., thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and emotions) in situated discourse. Drawing on a corpus of talk produced by novice language teachers during mentoring sessions, the analysis indicates that teachers' direct reports of their own speech tend to foreground their accomplishments and developing expertise, whereas direct reports of their mental states tend to highlight uncertainty, gaps in knowledge, or negative feelings and emotions. In other words, these two types of reported discourse constitute vehicles for different modes of self-presentation in the educational context of this investigation.

Notes

¹The term deixis refers to a set of words and grammatical constructions whose meanings rely on context. The major categories of deixis are spatial (e.g., adverbs such as here or there), temporal (e.g., grammatical tense or adverbs such as now and before), and personal (e.g., personal pronouns). Deictic markers are a characteristic of any direct reporting of speech or thought. Barnes and Moss (2007) considered the deictic category of tense—and specifically, the tense shifts that occur in quotations—to be a key feature of direct reported thoughts, or what they termed “reported private thoughts” (or RPTs).

² Barnes and Moss's (2007) category of RPT may strike some readers as very similar to our own category of DRMS. However, our preference for our terminological choice of mental states as opposed to thoughts is guided by our belief that mental states is more inclusive and encompasses a wider range of internal phenomena (feelings, attitudes, etc.), some of which may or may not be considered coterminous with thoughts.

³Janssen and van der Wurff (1984) suggested that “both cross-linguistically and intra-systemically, reported speech shows many empirical and theoretical connections with reported thought and perception” (p. 4). Similarly, Tannen (1989) and Romaine and Lange (1991) have argued that the line between reported speech and thought is often fuzzy, particularly when material is introduced by “be + like,” a quotative that “… blur[s] the boundaries between direct and indirect representations of both speech and thought reports” (Romaine & Lange, 1991, p. 234).

⁴It is worth noting that Tannen (1989) herself occasionally found it necessary to make a distinction between directly reported speech and directly reported thoughts or mental states, referring to the latter as “inner speech” through which “people often report their own thoughts as dialogue” (p. 114). Once again, we prefer not to use this previously applied term of inner speech to avoid terminological confusion with the Vygotskian/sociocultural notion of “inner speech,” which denotes an internal phenomenon—as opposed to the externalized, verbalized phenomenon that we are concerned with.

⁵All participants, with the exception of one male teacher, were female.

⁶Any quotation that was presented as clearly “speech like” (i.e., framed by a verb of speaking) was included in the category of DRS, whereas anything “thought like” was included in the latter. Although not all scholars would agree that hypothetical or “unsaid” quotations belong to the category of direct reported speech, we choose to follow Schiffrin (2002) and Barnes and Moss (2007) by including such instances in our own categories. To summarize then, in DRS, we include quoted material that is represented as something that was or could be spoken, and in DRMS, we include quotations represented as something that was or could be thought, felt, perceived, and so forth.

⁷Most of the students' words represented in the data are in the form of direct reports of speech, and most typically, these are parts of dialogic exchanges with the teachers. The “others” category includes direct reports of speech, thought/perception, or writing by individuals who are relevant in the lives of teachers—most often these included their spouses/partners, other teachers, their own professors, and so forth.

⁸The following example illustrates a direct report of writing:

I would [do so] for students who e-mail me and tell me “I'm not coming to class, can I come by and get the homework?”

Ambiguous cases, such as the one in the example following, were those in which it was not clear whether the quoted information represents speech or rather an internal, mental state:

… I decided to switch it up because every class we've done like minimal pairs and I was like “Well you know let's not do that today.”

This example can be interpreted either as an utterance addressed to the students or as a representation of the teachers' internal monologue, a thought that was not externalized vocally at any moment. (As discussed earlier, many of the cases coded as ambiguous were preceded by the frame be like and occurred as “isolated” quotations—i.e., not part of any larger dialogue.)

⁹In a similar fashion, Johnstone (1996) showed how an auto mechanic establishes professional expertise by relating a set of instructions within a sequence of constructed dialogue embedded in a narrative (p. 48).

¹⁰As noted previously, the reporting frame be like can often be ambiguous in terms of whether it is prefacing speech or thought; however, because the frame in this instance is preceded by the verb tell, this utterance was coded as an example of DRS.

¹¹These three examples come from two teacher narratives, which are discussed in greater detail in Vásquez (2007).

¹²This trend seems consistent with that reported by Barnes and Moss (2007) who found 240 instances of reported thoughts in 73 different interactions (which represent five different types of speech activities).

¹³See Buttny (1998) for more on the relationship between context and reported speech.