Investigating teachers’ appraisal of unexpected moments and underlying values: an exploratory case in the context of changing mathematics classroom discourse

Abstract

This article provides an exploratory case study that examines what one teacher indicated as unexpected as she worked to become more purposeful about her classroom discourse practices. We found that she highlighted three areas as being unexpected: (1) aspects of lesson enactment; (2) characteristics of student learning and (3) her own intentionality or purposefulness. We interpret these instances through the lens of the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) appraisal framework in order to understand how she evaluates the instances she highlights and connect these instances to the literature on values in the teaching and learning of mathematics.

Keywords:

• changing practice
• classroom discourse
• study groups
• appraisal framework
• values

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this article was supported with funding from the National Science Foundation ([NSF], Award #0918117, Herbel-Eisenmann, PI; Cirillo and Steele, co-PIs). We thank Mary Schleppegrell, Timothy Rowland, and anonymous reviewers for feedback on earlier versions. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.

Notes

1 ‘Text' refers to any cohesive stretch of spoken or written language (Coffin, 2000).

2 This decision is in line with other authors using the appraisal framework. It is common practice to draw on linguistic characteristics of the framework based on which ones seem to highlight important aspects of a speaker's appraisal. For example, there are publications that only focus on engagement (see, for example, Mesa & Chang, 2010).

3 When we use the word focus in our findings, we are using it in this more specific way.

4 These include Revoicing, Waiting, Inviting Student Participation, Asking Students to Revoice, Probing a Student's Thinking, and Creating Opportunities to Engage with Another's Reasoning (see Herbel-Eisenmann et al. (2013) or Cirillo et al. (2014) for more information).

5 These included things like taking attendance and checking homework.