Welcome to volume 9, issue 2 of Classroom Discourse. This issue features a review article and five research articles representing diverse geographical settings, including Denmark (Laursen and Kolstrup Citation2018), Japan (Ishino and Okada Citation2018) and the US (Hong Citation2018; LeBlanc Citation2018; Reddington Citation2018). The discursive phenomena in focus include positioning (Kayi-Aydar and Miller Citation2018), interactional management of student participation (Ishino and Okada Citation2018; Reddington Citation2018), clarification requests (Laursen and Kolstrup Citation2018), reported speech in teacher talk (LeBlanc Citation2018) and intertextuality (Hong Citation2018). The student participants represent diverse age groups, from kindergarteners (e.g. Hong) to adult learners (Reddington). The contextual diversity of the featured articles is coupled with different methodological and theoretical positions, embodying positioning theory, microethnographic discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and membership categorization analysis.
In the first article, Kayi-Aydar and Miller present a comprehensive review of the studies that draw on the principles of positioning theory promoted by Davies and Harré (Citation1990; Citation1999) in investigating the interactional dynamics of classroom discourse. Bringing together findings from both content and language classrooms, the authors call for more conceptual studies and more research addressing the relationship between micro-level positionings and macro-level discourses in classroom contexts. They also point to the need to have more research into online classroom discourse that draws on positioning theory.
Using Conversation Analysis, both Reddington’s article and Ishino and Okada’s piece address teachers’ management of student participation. The former focuses on engagement and exit practices in an adult language classroom in the US, while the latter concentrates on the use of alternative recognitionals for student reference in language classrooms at a junior high school, a senior high school and a university in Japan. Both articles contribute to the growing body of work on participation practices (e.g. Evnitskaya and Berger Citation2017; Hazel and Mortensen Citation2017) and provide insights into our understanding of the embodied achievement of teaching and learning events in instructed learning settings.
Laursen and Kolstrup’s study revisits clarification requests and shows that such requests potentially have a much deeper influence on the course of interaction than being just a sidetrack from the ongoing conversation. Their study partly draws on Bakhtin’s notion of ‘the grotesque body’, thus diverging from the conversation analytic perspective taken in the previous two articles. Bakhtin is also influential in the work of LeBlanc, who adopts the notion of ventriloquation in the analysis of reported speech in teacher talk. LeBlanc’s study also takes up the notion of emotional labour, described as the means “by which female teachers may negotiate gendered expectations through their classroom talk”. This research demonstrates how a teacher employs linguistic resources to mediate conflict and criticism in whole-class interactions.
The final paper in this issue (Hong) employs microethnographic discourse analysis to investigate intertextuality in a kindergarten setting, advocating intertextuality as a “powerful heuristic to transform the children’s experiences into meaningful learning and actions”. The study describes the ways children’s poem writing activity transforms into a robust learning process.
We do hope that the diverse methodological and theoretical standpoints taken by authors of this issue as well as different contextual representations will contribute to the growing body of research on classroom discourse. Collectively, these papers therefore give us a good idea of how different ontological and epistemological perspectives may be brought to bear on important issues in classroom discourse.
Mälardalen University School of Education, Culture and Communication English Studies Västerås, Sweden
[email protected] Kunitz
Stockholm University, SwedenNuma Markee
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
References
- Davies, B., and R. Harré. 1990. “Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20 (1): 43–63.
- Davies, B., and R. Harré. 1999. “Positioning and Personhood.” In Positioning Theory, edited by R. Harré and L. van Langenhove, 32–52. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
- Evnitskaya, N., and E. Berger. 2017. “Learners’ Multimodal Displays of Willingness to Participate in Classroom Interaction in the L2 and CLIL Contexts.” Classroom Discourse 8 (1): 71–94.
- Hazel, Spencer, and Kristian Mortensen. 2017. “The Classroom Moral Compass-Participation, Engagement and Transgression in Classroom Interaction.” Classroom Discourse 8 (3): 1–21.
- Hong, H. 2018. “Exploring the role of intertextuality in promoting young ELL children’s poetry writing and learning: a discourse analytic approach.” Classroom Discourse 9(2): 166–182.
- Ishino, M., and Y. Okada. 2018. “Constructing students’ deontic status by use of alternative recognitionals for student reference.” Classroom Discourse 9(2): 95–111.
- Kayi-Aydar, H., and E. R. Miller. 2018. “Positioning in classroom discourse studies: a state-of-the-art review.” Classroom Discourse 9 (2): 79–94.
- Laursen, H. P., and K. L. Kolstrup. 2018. “Clarifications and carnival: Children’s embodied investments in a literacy conversation.” Classroom Discourse 9(2): 112–131.
- LeBlanc, R. J. 2018. “Managed confrontation and the managed heart: gendered teacher talk through reported speech.” Classroom Discourse 9 (2): 150–165.
- Reddington, E. 2018. “Managing participation in the adult ESL classroom: engagement and exit practices.” Classroom Discourse 9 (2): 132–149.