Update on data collection

My back-up data collection plan within the high school context hit a snag late last week. The assistant principal of the school notified me that I could not conduct my research project on the collaborative team meetings without first obtaining the permission of "downtown." This means contacting the head of research and evaluation for Knox County Schools and submitting a written research proposal. I don't perceive this as being given the run-around, just an unfortunate side effect of the highly centralized, top-down administration for which KCS is well known.

I submitted my research proposal just under the wire, as all requests are reviewed on the second Monday of each month.  How long it takes for a reply remains uncertain. Based on the wording of the KCS policy, I fear my request will be declined because of the potentially sensitive nature of the collaborative team meetings I wish to audio record.  I suspect the fact that I am assuming a learner's stance and that the project is for fulfillment of a course requirement, not publication, will not serve to mitigate KCS's strict interpretation of the policy.

Here are the first few lines from "Regulations and Procedures for Conducting Research Studies in Knox County Schools":

Knox County Schools desires to keep abreast of changes in educational technology, results of current educational research, and innovative educational programs. Therefore, we welcome the opportunity to be a part of the development and testing of innovative ideas and quality research in education. However, it is the obligation of Knox County Schools and the research committee to protect the interests and learning opportunities of its students, teachers, and stakeholders. These interests and opportunities will not be sacrificed in order to establish a setting conducive to research. Thus, each proposal to conduct research will be examined carefully on the basis of whether it contributes significant new and useful information to the educational program of Knox County Schools and public education as a whole. In general, permission to conduct research may be denied when the study is deemed: (1) to interfere with instructional time, particularly when student responses are required; (2) to be too socially or politically sensitive; (3) to have little or no educational research value; or (4) to be too great of a burden on Knox County Schools personnel.

Update on data collection

Reading notes for Sept. 8: Confessions of a "talk junkie"

This week I helped chaperon an elementary school learning expedition (a "field trip" from the days of yore). It was a great opportunity. I was eager to get to know my son's new teachers and classmates, and I observed and interacted with them in the classroom, on the bus, at the zoo, and at lunch. It was a full day.

I had hoped to "check out" for a while and not do any thinking of the academic variety -- no blogs, no emails, no journal articles, and especially no discourse analysis in social psychology.

But, as the morning progressed, I couldn't stop thinking of discourse, or, in this case, the constant effort to squelch it: the "quiet zones," the "duck tails and bubbles" method of line management, the mountain of copy paper in the teacher workroom that bespoke the sheaves of worksheets that my son will bring home this year in his Kindergarten backpack.

The worst offender of all was the zookeeper, who, when a little girl said, "I saw a dart frog on T.V.," admonished the child by saying, "That's not a question. That's a story. Do you have a question?"

I didn't mean to turn the Kindergartners' learning expedition into my own little research expedition, but over and over again, I was struck by the "resources and practices" of those "engaged in mundane life" (Edwards, 2006, p. 43). Or, more specifically, I was struck by the absence of resources and practices in a place that should be engendering them -- K-12 education.

So, why am I having such a hard time connecting with conversation analysis (CA)? Along with discourse analysis (DA), it is a field that focuses on the "interaction-oriented work done by talk and text" (Edwards, p. 42), and yet what I've read so far about CA just doesn't appeal to me. How will that affect my fledging efforts in DA?

At the beginning of the semester, I was admittedly very confused about the difference between CA and DA. Now, especially after reading Paul ten Have's interesting and well-written historical account of the origins of CA, I have a better perspective on how the two traditions connect. I think I understand the "basic analytic function" of CA as ten Have describes it. Or, as Edwards (2006) puts it: "...[R]ather than asking is there a way of seeing below the surface to motives, ideas, thoughts, and experiences, we can ask: are there procedures that participants have, for dealing with those notions?" (p. 43).

I am starting to think of the conversation analysts as topographers, providing the map on which the discourse analysts can stake their claims. Considering the discourse analysts' preoccupation with variability (which I like), it seems they need the conversation analysts more than the conversational analysts need them.  CA defines the rules of "interactional social order" so that it is easier to locate and identify the chaos and the disorder when it invariably happens.  I hope that is a good way of thinking about the CA and DA connection.

Now that I have a clearer sense of the interests and commitments within each method, I must say that my confidence as a novice research is shakier than ever! The more I learn about CA the more certain I am that I am not cut out for it. But what does that imply for my work in discourse analysis??

As I read (or tried to read) CA studies excerpted by Wood & Kroger and ten Have, the problems being explored and the analytic distinctions being drawn struck me as so fine grained, so specialized, that I just didn't care. Perhaps "getting it" will come with practice and additional readings of full-blown studies (Lord, help me). At the opening of Chapter 3, I found myself literally nodding in agreement with ten Have's acknowledgment of CA's "image" -- obsessed with details, resisting the obvious.

Clearly, ten Have's purpose is to enlighten, not feed resistance to CA.  So, it's me who has the problem. I think I lack the patience and "analytic mentality" necessary for this kind of work (p. 10). Moreover, ten Have makes no apologies for the fact that the CA community is mostly content to study "social life" without taking a stand on social issues (p. 27). In the absence of serving some socially significant cause, I wonder how one summons the will to do this work, to devote a career to it?

On the other hand, I was talking to my colleague, Renee, and we discovered that in Wood & Kroger's Chapter 1, we were both draw to the emphasis on variability and the implications this has for the practical side of DA.  This is probably owing to our backgrounds as classroom teachers, where variability is the order of the day (despite reformers' efforts to endlessly standardize and script). We were intrigued by the idea that DA "thrives on variability" (p. 10) and briefly discussed what that would mean for our work as novice analysts. I, for one, am energized by the prospect of performing research that can be applied to my own future practice as a teacher/learner and that might serve others in similar contexts. 

This idea of variability as an "essential feature" to be studied, not a problem to be controlled, reminded me of a powerful literacy study we read last year in REED603: Advanced Studies and Theoretical Models of Reading. The authors zeroed in on students' unconventional interpretations of text during classroom literature discussions and teacher-student conferences. Specifically, they took up a DA approach to look closely at one student, who responded unexpectedly to aspects of rural poverty as portrayed in a poem.  During teacher-student conferences the "mismatch" between the student's performance and the teacher's expectations were explored in great depth (Hull & Rose, 2004, pp. 268-269).

The resulting discourse analysis revealed that sometimes a student’s seemingly inappropriate response is highly situated in his or her personal history and social identity. Teachers can learn a lot from the results of the analysis, beginning with the implications for text selection. A second lesson revolves around what to do when students inevitably put forth unexpected responses to literary selections. The implication is clear: talk about it!

Two years of doctoral study have taught me one thing: I have a fundamental, epistemological orientation to dialog. I think I may be addicted to the "'methodological' use of discourse" that Edwards somewhat disparages in his article (p. 42). Simply put: I'm a talk junkie. A talk-aholic? And two back-to-back semesters of intro to ethnography didn't help matters. A year of interactive interviewing, participant observation, and co-reconstructing of experience have perhaps ruined me for good. Maybe I am too much the egotist, wrapped up in my own well-meaning agenda, but I want to engage and ask questions. I want to converse with participants. 

So, can an incurable conversationalist be a conversation analyst? Probably not.

Other questions:

• I am curious about "categories" as produced in discourse, not pre-existing (Wood & Kroger, p. 17).  Is this the emic vs. etic distinction? A priori vs. in vivo? 
• How does an analyst choose a "phenomenon of interest," a research context, participants, guiding questions, if everything hinges on what is said by participants? It seems you must always suspend your next analytic move, your orientation to the literature -- all of it -- until you've been in the field long enough to see/hear/observe talk in action.

References:

Edwards, D. (2006). Discourse, cognition and social practices: The rich surface of language and social interaction. Discourse Studies, 8(1), 41-49.

Hull, G. & Rose, M. (2004). “This wooden shack place”: The logic of an unconventional reading. In R.B. Ruddell & N.J. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (5th ed., pp. 268-280). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.  

ten Have, P. (2007). Doing conversation analysis: A practical guide (2nd ed.). Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Wood, L. A., & Kroger, R. O. (2000). Doing discourse analysis: Methods for studying action in talk and text. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

 

Reading notes for Sept. 8: Confessions of a "talk junkie"

Reading notes on Mercer, chapters 5-7

In Chapter 6 of Words and Minds, Neil Mercer asks, "Have you ever felt, during a conversation with a child, that a shift in their understanding has taken place as a result of gaining some new information?" 

Well, yes, yes I have. 

It is soooo tempting to share out-of-the-mouths-of-babes stories to illustrate language development in children rather than try to synthesize my reactions to the diversity of topics in the last half of Mercer's book. These chapters discuss communities of practice, virtual communities, computer mediated communication, language development, and kids -- all areas of personal and professional interest to me.

Suffice it to say, I could fill an entire blog post with a response to Mercer's question, but I'll save those anecdotes for Facebook.  Instead, I will share some of my reactions to a few of the numerous implications for teachers, researchers, and teacher-researchers contained within chapters 5-7. [Note: See below for a cute photo and gratuitous kid-and-computer-mediated-communication anecdote all rolled into one.]

Still pondering context...

On p. 108, Mercer writes that "'explicitness' is a relative concept, a matter of context" and "the relevant consideration is whether matters are made sufficiently explicit by the participants to each other." This is exactly what we discussed in class last week, with the example of a teacher who may not know her students and what is or is not relevant to them.  If the teacher doesn't effectively contextualize the instructional content, she will be able to tell by students' facial expressions, body language, visual cues of engagement and disengagement, and (we hope) their questions.  

But, again, one would HOPE that in instances of teaching and learning, contextualizing is a joint venture between all participants (teacher and students). What about the researcher who is located on the other end of the participant-observer spectrum? I am beginning to come around to the idea that the researcher's compulsion to interview participants may be missing the mark insofar as discourse analysis (DA) is concerned, but the idea of simply acquiring audio in some disengaged fashion -- leaving the recorder on and walking away -- that's still hard for me to understand.

This issue of context came up again late last week, when I ran into a friend and school administrator at a local eatery.  She was grabbing breakfast to go and said she was off to a collaborative team meeting at a local high school, the same high school where I use to teach and still know several faculty, including the head principal.  She said (with the ulterior motive that I would apply for a current job opening there), "You should come to one of these meetings.  We talk about everything."  It was only after she rushed off that I realized, job opportunity aside, she had just offered me entree into an authentic data collection site, one where securing permission and developing rapport with participants would be relatively easy.

So, I immediately texted her with my own ulterior motive: to secure a back-up data collection site, just in case my first choice does not yield enough interesting data. (See related post on DA data collection plans.) I simply asked her via text, "Tell me about the kind of content discussed in a collaborative team meeting."

Here is her exact reply: "We do s-teams for a variety of reasons (pregnant sts, truant sts, students who may need to be tested for ld or ed); we also discuss students on the f-list and interventions. Every once in a while we actually discuss instructional issues: strategies, cross-curricular issues, etc." 

While allowing for the fact that text messaging is terrible medium for "contextualized joint activity" and "track laying," I think this is a great example of "alien jargon," what Mercer might call "teacherspeak." I am a teacher, and a former teacher within the potential research site being discussed, and I think it's safe to say that is the only reason I "get" 90 percent of her reply as well as her ironic tone at the end. But even I'm not entirely sure what "the f-list" is because no such term was ever used or discussed during my 6-year tenure at the school; I can only assume it's a list of failing students, which would make sense to most reasonable observers, I guess.

I am in the process of acquiring the principal's approval and the informed consent of team members to audio tape their collaborative meetings, but I feel like a relative outsider.  I haven't taught at the school in question since 2005; that's six years out of the loop, out of the "long conversation." I'm nervous about the "hidden contexts" and the inevitable jargon that will likely swirl through 30 to 45 minutes of rushed professional discourse. Mercer says this is a "profound problem" for analysts (p. 175).

Understanding and using discourses as "rhetorical tools"

I enjoyed the story about Sokal who used discourse as a "rhetorical tool" to ignite a debate between two academic fields, one of which he clearly did not respect.  It made me think of when others take up specialized discourses for even less-than-savory aims: to hoodwink, to propagandize, to denigrate a community or a people. There are lots of hoaxes on the Internet to this end, and, in recent years, a bit of hysteria about needing to teach "information literacy" to Internet users, especially children. I would argue information literacy is simply literacy and can be achieved by facilitating numerous and meaningful reading and writing experiences for learners of all ages. 

The Sokal story also made me think about literary genres, where the author's ability to "take in" readers and listeners by "saying something in the right way" (p. 112) is not the object of suspicion but a measure of sincerity and truthfulness. Speaking convincingly in various discourses is an enviable talent in literary circles and the source of much successful poetry, fiction, satirical writing, and social commentary. 

According to Mercer, "'recreational' genres" nurture "interthinking" by helping us make sense of and explain our own lives. There are just so many implications here for my field (literacy and reading education). For example, Mercer writes, "Genres are templates for interthinking, which, like all social conventions both facilitate and constrain what we do" (p. 170). The affordances and constraints of convention are exactly why we must encourage young people to pursue a varied and balanced reading diet. There is also compelling argument here for reading educators who seek "literature-based" or "balanced literacy" programs as opposed to the traditional basal approach.

I would add that reading, listening to, and watching a variety of genres should be accompanied with equal doses of writing and other forms of content production, so that learners can practice wielding the complexities of language for their own purposes and gain insight into how authors and other "powerful voices" innovate with and manipulate language. To that end, scholastic journalism, creative writing, and mentor texts are important outlets for learners to safely "try on" genres. I always believed this as a high school language arts teacher. But I realize now that my understanding of "genre" was perhaps too limited. I now see "genre" in the broader linguistic sense. The implications are the same for classroom teaching: expand writing instruction to include a variety of authentic subjects, modes, audiences, and purposes.

Revisioning the role of teacher as "discourse guide"

I am really interested in Mercer's "Talk Lessons" research, which he says is ongoing in Mexico and the UK. I wonder if similar work is being done anywhere in U.S. schools? A year ago in REED 603, Advanced Studies and Theoretical Models of Reading, we discussed the role of discussion as a constructivist tool for developing thought and aiding in reading comprehension, and our professor told us that this is under-researched area in literacy studies. 

I am inspired by this idea of teacher as "discourse guide" who develops each learner's individual capacity for "interthinking." But I wonder how many teachers are themselves versed in and comfortable with ideas of "collective thinking" and "ways of using language"? Many teachers would be offended by ideas in Words and Minds, e.g. memorization of facts as a waste of "cognitive storage space" and the suggestion that the most evolved of our species are those who "use joint communicative effort to recall" (pp. 168-169). I can just hear the old guard protesting, "Sounds like cheating to me!" Several of my former colleagues sneered at group work, and I distinctly remember one who pointedly referred to it as "guided ignorance."

My new dream dissertation: "Developing Teacher Capacity for Guiding and Facilitating Exploratory Talk in the Secondary Classroom."  Wouldn't that be fun?! Something like "Talk Lessons" with self and own students OR "Talk Lessons" with a teacher-participant (or co-hort of teacher-participants -- now I'm dreaming big).  This falls in line with the framework for teacher language developed by Peter H. Johnston in Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children's Learning. This handbook provides ways for literacy teachers to become more intentional in their teacher talk with the prerequisite assumption that all children deserve “to construct themselves as responsibly literate democratic citizens” (p. 80),

Taking the research community to task?

Mercer says there is very little interest in evaluating outcomes of people's communicative efforts. How can this be true?  I thought that the whole point of DA was to identify outcomes and effects of language in use. In class last week, we talked about the commitment within certain DA camps to examine power differentials and "long conversations" about race and gender. But it seems Mercer is taking the DA research community to task for not doing enough. Or, is this just posturing and puffery so that he may claim his own little niche in the research market? 

I want to give Mercer the benefit of the doubt, especially when he writes about transforming "the quality of education and working life" through "careful analysis" and "applied research" (p. 175). It sounds like the same social justice agenda I mentioned in my last week's reflection. Is Mercer a critical discourse analyst? Is he pressing for more of this vein of analysis? 

"Look, Mommy, Scooter is keeping your ABC's warm!"

Reading notes on Mercer, chapters 5-7

Data collection plans

Plan A

In collaboration with my classmate Renee, I have identified a research site and acquired the informed consent of all seven participants.  The site is a hybrid course in emergent literacy that meets face-to-face on Saturday mornings five times this semester. Renee is the instructor of record for the class; she is teaching for Dr. Anne McGill-Franzen, who is on sabbatical. As TA, I provide technical support to the instructor and students, mainly through BlackBoard.

The course, REED 529, is generally populated with practicing classroom teachers and recent college graduates seeking additional endorsement as K-12 reading specialists and/or MS degrees in reading education. Because the course is a hybrid, students must demonstrate competency with a variety of information and communication technologies in order to participate, interact, and represent what they have learned. Students write weekly blog reflections, build knowledge bases within wikis, and use the course management site to upload and submit written work and to communicate with the instructor. The final project is a written case study accompanied by an enhanced slide presentation for which the students must capture, edit, and embed video documenting their assessments of and instructional interventions with emergent readers.

Because the class was scheduled to meet twice in August and then not again until late September, we hit the ground running and began capturing audio on the first day, which was August 20.  We have since recorded more than five hours of audio, but I cannot say that any of it is particularly useful or relevant to my personal research agenda, which would be how teachers take up and talk about digital technologies. Over the last two Saturdays, I have listened to and participated in snippets of conversation about technology in the course, but so far there has not been a single, 30-minute segment of natural, uninterrupted conversation on the subject of technology.

It has always been the case in the past that I have offered technology help sessions to the 529 students, with them taking the initiative insofar as accessing that support. Over the next six weeks, students will be engaged in their first big project of digital content creation, the wiki. So, I am currently in a holding pattern as I wait to see how -- if at all -- they want to talk about, problem-solve, or troubleshoot this assignment between themselves or with me.

As far as collecting a document or text to analyze, I was thinking of two things: 1) the course syllabus, or 2) an actual digital artifact created by one of the students for the course. But, if I use a piece of student-generated content, I am wondering what additional permissions I might have to secure??

Plan B

I was recently invited to sit in on weekly collaborative team meetings at a local high school, and I am currently in the process of securing permission from the building-level principal to record these sessions. Then, of course, I would have to acquire the informed consent of the team, which numbers about eight teachers and administrators. The meetings occur every Thursday morning around 10:15 and last for at least 30 to 45 minutes. On the plus side, the frequency and duration suggests to me that this might me a good back-up plan, assuming the gatekeeper grants access. I’m also sure the team will generate a substantial trail of documentation, some of which I can add to my data mix.

On the minus side, I wonder if I will be a little handicapped, analytically speaking, because of my six-year absence from the public school context? I will discuss this issue of context in my reflection on Mercer, chapters 5-7.  

Data collection plans

What is the discourse analysis and literary criticism connection?

[Note: Please see previous post for a full reflection on Neil Mercer's Words and Minds, chapters 1-4.]

Coming at discourse analysis (DA) from the perspective of an English major and high school language arts teacher, my curiosity is naturally piqued by references to "readers," "texts," and "interpretations." 

Mercer does this a lot in Words and Minds. He writes, for example, "'Context' is created anew in every interaction between a speaker and listener or writer and reader" (p. 21). When Mercer refers to written texts (as opposed to utterances) and the "interpretive efforts of the reader," I can't help but think of Louis Rosenblatt's transactional theory, which in my current field of study, reading education, has been described as “a wave in an ocean unto itself” (Ruddell & Unrau, p. 1121).  It's a multidisciplinary perspective that includes comparative literature, philosophy, aesthetics, linguistics, and sociology. This lineage of thought is similar to DA.  Is there a connection?
  
Transactional theory views reader and text as bound in a “total dynamic situation,” where meaning is not extracted from the text but created between reader and text (Ruddell & Unrau, p. 1121). As a preservice English teacher in the early-90s, I came to recognize transactional theory, also referred to as "reader-response," as the primary theory that informed most of the English and language arts instruction I received as both a high school student and undergrad. (Although, I did have one American literature professor who admonished us on the first day of class that we were never to interpret a rabbit in a Robert Frost poem as anything other than a rabbit.)

Last week's class notes and some of the reading indicate that DA draws from literary theory, without making specific mention of Rosenblatt.  Starks and Trinidad, for instance, say DA evolved from linguistic studies, literary criticism, and semiotics (p. 1374).  From what areas of literary criticism does DA draw, and is transactional theory one of them?  I made a cursory pass at the other required texts for the course and could not find a single mention of literary theory, literary criticism, reader-response, or Rosenblatt. 

But there are several parallels.  Take, for instance, Rosenblatt's concept of the transactional paradigm, which borrows from an overall shift in "habits of thinking" over the last century and which casts aside "the old stimulus-response, subject-object, individual-social dualisms" (pp. 1364-1365). Under the new paradigm, "the human being is seen as part of nature, continuously in transaction with an environment -- each one conditions the other" (p. 1365).

Rosenblatt describes conversations, or "linguistic transactions," as "temporal" activities. "Each person has come to the transaction with an individual history, manifested in what has been termed a linguistic-experiential reservoir" (p. 1367).  Readers of Mercer might recognize the "reservoir" as a "frame of reference."

Similar to the way American trial judges reject linguistic interpretations of recorded dialogue in favor of one-shot "common-sense" understandings (Mercer, p. 36), transactional theory has its own critics who view reader-response as too subjective and "anything goes."  

There is a competing school of thought, commonly called "close reading," that presents a text stripped of its contextual layers. During close readings, students are taught to attend only to textual elements (words, images, language devices) as sources of meaning. It may be too pat to suggest that conversation analysis has its own parallel form of literary theory in the close reading, but the similarities are interesting.

References:

Mercer, N. (2000). Words and minds: how we use language to think together. New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library.

Rosenblatt, L.M. (2004). The transactional theory of reading and writing. In R.B. Ruddell & N.J. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (5th ed., pp. 1363-1398). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.  

Ruddell, R.B. & Unrau, N.J. (2004). Introduction: Models of reading and writing processes. In R.B. Ruddell & N.J. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (5th ed., pp. 1116-1126). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.  

Starks, H. & Trinidad, S.B. (2007). Choose your method: A comparison of phenomenology, discourse analysis, and grounded theory.  Qualitative Health Research, 17(10), 1372-1380.

What is the discourse analysis and literary criticism connection?

Reading notes on Mercer, chapters 1-4

While reading the first few pages of Mercer's Words and Minds, I was reminded of the old cliche of "building a plane while flying it." Communication between individuals carries as much potential for being productive -- and enthralling --  as it does for being disastrous. 

 "Building" origami paper airplanes. Patrick Ryan/Lifesize/Getty Images

Instead of planes or flight paths, Mercer's preferred image is a "track." He compares two people in conversation to "operators of some strange, dual-controlled track-laying vehicle called 'language.'" The process of "joint contextualizing can be done well or badly" (p. 25).  [Note: Page numbers may be off; I'm still learning how to cite from an eBook that doesn't have "fixed" page numbers.]

Hints of the epistemological foundation of discourse analysis (DA) come early and fast in Words and Minds; although, Mercer doesn't actually mention DA until Chapter 4.  

Photo by Samurai at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Mercer quickly rejects the positivist orientation that regards language as "transmitting ideas in a precise, unchanged form" (p. 5) and tells us that  "language is not only used to enable joint thinking about a problem, language use itself may create a problem to be resolved" (p. 12). Language is a tool, and one that we humans often misuse or abuse.  Mistakes happen. Problems of application or interpretation may themselves become the object of study. 

I like the empowering stance that Mercer assumes when he asserts that nothing is fixed in language, including our interpretations. There is that bleak worldview that regards language as just some rhetorical bludgeon wielded by politicians, professors, partisan media outlets,  and other powerful elites. "Fortunately," Mercer assures us, listeners and readers have their own powers of perception and "knowledge resources." Through dialogue and asking questions, we get to decide our own interpretation of "powerful" texts (p. 82).

That vision may strike some readers as a little too rosy or idealistic. I believe it is possible, but it carries a huge educational imperative.  I've long been interested in the field of critical literacies and the work of organizations like the Center for Media Literacy (CML). CML publishes a "toolkit" based on Five Key Questions that Can Change the World. These are very similar to the questions Mercer lists on page 82.

My nascent understanding of DA is it's a methodological tradition that, when done well, informs and improves our communication skills. I detect some social justice imperatives here, DA as route to improving living and work conditions (such as in classrooms, my area of interest). I shared my thoughts with a more advanced DA student, who said, "Well, now you are getting into critical discourse analysis."  Is that where I'm going? I have no idea.

Mercer acknowledges that his claim that language provides insight into how people think may seem "dubious" because "thinking" is not observable (p. 16). But the analysis of "interthinking," as Mercer calls it, is possible, and it's a lot easier than the work of some psychological researchers who focus on interior thought processes.

Interthinking occurs through dialog between people, and we can systematically and rigorously draw inferences from "whatever information we can" (p. 16). Concepts to look at and analyze closely include: context (a "mental phenomenon," any available information that people bring to a situation), physical artifacts (the material context), conversational ground rules for different kinds of talk (generally tacit and culturally specific), and frames of reference (past cultural experiences, perspectives, world views).

Part of the rigor and high standards of DA emanate from its tangible products -- the transcripts. In the preface Mercer tells us that when presenting transcripts in the book, he used a modified format, not the standardized Jeffersonian.   I had started asking questions about the "analytical abstractions" of DA and its intended audience in my last week's reflection, and I continue to wonder about the implications for audience when using Jeffersonian transcription.

If readers of a Jeffersonian transcript already know the symbols or are provided a detailed key, they can almost "hear" the text (Evers, 2011), but it seems that only experienced transcriptionists and conversation/discourse analysts would ever willingly attempt to read such a transcript.  At first glance, these documents are quite off-putting, almost like another language, and couldn't that be a barrier to reaching the audience whose communication skills you are hoping to improve? 

Even Mercer refers to the products -- the transcripts -- of conversation analysis as having "a dauntingly technical quality" (p. 57). I agree, so I guess I'm wondering about presentation of findings, and if it's common for analysts to carefully consider the desired target audience and modify their transcripts accordingly prior to publication, as did Mercer.

I'm also thinking about connections between DA and literary theory, and I will try to post those thoughts soon. [See What is the discourse analysis and literary criticism connection?]

References:

Evers, J. C. (2011). From the past into the future. How technological developments change our ways of data collection, transcription and analysis. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1). Retrieved from http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/viewArticle/1636

Mercer, N. (2000). Words and minds: how we use language to think together. New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library.

Reading notes on Mercer, chapters 1-4

Discourse Analysis: questions, reflections, reservations

A few days ago I received an email from a fellow doc student was considering taking Discourse Analysis, a research methods course I will be taking this semester. She was wondering if discourse analysis would be the right methodological "fit" for her.

Fact is, I'm wondering that for myself, too.

Because I would love to have my colleague in the course with me, I tried to convince her to take it. In my email reply I said, "My hunch is discourse analysis could be an overall method of study or could just inform your method of data collection, transcription, and/or analysis along the way.  I definitely recommend you keep taking methods courses, or what you learned in intro to qual will slip away."

That's all I could think to say because I really don't know much about discourse analysis as a qualitative research tradition.

I wish I could say, "I'm taking Discourse Analysis because my committee thinks it would be a good idea." Or, "It matches my dissertation proposal." Or, "It fits my research question."  I would first need a committee, a dissertation topic, and a research question for any of that to be true!

On the plus side, I am an undergraduate English major and journalism minor and a former high school English teacher who loves to, well, talk! (I've been told by well-meaning friends who like me that I could carry on conversation with a tree stump.) I don't require much arm-wrenching to take a course that focuses on language use. 

So, it's established I am interested in language and qualitative research methods.  Is that reason enough to take a semester of Discourse Analysis? The reading selections for the first week leave me with more questions than answers. 

Silverman claims the preparation and study of transcribed conversation is an absolutely worthwhile endeavor, but "without a way of defining a research problem, even detailed transcription can be merely an empty critique.  Thus we need to ask: what sort of features are we searching for in our transcripts and what approach lies behind this search?" (p. 166) 

To prepare transcripts with the attention to detail required by discourse analysis, it seems you would have to have a clear sense of purpose.  A well-defined research question.  I have neither of these. What I do have is an idea for a pilot study about what would happen if literacy teachers in the UT Reading Education program were allowed to choose and adapt digital and multimedia storytelling tools for purposes of representing case study data.  The current manner in which case studies are reported and shared is fraught with technical difficulties, so I proposed an intervention in the form of a design experiment. 

In my first pass at a proposal for this research project I made no mention of language-in-use or its role in the "creation and maintenance of social norms, the construction of personal and group identities, and the negotiation of social and political interaction" (Starks & Trinidad, 2007, p. 1374). Is possible or even appropriate to retrofit my research idea with a discourse analysis bent? Could I take a segment of recorded audio from my desired participant population and "get started" with "repeated, careful listening" (Silverman, p. 163)?

I am also wondering about intended audiences for discourse analysis and the level of "analytic abstraction" (Starks & Trinidad, 1377) required in the final write-up of these studies.  I want to collaborate with real teacher/learners, using 21st century digital tools to solve a real problem in practice and produce research that reaches a practitioner-based audience, not policy makers.

Discourse Analysis: questions, reflections, reservations