7.2　Classroom Discourse

The classroom is the fundamental learning context to understand how students recontextualise disciplinary knowledge and learning experience.More than a material space, a classroom is construed as a meaningful field embedded with particular pedagogic or disciplinary conventions and interpersonal relationships.Spoken discourse is the most common mode of language for carrying out activities in the classroom.A teacher will conduct a lecture with monologue, or both the teacher and students participate in a conversation to exchange information of knowledge through interactive sequences.It has been discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 that, once a conventional mode of expression is recognised and accepted through habitual participation in discourse practice, a disciplinary discourse becomes a register.In this sense, an instance of classroom discourse is registerially structured within the range of disciplinary conventions, by sharing a variety of contextual and ideological features.

Interpersonal relationships are another dynamic composition affecting the classroom discourse structure.The relationship between teachers and students has an impact on how they operate classroom interactions with different linguistic structure scales.In most cases, as Christie (2002) states, when teachers and students interact in the classroom, it is teachers who take up the dominant speech role of opening and ending the interaction, initiating the questions, or evaluating the answers.However, this does not mean that the development of students’ speech roles in interaction is not transferable.As mentioned in the previous chapters, positive engagement in discourse practice endorses the enhanced sense of values and ideologies.It seems most likely that senior students enact classroom discourse with a more dynamic and advanced structure than the novice students.

Much of the classroom discourse analysis has been forged in Sinclair and Coulthard’s (1975) five ranks of discourse units, Lesson, Transaction, Exchange, Move and Act, and Mehan’s (1979) IRE moves, Initiation, Response, Evaluation.Even though there is a large amount of classroom discourse analysis recently done via IRE, the three-move approach is criticised for neglecting the much more dynamic constructive meanings of interaction, concerning the teacherand-student moment-to-moment roles and responsibilities in constructing these meanings, and the cohesive relationship between the corresponding interactive patterns and overall classroom participation.Although it is true that interactive patterns of classroom discourse tend to be conventional and thus predictable, arguably, it is the interpersonal function of information exchange that intermediates between activity patterning and the whole classroom discourse text.

Culture is another important factor that has an impart on students’ interpersonal performance in the classroom.Students from Western and non-Western backgrounds have significantly different understandings, expectations and beliefs of pedagogic or disciplinary cultures and educational practices, as discussed in Chapter 1.That’s why, for example, in certain traditional Englishimmersion educational contexts, non-English speaking students tend to be marginalised (Ballard & Clanchy, 1991).To enact classroom interaction in such a context, much more attention should be paid to the connection between the appropriate cultural model and the symbolic control of discourse (Christie, 2002; Hyland, 2012).Language is a social phenomenon that is tied up with social practices, values and ideologies.A prominent function of language, as Gee (1999) points out, is ‘to scaffold the performance of social activities...and to scaffold human affiliation within culture and social groups and institutions’ (p.1).Therefore, new methods of classroom discourse analysis are needed in order to put forward a more contemporary understanding of what Christie (2002) suggests—‘the challenges of articulating what might be seen as an adequate account of language in the social construction of experience’ (p.2).This, as Christie (2002) argues, can be addressed with systemic functional grammar (SFG).The relevant justifications have been explained in the previous chapters.