7.3 Analytical Tools and Procedures of Classroom D...
In this chapter, the level of classroom discourse analysis is register, by focusing on the detailed description on the ideational and interpersonal features.To recapitulate on Chapter 3, register in SFL refers to a functional variety of languages that combines the linguistic features and interactional patterns in a given situational context.It semantically configures the field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse.For the current analysis, I focus on the registerial variables of field and tenor, because they can provide insights into how the Chinese students enact their disciplinary identities in the situational context of the classroom, which generates prerequisites and enabling conditions for exploring group membership affiliation in the development of linguistic meanings and speech roles.
In particular, the analytical results show that the greatest differences between the four classroom discourse texts lie in the constructing of field and tenor.Rather than selecting particular analytical tools to analyse the texts, I used different SFG approaches and found that grammatical intricacy, technicality and abstraction, and speech functions were the salient ideational and interpersonal features constructing the different meaning probabilities in texts.To give a cohesive picture of classroom discourse analysis, the explanations of the analytical tools and procedures are presented together in the subsections as follows.