Discourse Analysis Of Languaging And Literacy Events In Educational Settings PDF Download

This dissertation investigates language and literacy practices in a kindergarten and first grade classroom and builds upon Hymes’ (1974) notion of “key” to develop a theory of “relational-key” through the paradigm of languaging relationships. The concept, “relational-key,” can be described as the mood or atmosphere of a conversation yet it is much more than the mood or atmosphere per se. Relational-key constitutes the complex and multilayered construction of relationships that we have with each other, ourselves and the material environment through our uses of language. There are, therefore, numerous relational-keys enacted in classrooms and in social life more generally. In the broad sense, relational-keys underlie the kinds of interactions we have with each other. Thus, there are sad relational-keys and ambivalent or distant relational-keys. In other words, every event has a relational-key. This dissertation is primarily concerned with relational-keys in events that build a sense of mutuality, connectedness and intellectual excitement in classrooms. I focus on these relational-keys to build on what is happening in classrooms to create positive change in the ways in which we think about and enact classroom life for both students and their teachers. I see this as particularly important for students from non-dominant communities, emergent bilingual students, students who have been identified for special education services and students whose families struggle economically, and who therefore, are more likely to experience subtractive models of schooling that divests students of social and cultural resources while often emphasizing test taking, discipline and basic skills curricula. While my goal in this study has been to investigate relational-keys of connectedness and joy in learning, there is nothing inherent in the concept of relational-key that characterizes it as such. Relational-keys range the nature of human experience and can be alienating, oppressive and suffocating just as they can be the opposite. Drawing upon a two year-long classroom ethnographic study in early childhood classrooms, I used microethnographic discourse analysis to closely examine particular moments in classroom life in the chosen settings focusing on the construction of relational-keys across reading, writing, language and literacy events. This study examines these constructions through the lens of three critical constructs. First, I examined how languaging is action that students and teachers utilize to create social relationships and content-emotional-dispositional stances in both the teacher-directed instructional space of literacy events and in children’s literacy events in peer culture. Second, I examined how students’ and teachers’ socialization to narrative as text or performance affect the relational-keys of classroom life. Third, I examined how authoring can be reimagined as the relational work of languaging writing through relational-keys. The findings indicate the importance of orienting schooling not only towards academic achievement or students’ acumen in reading and writing, but rather, to the complex and nuanced set of dimensions that make people into readers and writers. Theorizing the classroom through the concept of “relational-key” leads to important theoretical, methodological and instructional shifts in thinking about the teaching of reading and writing instruction in classrooms. The data I have gathered in this study challenge central concepts in educational research including the notion that schooling comprises a set of skills to be accumulated in a fixed manner for future success. The concept, “relational-key,” focuses on the present moments of interactions in and of students and teachers’ lives in the classroom, and asks questions about students and teachers continual being, belonging and becoming with others in that context. Relational-key, as a construct, also challenges the location of “meaning.” Rather than “meaning” being held in the text, “meaning” is held among the lived relationships among people involved and participating in those events. The findings in this study, then, create new ways through which to think about, and to reconceptualize how we understand literacy, teaching, learning, curriculum and instruction.