Dialogic Voices in a Japanese Fourth-Grade Mathematics Classroom: A Bakhtinian Perspective

• In Event: Discursive Practice and Knowledge Construction in Mathematics Classrooms in Widely Different Cultural Settings

Abstract

This paper investigates how a Japanese fourth-grade mathematics classroom is discursively constituted. The investigation focuses on the ways that students collaboratively coordinate their purposes and maintain a predictable sense of the ongoing discourse.

The theoretical framework, which is grounded on the Bakhtinian perspective (1982, 1986), is applied to the study of classroom discourse in which the concept of “voice” and “polyphony” play significant roles. Unlike many scholars of language, especially contemporary linguists who concern themselves primarily with linguistic form and meaning abstracted from the actual conditions of use, Bakhtin focused on the utterance, the real unit of communication. Speech can exist in reality only in the form of concrete utterances by the individual speaking subject. The speaking subject is called \"voice\". Voice refers to more than vocal-auditory signal. It involves the much more general phenomenon of \"the speaking personality\" in a particular social practice. Utterance is an activity that enacts different values, perspectives, conceptual horizons, intentions, and world views. Bakhtin stresses “polyphony”. Any utterance entails the idea of addressivity. An utterance reflects not only the voice producing it but also the voices to which it is addressed. Furthermore, the voices to which an utterance is addressed are temporally, spatially, and socially distant.

A participant observation was conducted in a fourth-grade mathematics classroom. “Area of rectangle” was the topic of the lesson sequence. Every lesson, 16 in total, was audio-video recorded for later analysis. Micro-ethnography was adopted in order to generate a provisional scheme of discursive interaction. In order to ensure that the uncovered recursive discourse pattern converged with that of the participant, I adopted a research strategy analogous to “breaching study\" (Garfinkel, 1967). This methodological procedure consists of observing participants’ actions where normal circumstances are disrupted. To obtain such an unusual occasion, this paper reports the analysis of an episode where the classroom teacher was absent at the beginning of lesson and students had to initiate discursive interaction by themselves.

In this episode, students collaboratively tried to formulate a problem through whole class discussion. In the absence of the teacher, a student took the role of a coordinator, who ventriloquised the teacher’s voice. With this student as chair, two students initiated whole class discussion. Their utterances contained not only talking and doing mathematics but also revoiced their classmates’ talking about doing and talking mathematics.

Analysis of the episodes shows that classroom discourse in this classroom was characterized by a dialogicality of voices. Any utterance contains multiple voices that contain within them dual aspects: an object to which utterances are addressed and voices of others that are spatially and temporally distant. Examples will be provided to illustrate this dialogicality.

References
Bakhtin, M. M. (1982). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Holqist, M. et.al, (Eds). Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Translated by V. W. McGee. Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice Hall.

Author

• Minoru Ohtani, Kanazawa University