Complementary Approaches to Understanding Discourse as a Unified Linguistic, Social, and Cognitive Process

Session Submission Type: Working Group Roundtable

Abstract

How discourse, or language-in-use, provides a foundation for learning and development of knowledge, and linguistic, social and cognitive expertise throughout the lifespan is a fundamental question for education. Participants representing different disciplines (e.g., education, psychology, and linguistics) studying discourse-in-use will (1) examine how their disciplines conceptually frame this problem, and (2) explore how a complementary research approach that combines theory and methods from different disciplines can be developed to provide a more unified account of educational discourse, and understandings of what is accomplished through such discourse. Participants in this working group will explore how the arguments proposed relate to their areas of research.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Language and Social Processes

Chair

• Stephanie Renee Couch, California State University - East Bay

Papers

• Learning and Reasoning Through Interactive Discourse: Examples From Engineering and Medicine - Carl H. Frederiksen, McGill University

• Tracing Ways of Knowing, Being, and Doing Constructed in Classrooms - Judith L. Green, University of California - Santa Barbara

• The Nature of Dialogic Pedagogy: Understanding Discourse as Students’ Grasp of Science - Ellice A. Forman, University of Pittsburgh

• Second-Language Reading Comprehension: A Socio-Cognitive Perspective - Janet Donin, McGill University

• Discursive Construction of Academic Identities as Social Scientists - Maria L. Castanheira, Federal University of Minas Gerais