Cognition and Learning Through Educational Discourse Interactions

• In Event: Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Ethnography and Language in Educational Settings: (Re)Envisioning and Reformulating Language Use in Educational Settings

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of how to study social and cognitive learning processes and how they co-occur through analysis of discourse interactions in social contexts of learning. The challenge for researchers is to make these learning processes visible in contexts of educational interaction; that is, to analyze how processes of social interaction and cognition co-occur and are reflected in the content and form of discourse interactions, and in the actions of learners and teacher-mentors. This requires analysis of discourse interactions among participants within social contexts of education such as classrooms and collaborative learning groups, the propositional content of utterances, and analysis of how the discourse is framed to communicate knowledge and practices that are being learned (Author, 1999; 2008).
I first breached this problem when I was working at Rockefeller University with John Dore and William Hall on analysis of their corpus of children’s conversations, and reported the results in Ethnography and Language in Educational Settings (Author, 1981). Drawing on Dore’s work on conversational analysis of the structure of children’s illocutionary acts (Dore, 1977) and inspired by Gumperz’ insights about the nature of conversational inference as a process of interpreting contextualization cues signaling contextual interpretive frames (Gumperz, 1977), I explored the potential of applying current cognitive theories and approaches to analysis of the content of children’s conversations. Specifically, I explored how analysis in terms of propositional content, inferences, and frame/schema representations, prominent in current cognitive research on comprehension and production, could be applied to children’s conversations to complement their analysis in terms of their illocutionary structure.
This paper aims to promote discussion of the potential and challenge of developing a multidisciplinary approach to analysis of interactive educational discourse that combines cognitive and interactive sociolinguistic approaches. I will present results of an analysis of the conversational interaction and the content of discourse interaction between an experienced tutor and three students in a context of one-to-one tutoring in a domain of mechanical engineering. Over the course of three tutoring sessions, the three university students all were successful in learning to reason and solve problems in the domain through their conversational interaction with the tutor. In the first session, the tutor modelled for the students how to solve a problem example with the students participating in the solution process. During the next two tutoring sessions, the tutor switched to coaching the students as they attempted to reason and solve new problems with decreasing assistance from the tutor. Results indicate that the tutorial discourse provided an interactive conversational environment in which the tutor modelled the knowledge, reasoning and problem-solving methods needed to solve problems for the students. Subsequently the tutor shifted responsibility for problem solving to the students, using their contributions to the discourse to guide and provide feedback to the students and model additional knowledge if needed by the students.  The interactive tutorial discourse enabled the students to successfully develop knowledge and skill in reasoning and solving problems in this complex domain of problem solving.

Author

• Carl H. Frederiksen, McGill University