Show Me Your Listening Position: Embodied Silence and Speech in a Second-Grade Class of Bilingual and Bi-Dialectal Students

• In Event: 29.082 - Talk That Talk: Making the Most of Text, Speech, and Silence for Emergent Bilinguals in the Classroom

Abstract

Educators often approach silence as a barrier to learning. What can we learn from what students, particularly bilingual and bi-dialectal students, do not, cannot, or have no chance to say in the classroom? This study examines the silences that accompany the speech of those students and the circumstances that contribute to silence or create space for talk.

This study focuses on the communicative silence during social interaction. Communicative silence operates within an immediate interactional context and intersecting wider sociocultural system to determine meaning. Instances of silence are best understood as performed not by a single speaker, but rather by individuals or groups bound together inside a system of social organization (Goodwin, 1990; Schultz, 2009).

This ethnographic study focused on face-to-face interactions between members of a speech community across one school year. The focal second grade class was part of an English language strand at a small, urban public school in California. Ethnographic and interactive data were collected at varying levels of abstraction. The ethnographic data enabled me to describe, categorize, and organize data of face-to-face interaction and break down activity into “interactive events.” Conversation analysis transcription conventions facilitated the analysis of speech and silence patterns (Sacks et al., 1974).

The findings reveal that silence had a palpable presence, was a constitutive aspect of classroom culture, and a consequential communicative action. Silence had uses far beyond what has been previously acknowledged. But systems of meaning at both the sociocultural and interactional levels constrained how silence could be used and talked about in the classroom. Finally, students skillfully used silence to accomplish interactional, social, and academic work.

Analyzing silence revealed insights about talk and conceptions of learning. For example, discourse during instructional events mostly consisted of short, disconnected units of talk that primarily focused on “asking” and “telling” and took place in a tightly controlled sequence. Direct attempts to elicit elaborate, or connect speech were common, but often unsuccessful. Results suggest this was because communication dynamics between teacher and students attended to a notion of knowledge as a finite product and learning as a display of that product. Learning, knowledge and language were enacted as products, not processes. This constrained how silence and speech were available to participants as communicative resources and limited opportunities for rich talk and productive silence.

The results also suggest that the unit of educational reorganization or change is not the individual child, but the classroom environment and systems that promote ways of using silence and speech. If our goal for language-minority students is to acquire rich, academic language and content area success, we need to think deeply about how the “product over process” philosophy of learning and knowledge limits the types of communication available in classrooms.


References

Goodwin, M. (1990). He-said-she-said: Talk as social organization among black children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Sacks, H., Schegloff, E.A. & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50, 696-735.

Schultz, K. (2009). Rethinking classroom participation: Listening to silent voices. New York: Teachers College Press.

Author

• Sara Rutherford-Quach, Stanford University