Rational but Relational: A Classroom Ethnography on Languaging Thinking Practices in an English Classroom

• In Event: 18.072 - Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: 18.072-1 - Agency, Discourse, and Youth

Abstract

While many studies have investigated language as a tool for improving thinking, little have been studied about how people participate in the act of languaging to construct thinking. This study proposes a concept of languaging thinking and examines how the instructional practice of languaging thinking is constructed in a reading and writing classroom around crafting and analyzing argument. Adopting a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis, I analyzed the classroom interaction, interviews with the students and the teacher, and students’ writing. Findings indicate that languaging thinking was interactionally and socially constructed as part of the unfolding learning process and that it was employed as a way of engaging the teacher and the students into sophisticated and complex ways of doing argument.

Author

• Min-Young Kim, The Ohio State University