Transcribing the Social Construction of Key: Generating Mid-Level Theory Through Transcription

• In Event: 34.079 - Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: 34.079-12 - Reflexive Multimodal Transcription of Young Children: What Is Made Visible and Possible to Theorize

Abstract

Objective
This presentation theorizes a way of transcribing that foregrounds the constructed and negotiated processes of relationality in daily classroom life through key — a tone, manner or spirit of an act (Hymes, 1974). Although fundamental to social meaning, key is seldom discussed in educational research. Key is commonly languaged as affective (versus cognitive) or emotional (versus the body) aspects of learning -- partitioning the nature of the human experience into binary realms. Although it is more typical for scholars to discuss the tone of conversation in a transcript, it is often noted in an overview introducing the discourse (Goodwin, 1990). This presentation aims to begin at filling this void by offering one way to transcribe key through moment-to-moment classroom discourse as well as discusses how theory was generated in a dialectical process from an evolving transcription.

Theoretical Framework
From a sociolinguistic perspective, this project assumes that language is inseparable from and constitutive of social life (Labov, 1972). Examining key in moment-to-moment discourse enables an understanding of the nature of how people are together through the collective, ongoing moments in the classroom. Central to students’ and teachers’ linguistic resources is the use of key which is displayed through contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1982). Utterances and non-verbal gestures (e.g. wink) can be keyed in conversation as serious, silly, mock or indifferent.

Methods and Data
Drawing upon a larger, year-long microethnographic study in a first grade classroom, I utilize data from classroom read-alouds using a discourse analytic approach (Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto & Shuart-Faris, 2005). Classroom observations were conducted three times a week for eight months. Video recordings were taped throughout the school year. Read-aloud events that varied in key were transcribed in an evolving process that continually included increasing semiotic material from interactions. Transcripts were revised over the year and were analyzed using line-by-line descriptive sheet analyses (Bloome et al., 2005).

Results
Close examination of the video data from the read-alouds showed the importance of students and teachers use of verbal and nonverbal contextualization cues to construct and negotiate shifts of key in conversation. These cues include prosodic (e.g. stress on vowels) and paralinguistic features (e.g. various forms of sporadic giggling and synchronized laughter) to convey social meaning. Analyzing the transcription of key in discourse was fundamental to generating mid-level theory-- hovering just over the particularities of events presenting the situated, contextualized interaction (Newell, Bloome & Hirvela, 2015). In particular, the process underscored the fundamental importance of specific and descriptive contextualization cues in the social construction of key, specifically paralinguistic features that are often given general descriptions or glossed over in transcripts (e.g. “laughter”). Further, the process highlighted the inseparable nature of human experience through discourse.

Significance
This process illustrates the moment-to-moment development of classroom relations and how this process is inextricable from the process of teaching and learning. It raises questions about what can be understood about everyday interaction if subtle aspects of language such as key are erased from events in the process of transcription.

Author

• Faythe P Beauchemin, The Ohio State University - Columbus