Becoming a Critical Language Educator Through Engagement With Discourse Analysis Within Graduate Course Experiences

• In Event: Analyzing Language, Examining Power: Discourse Analysis as a Pedagogical Tool

Abstract

We present a study of how discourse analysis (DA) was used in a graduate teacher education course focused on language, identity, race and power (e.g., Author, 2014). The course, Classroom Discourse and Teacher Research, occurred at a large Southwestern public university and was focused on using narrative, multimodal, deconstructive/critical, and reconstructive/positive DA approaches in both teacher research and in coaching preservice teachers (Authors, 2016). We ask, “How did DA-focused course activities guide teachers in developing a critical language pedagogy perspective?” (e.g., Alim, 2005; Martínez, 2013).

Participants in the study included ten inservice teachers, two doctoral students, and one university professor. An initial qualitative analysis of fieldnotes and transcriptions of class events (15 sessions/3 hours each)--including book clubs, whole group and small group discussions of readings, collaborative analysis of teacher researcher notebook entries, and preservice teacher video coaching analysis sessions--revealed three ways that teachers engaged with DA in the course. We then engaged in a closer discourse analysis of events in which teachers used DA (Rogers, 2014) towards an understanding of how DA was becoming a pedagogical tool for the teachers.

The first way teachers engaged in DA, sociolinguistic analysis, involved applying sociolinguistic principles to consider how standard language ideologies are (re)constructed in daily life. For example, situated within a book discussion of Lippi-Green’s (2012) English With An Accent, participants analyzed how ideologies of language variation were built and disrupted through discursive interaction in their encounters as both multilingual people and teachers of multilingual students.

The second engagement with DA was textual analysis--analyzing language choices in texts and how texts position students. Drawing on models provided by the instructor, teachers took up critical language awareness-focused textual analysis in relation to professional literature read for class (e.g., Heath, 1983). Teachers’ use of DA ranged from drawing on personal connections to classroom practice (i.e. “this is exactly what I experienced”) and expressing resistance to the text (“I would never do that in sharing time”) to taking up a historical perspective and disrupting/questioning the narratives represented in the texts.

Finally, we found the participants used multimodal discourse analysis to analyze their interactions with their preservice teachers. Teachers presented videos three times in the class, and each time, engaged in collaborative analysis of how their linguistic choices, body positioning, and use of materials (i.e., data collected during an observation) engaged preservice teachers in critically examining teaching practices. Often, teachers repeated their language and collaboratively tried out alternative ways of positioning themselves and students in those conversations within the shared space of the course, engaging in reconstructive analysis.

Language is intertwined with race and power, and in order to disrupt inequities that are evident in classrooms as well as larger societal structures, teachers and researchers must interrogate this relationship through an analysis of language (Erikson, 2004; Labov, 1972; Lippi-Green, 2012). These three examples of inservice teachers doing DA in a course imply how we support critical language teachers in action.

Authors

• Melissa Mosley Wetzel, The University of Texas - Austin

• Laura A Taylor, Rhodes College

• Saba Khan Vlach, The University of Texas - Austin