Conversational structures of ‘reports’ in writing class group work
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Stefan Frazier
Stefan Frazier (b. 1968). His research interests are discourse analysis, functional grammar, corpus linguistics, and composition pedagogy. His publications include ‘The trouble with crosscultural oversensitivity’ (2002); ‘A corpus analysis of would-clauses without adjacent ifclauses’ (2003); and ‘Tellings of remembrances “touched off” by student reports in group work in undergraduate writing classes’ (in press).
Abstract
As students are participating in group work in writing classes, what are they talking about and how is their interaction organized? This study analyzes the structures of talk and embodied interaction in student group work in university writing classes. Using video data of naturally occurring interactions, the study draws from conversation analysis (CA) and from analytic approaches to the way talk, gesture, and other forms of embodiment join in a semiotic ecology to produce social action in the course of interaction (see C. Goodwin 1984, 1986, 2000, 2003). Students in group work ‘share their ideas’ in highly structured ways. Their ‘reports’ to each other about work they have completed outside of their group work are similar to the ‘storytelling’ structures of ordinary conversation (Sacks 1974, 1995). This paper looks at those structures in detail and also makes a case for the ‘institutional’ nature (Drew and Heritage 1992; Schegloff 1992) of group work talk.
About the author
Stefan Frazier (b. 1968). His research interests are discourse analysis, functional grammar, corpus linguistics, and composition pedagogy. His publications include ‘The trouble with crosscultural oversensitivity’ (2002); ‘A corpus analysis of would-clauses without adjacent ifclauses’ (2003); and ‘Tellings of remembrances “touched off” by student reports in group work in undergraduate writing classes’ (in press).
© Walter de Gruyter
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Articles in the same Issue
- Educating the semiotic mind: Introduction to special issue on ‘Semiotics and education’
- Diagrammatic reasoning and hypostatic abstraction in statistics education
- The give and take between semiotics and second-order cybernetics
- Conversational structures of ‘reports’ in writing class group work
- Semiosis as an educational instrument: The irrelevance of mediation and the relevance of social capital
- The complementarity of a representational and an epistemological function of signs in scientific activity
- Semiotics and classroom interaction: Mediated discourse, distributed cognition, and the multimodal semiotics of Maguru Panggul pedagogy in two Balinese Gamelan classrooms in the United States
- A preliminary examination of a theoretical model for researching educator beliefs
- Learners' idiosyncratic links as affordances for meaning making in the semiotic process
- Towards a semiotic theory of learning: Deleuze's philosophy and educational experience
- Regina Rex or, a semiotic fable from the end of education
- Reflections on semiotics, visual culture, and pedagogy
- Education à la Silhouette: The need for semiotically-informed curriculum consciousness
