Discourse in Activity and Activity as Discourse A companion to Chapter 11 by Shawn Rowe From the companion website for Rogers, R. (2011). An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education, 2nd edition. New York: Taylor and Francis at

Aim of Presentation To establish theoretic and analytic connections between Critical Discourse Analysis and and sociocultural approaches to learning. To demonstrate a way of representing co- occurring talk and activity.

Why CDA and Sociocultural Theory? A sociocultural approach to learning and language-in-use addresses CDA’s concern with transformation by focusing on the ways in which members’ resources are privileged, appropriated, rejected, and deployed as part of participation in activity. A critical approach to language, psychology, and activity is a crucial, but often neglected, addition to any sociocultural project that seeks to highlight the structure and realization in everyday activities of the inequitable distribution of power, authority, and valued cultural and physical resources that shape all social institutions.

Talk and Activity are Interrelated: Discourse Continuum that Reflects Salience of Language vis-à-vis Activity (Clark, 1996) Highly Linguistic Highly Active Telephone conversations Newspaper items Radio reports Novel Playing a string quartet Waltzing Playing catch Face-to-face conversations Tabloid items TV reports Science texts Business transactions Plays, movies Coaching demonstrations Apprenticeship lessons Bridge games Basketball games Tennis matches Two people moving furniture Making love ___________________________________

Significance of Intersections of Talk and Activity in Education Contexts Example: Teacher at chalkboard uses gesture, gaze, and language to direct student attention as needed to content and relationship to content. Academic identity is enacted through the interrelation and coordination of activity and language.

A Different Kind of Transcript is Required to Harness Communicative/Expressive Aspects How do both talk and action shape each other over the course of an activity? How do people learn to use the linguistic and nonlinguistic stuff that makes up Discourse (the enactments of identity)?

Example: A Non-School-Based Learning Site Visitors (A Family) Engaging with Interactive Museum Display Authority is Negotiated Utterances are Co-constructed

A representation that shows the relationships between utterances and actions, between utterances and other utterances, and between actions and other actions by including a person’s actions and utterances in one box of the table. As on a music staff, these utterances and actions are shown across time. From Transcript 2: Rolling

Helps analyst view learning as the appropriation of culturally valued mediational means or members’ resources as part of participation in active, distributed meaning making. The key to understanding learning thus defined is analyzing how the appropriation of mediational means occurs across time and in interaction (or does not occur). A Mulitimodal Representation of a Group Learning Activity

Suggested Readings Clark, H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. London: Longman. Gee, J.P. (1999). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. New York: Routledge. Linell, P. (1998). Approaching dialogue: Talk, interaction, and contexts in dialogical perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Norris, S. (2004). Analyzing multimodal interactions: A methodological framework. London: Routledge. Wertsch, J.V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.