Elena Pleshakova (Bonn): Time-Series Approaches to the Classroom Discourse Research

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Elena Pleshakova (Bonn): »Time-Series Approaches to the Classroom Discourse Research«

Abstract:

Discourse is a vast area of Linguistics that has captivated the minds of researchers since F. de Saussure (1916/1959) proposed three functions that allowed approaching a speaker’s utterance as a tripartite system. Comprehensive approaches to discourse analysis aroused by the functional framework (e.g. sociocultural and ethnomethodological) have been conventional for classroom discourse studies (Mercer, 2010). Technological advances have paved new strategies for discourse research (e.g., corpus methods (Walsh, 2011), time series analysis (Tay, 2019), vectorization (Bruchansky, 2017), etc.). However, these approaches opt for studying frequencies and the change over time of a single variable, or correlations.

Corpus methods are becoming crucial for classroom discourse studies since a collection of transcripts is a remarkable source for a corpus (Walsh, 2011). Utilizing concordances as the main corpus tool (Brookes & McEnery, 2020) allows extracting for frequencies and the patterns of occurrence of single words, or communicative chunks in the teacher’s speech, tracing the teacher-learner(s) interaction, capturing lexical and pragmatic variation. Computational methods advance the search with synonyms, semantic clusters, or grammatical patterns. Time series analysis of concordance outcomes (visualized as dispersion plots) provides the distributions of keywords over time. The corpus approach sustains a better understanding “of how learning and learning opportunity can be improved” (Walsh, 2011:1).

The current study reports the research outcomes into the teacher’s speech in the initial phase (~ 3 min long each) of two EFL lessons (groups of HAVO-5 and Atheneum-6) in a Dutch mainstream public school. Classroom discourse is approached as a complex dynamic system that originates from the continuously changing sociocultural and methodological constellation, and comprises various domains: pragmatic (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989a,b), illocutionary (Searle (1965, 1968)), linguistic, and power base (Kawash & Reid, 2017). The teacher implements various pragmatic strategies and uses different types of power (Referential, Expert, Reward, Legitimate, and Coercive) to redirect learners’ heed from the “phatic communication”
(Schneider, 1987) to the classroom activities and “shape relationships” (Kawash & Reid, 2017:34).

We hypothesize that (1) there is a pattern in the expression of power load in the teacher’s utterances employing certain illocutionary acts, (2) the types of power in the teacher’s utterances may co-occur and interact, and (3) the interaction of power types in the teacher’sutterances changes.

The teacher’s utterances were manually coded for Language, Illocutionary Acts according to the Speech Act Theory by Searle (1965, 1968), and Power Base (French & Raven (1959), Kawash & Reid (2017)). The analysis was conducted using NLTK 3.9.1 Python module (https://www.nltk.org/). Concordance was a pivotal tool for extracting pragmatic patterns (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989a,b) and associating them with illocutionary acts and power types. Linguistic and time-series analyses have supported all hypotheses and revealed the change in the pragmatic specifics and the use of power types in the teacher’s speech:

(1) the utterances with Referent and Legitimate Power co-occurred at the beginning of the Initial Phase;
(2) a combination of power types may render a single illocutionary act;
(3) the combination of power types within the same illocutionary act may change over time.

Selected References:

Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., Kasper, G. (1989a). Investigating Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: An introductory overview. In S. Blum-Kulka, J. House, G. Kasper, (Eds.). (1989). CrossCultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies (pp. 1 – 34). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., Kasper, G. (1989b). The CCSARP coding manual. In S. BlumKulka, J. House, G. Kasper, (Eds.). (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies (pp. 273 – 294). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Bruchansky, C. (2017). Political Footprints: Political Discourse Analysis using Pre-Trained Word Vectors. ArXiv, abs/1705.06353.

Brookes, G., & McEnery, T. (2020). Corpus linguistics. In S. Adolphs & D. Knight (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of English language and digital humanities (pp. 378–404). Routledge.https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003031758-
20/corpus-linguistics-gavin-brookes-tony-mcenery.

Reid, L., Kawash, J. (2017). Let’s talk about Power: How teacher use of Power shapes relationships and learning. Papers on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching: Proceedings of the University of Calgary Conference on Learning and Teaching, 2, 34 – 41.

Schneider, K. P. (1987). Topic selection in phatic communication. Multilingua, 6(3), 247 – 256. Searle, J. (1968). Austin on locutionary and illocutionary acts. The Philosophical Review, 77(4), 405  424.

Tay, D. Z. (2019). Time Series Analysis of Discourse. Method and Case Studies. Routledge. Walsh, S. (2011). Exploring Classroom Discourse: Language in Action (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203827826