Too Much Language Analysis for One Week

Just keep swimming.   I'm trying to remember a conversation that I've had recently that wasn't about language and discourse...  And I almost can't remember.  I'm in the middle of a 3 day training (for work) on the Structural Analysis of Written Language (SAWL), a tool for monitoring the development of written English.  We spent the morning talking about Chomsky and his kernel sentences and "key trigger verbs" and their semantic and syntactic features, and in the afternoon we began coding written language samples.  It was a lot of good information and an interesting, re-conceptualized approach to grammar that I'm interested in learning about.  But so much of what we are being trained to do has to do with measuring written language in numbers and percentages (of t-units, flawed t-units, etc.)  It's hard for me to look at language in such completely different ways for such different purposes simultaneously.   (Langue?  Parole?  Tous les deux?  Je pense que j'ai besoin d'une petite siesta...)  It's good...because this is exactly why I wanted to take this course...but it also makes me a little dizzy!  Just keep swimming...just keep swimming...

Discursive Psychology.  I'm pretty sure I had no idea what discursive psychology was before reading this.  At first I was reading along and thought--I like this.  It just makes sense to me.  On the first night of class, Hollie said something about how she didn't realize that not everyone thought that way, because it just made sense to her (that the message sent isn't always the message received).  That's almost how I felt about this...of course our attitudes, social groups, and identities are social constructed...if they were tied to mental states or processes wouldn't they be much more resistant to change and much less likely to be influenced by environment.  When I look back on the major changes in my own attitudes and identities and it's clear to me that those changes were social constructed.  I really liked on page 122 when they said, "The production of meaning, and hence identity construction, are constrained by the rage of discursive resources which are available to individuals by virtue of their social and cultural position and status."  That makes total sense to me.  This summer I remember reading something in Sociolinguistics about how we have to have language before we can have thoughts.  I have to admit that this is something that is tough for me to grasp.  In deaf ed, we are often claiming the opposite (In fact, I heard the opposite in our SAWL training today..."They have thoughts, they just don't have the language to express them."  So while I think I essentially agree it's still a tough concept for me to wrap my brain around.  That quote was helpful to me because it articulated why it is that I do agree that language gives birth to thought.  I think my favorite thing about DP (in comparison to Laclau and Mouffe) is that it analyzes discourse as situated social practice.  (Cause really that's where L & M lose me.)  When they start discussing the 3 strands of DP, they refer back to Figure 1.2 (p. 20).  Where was that when I was actually reading Chapter 1?  (But really...why do I always skip over the graphics...you'd never know I was a reading teacher...I do not at all practice what I preach!)  Anyway...I found it to be very helpful.  Pretty sure I'll go back to that a few times this semester.   So clearly...I liked this chapter.  I like DP  (probably would have enjoyed that class this summer!)...but then I read, "Discursive psychology thus locates certain social practices outside of discourse, although it does not distinguish as sharply between discursive and non-discursive practices as does critical discourse analysis"  (p. 103).   And I thought--hold up...this is the same issue I had with CDA.  I don't understand this distinction.  To me, it's all discourse.  (This is where I do agree with you, Laclau & Mouffe!)  I wasn't clear (okay, I'm still not) on what it is that they locate outside of discourse...but this statement bothered me.

Across the Approaches.  This chapter got me a little confused because I was still trying to figure out what DP considers to be "discourse".  I feel like they aren't saying that certain social practices aren't discourse. but they are saying that certain social practices may not be the focus of a given examination because discourse is given different boundaries depending on the context and research question.   However, if such practices were to be the focus, other theories could be used to explain how those non-discursive practices that are indeed part of discourse but have not yet been translated into a given discourse analytical perspective.  If that's what they're saying, then I'm not so bothered by this demarcation.  If that's not what they're saying...well then I might be even more confused...  :-)  This chapter was helpful in that it started to help me understand how these 3 approaches could be used in analysis.  I liked that examples in this chapter (and the others) because it helps me start to understand how DA can be used to answer research questions...but I think I'm looking forward to doing my mini lit review, because I need to understand what kinds of questions researchers are using DA to answer, especially in my field.

Really long sidenote that has a lot more to do with my thinking about the research I'm doing for my job than DA:  (Really you should skip this...It's just me trying to figure out what in the world I'm thinking about the SAWL, which is a completely different way of analyzing language...Writing helps me think!)  The linguist in me got super distracted in chapter 5 (as well as, throughout the book) when the authors were using words that reveal something to me about them (rubbish sorting, flatmates, etc.)  Clearly, I know what these words mean...but I think it's interesting because those words told me something about the authors (even before we discussed their backgrounds). Recently I was talking to my friend Candice on Skype.  Her family recently moved to Alabama from England.  We typically talk while her children are napping, but her 3-year-old was awake so I got to chat with him.  I was astounded at how obvious it was that they had been living in England.  By his language, one would have thought he was British!   It's interesting to me, because Candice and her husband are both American, and Candice is a stay at home mom.  Yet, somehow in their interactions in public he has picked up on these language features through social interaction.  He learned that it is more effective to use the discourse of the people around him.  Both Candice and I were born in Germany.  There are Beta tapes of us at Joseph's age speaking German to one another.  Neither of us remembers enough to hold a conversation in German now.  We came back to the states and quickly realized that the language used around us was very different and that German really didn't help us communicate with others.  We wondered together about how long it would take for Joseph to lose his British language and start speaking with a Southern twang.  His parole will begin to change, because his langue will, and vice versa.  The visible changes that will occur in his language features will also be tied to more tacit changes in his identities and attitudes.  It's so obvious to see how discourse changes according to the context when there are surface level differences are overt.  But I think that context influences subtle differences (those beneath the surface), too.  I realized today that this is my major issue with the SAWL.  It is intended to analyze language out of context.  But I really think that there is really no point in looking at language without context.  (Sorry, L & M.) So while I like the SAWL...much more than sentence patterns which I just can't get behind at all...I'm sort of stuck on whether or not I think it's useful for analyzing student language.  I think it has potential...but I would like to still look at the context.  Which I guess goes back to epistemological differences.  The SAWL is trying to be objective.  I'm not.  So maybe there is something about DP (outside of DA even) that could be helpful to me in looking at deaf students' language in a different way.  The ways I know feel too reductionist, to decontextualized, too inadequate...

Discourse Analysis in Literacy.  I definitely need to look into a lot of these articles.  Some for my mini lit review.  Some just because.  But what I found surprising is how many of these articles I have read (especially those about identity and shifting roles)...and I never realized that they used DA.  Probably because I'd never even heard of DA until near the end of my second Masters.  And then there's the whole idea that I didn't read like a researcher until a year ago, because I had sworn I was never going to be a researcher.  God and his sense of humor...  Some of the studies they mentioned and the questions that the included studies address were helpful to me in thinking about how DA might be used in deaf ed in general.  When I was reading about how Dworin and Bomer (2008) us DA to critique Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty, my first thought was:  I need to read that.  But then I thought about how DA could be used to critique other written texts--like laws and policies in special education or websites for various power-holding groups in deaf ed (AG Bell comes to mind...)  When I was reading about the articles that used DA to as "What counts as literacy?" I wondered how DA could be used to look at "What counts as ASL?"  I was observing in a class last week and the teacher was trying to explicitly teach some things about ASL that I viewed as misconceptions.  It got me thinking about how our ideas of what constitutes ASL had been formed.  Who decides?  What counts?  And then whenever I read about identity formation of any kind, I start thinking about Deaf with a capital D.  I always say that Deafness is a social construct.  But what is it?  How is it constructed?  And by whom?  One of the studies that stood out to me most was Mariage (2000).  (Quote:  "The study contributed to clams that when literacy events create conditions that give children who are commonly considered deficient access and ownership of their learning it can lead to increases in achievement of students" p. 107)  I use the research of Englert and Mariage a lot for my work in writing instruction and classroom discourse.  I'm sure I've read this before.  But I want to read it again, for new reasons.  I really think that it gets at one of the things I am most interested in when it comes to classroom discourse and struggling readers/writers...how classroom discourse can contribute to their achievement.