Bibliografía

Discursive psychology (DP) is an approach to the study of discourse in which all types of cognitive phenomena are seen as an intrinsic part of the interactional business participants are involved in, rather than as invisible inner states somehow controlling their actions. It has a constructionist epistemology, in that its focus is not on the

existence or otherwise of mental states or the veracity of events in the world, but on the discourse through which participants construct versions of reality in their descriptions of events (Potter 1996; Potter and Hepburn 2008). Psychological phenomena such as beliefs, knowledge, attitudes or opinions can be explicitly referred to in discourse as part of participants’ business, or versions of events can be constructed in certain ways to make available ‘psychological’ attributions such as intentionality. In avoiding the cognitivism of mainstream psychology, DP is a radical departure, constituting, as Wooffitt (2005) puts it, ‘nothing less than a thorough reworking of the subject matter of psychology’ (p. 112). Its radical move is to treat psychological matters not as located in people’s heads, but in the situated, action-oriented and constructed nature of

discourse. Its programme can be broadly characterized in terms of the following three core principles (based on Hepburn and Wiggins 2007: 7):

1. Action orientation. Discourse is seen as a primary means through which social actions are done, and actions are seen as embedded in wider practices. DP has a

particular focus on how actions like complaining or attributing motives are done indirectly through descriptions of events, people and things.

2. Situation. DP sees discourse as situated in three ways. First, discourse is organized sequentially in the ways described by conversation analysis. Social actions such as invitations or accusations are built as sequences, with one action making a second one relevant (acceptance, declination, admittance, denial) in (usually) the next turn. Second, discourse is situated institutionally. That is, institutional activities and identities (teacher-student, doctor-patient, journalist- politician) will be of relevance to how the discourse unfolds. Third, discourse is situated rhetorically. That is, any version of events can be built up as an

alternative to, or even to undermine, some other version.

3. Construction. For DP, discourse is both constructed and constructive. Discourse itself is constructed out of a range of symbolic resources (words, labels,

categories, metaphors, interpretative repertoires), but is is also constructive in that descriptions, reports, accounts etc, are used to construct different versions of reality. For example, speakers can use a range of resources to construct

descriptions as factual, and then use this ‘factual’ nature to carry out an action such as justifying their actions or attributing blame.

Such a radical reworking of cognitivist assumptions can have profound implications for teacher cognition research, and can offer ways of moving the field beyond some of the problems described in the previous section. The first important shift is to see talk produced by teachers either through data elicitation processes or in the classroom as action-oriented. That is, rather than seeing their talk as a window onto the underlying cognitions that somehow guide, influence or even cause their behaviour, we analyse the actions they are doing with that talk as it is produced. Second, we treat all the teachers’ talk as situated in the three ways described above. In interviews, or in the classroom, the talk will consist of interactional sequences, questions-answers, assessments-

agreements/disagreements etc. The institutional situation and identities may also be relevant (researcher-teacher; teacher-students) and oriented to in the talk. In talking about their practices, teachers will not be disinterested observers, but will build descriptions of their practices with an eye to alternative versions which could have consequences for their accountability as professionals. Third, rather than mining

the resources teachers use in constructing both their practices and their descriptions of practice, and on the kinds of social actions these descriptions are designed to perform. The analytic goal will be to see how a teacher constructs her world of practice both in practice and in her talk about practice.

In analysing talk as situated action, discursive psychology draws on the analytic resources of conversation analysis (CA). According to Sidnell (2010:1), CA is ‘an approach within the social sciences that aims to describe, analyse and understand talk as a basic and constitutive feature of human social life’. CA uses fine-grained transcripts of audio and video-recorded interaction, in which no detail, however small, is

discounted as potentially relevant to the analysis. Rather than impose external

theoretical models or frameworks on the data, the objective is to explicate participants’ practices from their own (emic) perspective. CA studies focus on one or more of what Schegloff (2007: xiv) describes as six main ‘problems’ that speakers face in talk-in- interaction. These are, briefly, how turns are distributed among speakers, how speakers design turns at talk to be recognizable as actions such as requesting, inviting etc., how talk is organized in sequences, how ‘troubles’ in mutual understanding are repaired, how turns are ‘designed’ in terms of their components, and how longer stretches of interaction are structured. Although CA takes as its baseline members’ practices in producing ordinary conversation, it has been used to study interaction in a wide range of institutional contexts, such as courtrooms, doctor-patient consultations, and media interviews (Drew and Heritage 1992; Heritage and Clayman 2010). The growing shift in CA away from studies of mundane conversation towards institutional contexts has led to the more frequent use of ‘talk-in-interaction’ as opposed to ‘conversation’ as its object of study (Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008).

The purposes of using a CA-informed approach to analysing interaction in this study are twofold. First, in order to answer research questions one and two, it is necessary to achieve an overall characterization of the relationships between pedagogical goals and interactional organization in the four classrooms in the study. Second, in order to deliver on the methodological and analytic goal of describing the verbal commentaries produced in the study as situated social action, and deal with the ‘discourse dilemmas’, it is necessary to provide a more fine-grained analysis of transcripts than is the norm in

The first research question asks what is the relationship between the interactional organization of the CLIL classrooms in the study and the teachers’ pedagogical purposes, in other words, how the teachers use the L2 as a tool for achieving their curricular goals. In order to answer this question, it is necessary to have at least a broad description of the kinds of interactional contexts which are found in these classrooms. For this, the study uses the concept of classroom micro-context, as developed by Seedhouse (2004), in his work on L2 classroom interaction. Seedhouse uses a CA methodology to describe how the interaction in L2 classroom changes in accordance with teachers’ pedagogical focus. He identifies three types of evidence of a teacher’s pedagogical focus:

1. The teacher states explicitly what the pedagogical focus is.

2. Ethnographic evidence is used (pre-teaching interview, lesson plan, post- teaching reflective comments)

3. Classroom-interaction internal evidence is used. That is, the participants’ own orientations to a pedagogical agenda in the unfolding interaction.

(Seedhouse 2004: 195-97)

In the first type of evidence, we can look in the data for teachers’ explicit statements of what the pedagogical focus is. In some contexts, it is a relatively common practice for teachers to explain to learners what the goal of an activity is, explicitly stating what they are looking for as successful completion of the activity or what constitutes a correct response etc. The second type of evidence involves looking beyond the classroom interaction by asking teachers to produce some kind of verbal commentary, as in most teacher cognition studies, or by using documentary evidence such as lesson plans, teaching materials or examples of students’ work. The third type of evidence corresponds to Seedhouse’s own approach, in which he uses a CA methodology to examine the relationship between classroom interaction and pedagogy from within the interaction itself. He describes the analyic procedure as one in which

The analyst follows exactly the same procedure as the participants and traces the evolving relationship between pedagogy and interaction, using as evidence the analysis of this relationship which the participants display to each other in

In this study, type 3 evidence is the first evidence used in tracing the relationships between the interaction and the teachers’ pedagogical purposes. In doing so, as with Seedhouse’s work, the result is a description of a small set of ‘micro-contexts’ each corresponding to a broad alignment of interactional organization and pedagogic foci. Seedhouse showed how these classroom contexts could provide both a context-specific and context-free description of examples of classroom interaction. That is, they allowed the analyst to show how pedagogic goals and interaction were aligned in any specific example of classroom data, at the same time as showing how any particular example of classroom data also belonged to one of a small set of classroom micro-contexts, that could be found throughout the wider corpus. Seedhouse’s micro-contexts of course were relevant to the interactional context he was investigating, EFL classrooms. Thus, his four micro-contexts relate to broad purposes in foreign language teaching, such as focusing on form and accuracy, meaning and fluency, or task-orientation, as well as a more general procedural context. For this study, the approach is adapted to CLIL classrooms, which although they are still L2 classrooms, are essentially subject classrooms, with different sets of pedagogic foci and agendas. However, the same analytic procedure is used, and the result, as will be seen in chapter six, is a broad characterization of five classroom micro-contexts which cut across the four different subjects taught.

The study also uses CA resources to explicate in more detail how the teachers dealt with language in the classroom, in what are described as ‘language-focused practices’

(LFPs). The two main analytic resources used for these analyses relate to two of the ‘problems’ referred to by Schegloff (2007) above: the sequence organization of talk, and repair of ‘troubles’ in talk. In analysing how turns at talk link together to form coherent sequences in conversation, the major resource for analysis of is that of ‘adjacency pair’ (Schegloff 2007). Adjacency pairs are linked pairs of utterances produced by different speakers, in which the ‘first pair part’ such as an offer, sets up an expectation, or ‘conditional relevance’ for a second pair part (an acceptance or

declination). Another important concept is preference organization. This refers to the observation that some adjacency pairs have ‘preferred’ and ‘dispreferred’ second pair parts. For example, the preferred second pair part for an offer is an acceptance, while a

an interactional phenomenon and as such is not concerned with speakers’ psychological states, such as actually preferring one option over another. This is seen in the fact that preferred or dispreferred responses can be signalled by interactional phenomena, such as hesitations, pauses or the use of discourse markers to delay dispreferred second pair parts.

The second major analytic resource used to explicate the teachers’ language-focused practices is that of repair. In describing the interactional organization of repair,

Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks (1977) distnguished between the two actions of initiating or carrying out a repair, and the actors involved in these actions. Repairs could either be initiated by the current speaker, as when he or she indicates having some trouble in producing an item, or by another speaker who points out some trouble in hearing or understanding or in the correctness of what a first speaker has said. Repair can be carried out by the same speaker, who may, after indicating there was a problem, act to resolve it by filling the gap or correcting a previous utterance, or by another speaker, who supplies the missing information or corrects the troublesome aspect of the first speaker’s utterance. Schegloff et al. (1977) identified a preference organization for repair trajectories, with self initiation and repair preferred over other initiation and repair. Jefferson (1987) also noted the practice of embedded correction, in which a second speaker reformulates some aspect of a previous speakers’ utterance without explicitly drawing attention to any repair having been carried out. This practice has been noted in classrooms in the literature on recasts, where it could be placed at the ‘implicit’ end of an explicit/implicit continuum for recasts (Sheen 2006). The CA framework of repair has been used in studies of L1 classroom interaction by researchers such as McHoul (1990) and Macbeth (2004), and by van Lier (1988) and Seedhouse (1997; 2004) in L2 classrooms. In this study, the CA resources for repair are used in the analysis of the teachers’ reactive LFPs, that is, how they respond to aspects of L2 use in their learners’ utterances.

In sum, then, CA analytic resources are used to provide an overall description of the interactional properties of the micro-contexts which emerge in the classrooms in the study, and how these relate to the teachers’ pedagogical goals, as well as more detailed analyses of the teachers’ language-focused practices (LFPs). However, because this is a teacher cognition study, it has a legitimate interest in one of the other types of evidence

mentioned by Seedhouse (2004), namely type 2. In fact, the majority of the data used in the study, as is fitting in such an approach, are verbal commentaries elicited from the four teachers before and after teaching the video-recorded lessons. Thus, as described in the previous chapter, the CoRe instrument is used as the basis of pre-teaching

interviews, and, as discussed above, videoclip vignettes are presented to the teachers for post-teaching reflective comment. However, because of the study’s social practice orientation and borrowing of key ideas from discursive psychology, the approach to the analysis of these data is rather different from that of other teacher cognition studies. As described above, the interaction in the settings in which the verbal commentaries are produced is itself a topic in the study, as it is seen as action-oriented, situated and (co) constructed.

This brings us to the second reason for using a conversation analysis methodology: in order to represent the action-oriented, situated and co-constructed nature of the data, and thus address the ‘discourse dilemmas’, it is necessary to have detailed transcripts which can show how the teachers’ verbal commentaries were actually produced (transcription conventions are given as appendix A). More conventional treatments of data in teacher cognition studies fail to do this, leaving out interactional information such as repairs, repetitions, pauses, overlaps or adjacency pairs, which may have a crucial impact on how any ‘cognition’ was jointly produced. Thus, the object of using CA is not to provide a detailed analysis of the interaction for its own sake, but to show how the phenomena of interest to this study, ways in which language figures in the teachers’ practices and understandings, are, at least partly, the product of the interactional contexts in which they were co-constructed.

Using a CA-informed methodology allows the analyst to build a bridge between different data sets. Unlike some teacher cognition studies which seek to expose inconsistencies between teachers’ professed and attributed beliefs, a CA approach as part of a social practices perspective sees discourse in all interactional settings as action-oriented, situated and co-constructed. When teachers use cognitive categories such as ‘belief’ or ‘knowledge’ or construct descriptions in ways that make available interpretations of participants’ intentions or epistemic states, they do so for the purposes of the interaction they are involved in at that moment. This goes for whether they are in

comments. It will be analytically legitimate to identify courses of action, uses of interpretative resources (such as images, metaphors, phrases), and ‘cognitive’ attributions, all of which may appear in different contexts, but with variation in the ways in which they are used. Thus, a CLIL science teacher may talk about students’ ‘misconceptions’ in a pre-teaching interview, use a classroom interactive practice which orients to the discovery and exposure of ‘misconceptions’, and, in post-teaching

reflection, provide accounts of her practice in which ‘misconceptions’ are used as a justification for certain courses of action. None of this relies on any assumption that the teacher ‘possessed’ beliefs about ‘misconceptions’ and that these ‘made’ her act in certain ways. Much less does it rest on any assumption of ‘inconsistencies’ between professed and attributed ‘beliefs’.

In sum, the methodological approach taken in the study, as seen in its selective use of concepts from discursive psychology and conversation analysis, is entirely consistent with its social practices metatheoretical stance. It will be recalled from the beginning of this section that the view on knowledge and understanding taken in the study sees both as intrinsic parts of human social practices, not as some ‘ghost in the machine’ which directs action. The focus is on the ‘shared practical understanding’ around which embodied activity is organized. In this sense, the CLIL teachers’ language awareness is a matter of the shared practical understandings which are inherent in embodied

activities, whether they are in the classroom or any other interactional setting. Discursive psychology provides a framework for describing how ‘cognitive’ matters emerge in embodied activity, while conversation analysis provides practical

methodological tools to describe the ‘arrangements of sayings, doings, set-ups and relationships’ (Kemmis 2009: 32) in the interactional settings in the study.

5.7 Chapter summary and conclusion

This chapter has dealt with the methodological aspects of the study. It began by setting out the research questions which drove the study forward, and went on the describe the participants in the study and the data gathering methods. The study’s use of a multicase study strategy was explained and justified, and ethical issues were addressed. This was followed by a discussion of the study’s overall methodological approach, which was seen as arising from its fundamental social practices and constructionist epistemology.

Four methodological problems that can beset teacher cognition research were described: the reflexive relationship between data elicitation methods and ‘cognitions’ obtained; the often misleading distinction between professed and attributed cognitions; the lack of shared understanding between researchers and teachers; the lack of attention to the con- constructed nature of verbal commentary data. The methodological approach taken in the study, one based on an overall social practices metatheoretical perspective, and drawing on the analytic resources of discursive psychology and conversation analysis, was presented as a way of ameliorating the effects of these problems. Now that the