FINANCIEROS DE CRÉDITO

Four other studies used similar research methods for examining the linguistic and communicative practices in school settings. Two of these studies included bilingual

learners. Maybin (2006) used observation and recordings of students’ school day which later influenced the shaping of the conceptual framework for the analysis of children’s communicative practices. The focus of my study was the investigation of children’s involvement in the collaborative use of language in daily life and the way this involvement affects their knowledge and enhances joint construction of meaning. The observations of this study emerged partly through my participation, as teacher-researcher, in classroom activities and through relationship building with students, school staff and parents. Ethnographic interviews with students were also conducted in a friendly and trusting environment that was achieved by gaining close relations with children. By contrast, Maybin (2006) had to gain permission to enter the school context under study as well as to create strong relationships with the participants. Her research did not focus on translanguaging practices or the way students with learning difficulties construct knowledge in the classroom setting.

Creese and Blackledge (2010) studied examples of flexible bilingualism in complementary schools and focused on the bilingual strategies used in complementary classrooms. Methods such as observation, audio recordings and interviewing were used for the purpose of their ethnographic case studies. Audio recordings were transcribed and extracts of conversation data were analysed. There are several differences between this project and my own. First, is that it was undertaken in four different schools and observations in classrooms used team ethnographic approach for identifying the key participants of each school. Further, the schools were ‘complementary’ to the mainstream schools, and did not need to follow the full national curriculum of subject areas. Another difference was that interviews involved not only parents but also teachers, administrators and the key participant children. In addition, this research project used photographs and important

documents to enrich their evidence. Both in school assembly and within the context of the classroom, students and teachers used both of their linguistic varieties to negotiate meanings and maximise the participation of more individuals. In class the teacher adopted a translanguaging approach to establish and clarify the pedagogic task. Participants engaged in flexible bilingualism where languages are considered to connect and interrelated without setting linguistic boundaries.

Similarly, my research uses participant observation to investigate the dialogic discourses between students and the teacher-researcher. Students draw on all of their linguistic resources to acquire meaning while, I, as the teacher-researcher, use both linguistic varieties for making the meaning accessible to students. The difference is that my research uses classroom ethnography to provide an ecological perspective of the way students with and without learning difficulties construct meaning and knowledge in a diverse sociolinguistic educational formal setting and not a complementary one.

Yiakoumetti (2006) studied bidialectism by examining the linguistic landscape of Cyprus. There are several differences with my study. In this study the researcher, Yiakoumetti, implemented a language program which was designed to teach SMG by using CD as mediating tool for learning. It was an intervention program which allowed students to use their dialect when learning the official language to provide empirical evidence to prove that the use of dialect along with the standard variety can enhance the development of the standard that is SMG. The study used the proposed bidialectal language model based on Language Awareness as the approach to teaching the non -standard variety, CD, as a second or foreign language based on inclusive language education which uses similar and divergent linguistic features (Yiakoumetti, 2006). Further it used a quasi-experimental design involving two groups of students in primary education- an experimental group and

a control group. The program used textbooks with activities in both linguistic varieties while students’ performances were compared after oral interviews and essay writing in language and geography. The results showed that the experimental group was able to consciously identify the differences between the two varieties and enhance their performance in SMG.

Singleton & Avonin (2007) stated that such studies as Yiakoumetti’s showed that students can manage difficult aspects of a language if their consciousness is enhanced about the relationships between different features of the L1 and L2. The difference between this study and mine is that it did not adopt an ethnographic methodology. Nevertheless it opens up opportunities for further research in Cyprus educational system. For example, what has not yet been studied in Cyprus is the perspective that bidialectal classrooms consist of students with different cognitive abilities, such as students with specific learning difficulties. It is essential that research also examines the way all students construct knowledge through an ecological perspective and assess the way students use language to solve pedagogic tasks and thus enhance their meaning making process.

Mercer (2000) focused on understanding how talk is used between students during teaching and learning rather than on the assessment of talk. He also focused on conceptualising the shared communicative space that is created through joint activity and leads to the construction of meaning. Mercer et al. (2004) implemented a program called TRCA (Talk- Reasoning and Computers-programme) for students aged 9-10 to examine their quality of talk and problem solving through collaborative activities. Children in four target groups and four matching control groups were also observed, video recorded and tested in the same way for validation purposes.

Mercer et al. (2004) stated that they used observational data that could provide detailed descriptions of the dialogues between students which enabled them to recognise any changes in the quality of talk. In this programme, Mercer was more interested in the type of talk that is used, especially exploratory talk that assists in the development of children’s individual reasoning skills. He interrogated Vygotsky’s idea regarding the development of mental abilities through intermental and the intramental thinking mediated by language. His study explored how children’s used language as a cognitive tool when cultural language practices were introduce in the classroom (Mercer et al. 2004). However, Mercer analysed the content of the talk but did not explore the way children with different linguistic backgrounds enhance their reasoning and whether exploratory talk was achieved through translanguaging which my study aims to do.