almost there

Today I am working on the journal article. It is tentatively titled:

Routine Encounters during Independent Writing: Explicating the taken-for-granted in a lesson

The article is being written out of Chapter Five of my thesis. I am only using a very small section of data analysis though. In rather a radical move (for me) I have included very little background information about the lesson and participants. This is in keeping with much of the CA work. Usually I would include more information however I realised that in a strong sense it doesn't matter much to the analysis and article. What i am trying to do is to examine short sequences of talk and establish interaction that differs from the IRE pattern of teacher-led talk i THINK i have done this.

I am enjoying getting back into CA reading and thinking. Yesterday I re-read a chapter that I enjoy:

Freiberg, J., & Freebody, P. (1995). Analysing literacy events in classrooms and homes: Conversation analytic approaches. In P. Freebody, C. Ludwig and s. Gunn (Eds.). Everyday literacy practices in and out of schools in low socio-economic urban communities (pp. 185-369). Canberra: DEET

My favourite line in the chapter was one about the IRE sequence of talk in classrooms

the "q-a-e" sequence has lost its functional moorings in an instructional sense, and has become the interactive technology that shapes activities for which it may well be thoroughly ineffectual (Freiberg and Freebody, 1995, p. 320)

The research that informed the overall report was a large ethnomethodolocial study that used conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistic analysis. It is a great read