Student-Teacher Dialogue Journals as a Tool for Developing Interactional Ability. Tesi di Laurea in

351 Pages·2012·8.16 MB·English

DOCUMENT RESUME
FL 023 530
ED 393 294
Morini, Emanuela
AUTHOR
Student-Teacher Dialogue Journals as a Tool for
TITLE
Developing Interactional Ability. Tesi di Laurea in
Lingua Inglese.
PUB DATE
95
359p.; Doctoral Dissertation, University of Bologna,
NOTE
Italy.
Doctoral Dissertations (041)
PUB TYPE
Dissertations/Theses
Research/Technical (143)
Reports
MF01/PC15 Plus Postage.
EDRS PRICE
Classroom Techniques; *Dialog Journals; Discourse
DESCRIPTORS
Analysis; Foreign Countries; Interaction;
*Interpersonal Communication; Interpersonal
Relationship; *Journal Writing; Language Patterns;
Student Journals; *Teacher Student Relationship;
Written Language
ABSTRACT
A study investigated the features of discourse in the
written student-teacher interaction in dialogue journals. It was
assumed that such an activity would encourage the negotiation of
meaning and roles, and that the data would provide evidence of that
negotiation. Data were drawn from 32 journals written by
16-to-18-year-old students in an Italian school and for whom English
was a second language. There were a total of 218 student entries and
217 teacher responses. Entries were analyzed for degree of
student-teacher interactivity, including, for students, introduction
of utterances signaling an interaction, topic continuation, and
negotiation for topic initiation, and for the teacher, affiliation
and appreciation and suggestion of a course of action. Techniques
used to gear an entry to the student are also examined. It is
concluded that dialogue journals can be a valuable tool to
individualize instruction and engage teacher and student in authentic
social communication, creating a context for students to construct
meaning. Creation of meaning, negotiation of face, and
rapport-building all emerged in the discourse. Appended materials
include data summaries from the discourse analyses, and
transcriptions of journal entries. Contains over 100 references.
(MSE)
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Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made
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BOLOGNA
UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI
FACOLTA' DI LETTERE E FILOSOFIA
Straniere Moderne
Corso di Laurea in Lingue e Letterature
Journals
Student-Teacher Dialogue
Tool for Developing
as a
Interactional Ability
Tesi di Laurea in Lingua Inglese
A
Presentata da:
Relatore:
EMANUELA MORINI
Prof.ssa RUM' BRODINE
Correlatore:
"PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS
MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY
GHIGI
Prof.ssa VALENTINA POGGI
e (snalt...-r1k.kerk.fa
n1b1"--1 f't
TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)."
Sessione Estiva
Anno Aecademico 1994195
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF
EDUCATION
Office of ECIUGOOMII altallth
end Improvement
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
INFORMATION
CENTER (ERIC)
his document hes been
reproduced es
received from this person
Irleir
or organization
originating il.
ta Minor changes have
been made to
Improve reproduction qualify.
0
o.- Points
of view or opinions
BESI UJf I AVAILABLE
stated in this
document do not necessarily
represent
officiel OERI poidton
or poecy.
1
UNIVERSITA' DEGLI STUDI DI BOLOGNA
FACOLTA' DI LETTERE E FILOSOFIA
Corso di Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere Moderne
Student-Teacher Dialogue Journals
as a
Tool for Developing
Interactional Ability
Tesi di Laurea in Lingua Inglese
Presentata da:
Relatore:
EMANUELA MORINI
Prof.ssa RUEY BRODINE
Correlatore:
Prof.ssa VALENTINA POGGI GHIGI
Parole Chiave:
English, Journals, Interaction, Pragmatics, Learning
Sessione Estiva
Anno Aceademico 1994/95
3
To My Students
iii 4
Contents
Transcription Conventions
0. Introduction
1
1. Learning to Use the Language for Social Purposes
4
4
1.0 Preliminaries
1.1 Writing and Second Language Acquisition
5
1.2 Social Interaction and the L2 Classroom
10
1.3 Oral and Written Discourse in the Classroom
14
1.4 Competence, Capacity and Interactional Ability
21
1.5 Dialogue Journals
27
2. Data Collection
35
2.0 Preliminaries
35
2.1 Collecting the Data
35
2.2 The Learners
37
2.3 The Teacher's Response Strategies
38
3. Analysis
42
42
3.0 Preliminaries
3.1 Interactive Features in the Journal Activity
44
3.2 The Students' Journal Entries
47
3.2.1 Emergence of First Pair Parts
52
3.2.2 Topic Continuation:
a Structural Feature of Journal Writing
73
3.2.3 Negotiatory Work for Topic Initiation
76
3.3 The Teacher's Journal Entries
81
3.3.1 Affiliation and Appreciation
86
3.3.2 Suggesting a Course of Action
100
3.4 Designing the Entry to Suit the Recipient
104
3.4.1 Addressing the Teacher as "You"
105
3.4.2 Personal Information: Sharing Experiences
and Points of View
110
3.4.3 Matching Stories
118
5
125
4. Dialogue Journals as a Learning Context
125
4.0 Preliminaries
4.1 Re-negotiating Positional Roles:
"They Show you another Face of your Students
127
and Show me another Face of the Teacher"
4.2 Building up Mutuality and Trust: Making the
130
Exchange more Symmetrical
135
4.3 Writing in a Socially Meaningful Context
137
4.4 Conclusions
144
4.5 Indications for Further Research
Appendix T - 3
Additional Tables
Appendix A - 29
Appendix
Appendix R - 192
References
6
Transcription Conventions
Student Code Number/day and month of
<S33/10.01>
entry
Teacher Code Number/ day and month of to
<T03/14.04>
student
indentation
<i>
new paragraph
<p>
underlining, start/end
<U> <u>
wiggly underlining, start/end
<WU> <wu>
writing added above, start/end
<A> <a>
writing added below start/end
<B> <b>
text in pencil, start/end
<PE> <pe>
text which has been crossed out
te-x4
alternatives or translations written above
//text//
blank space
<blank>
illegible word or part of text
<???>
use of Italian quotes, start/end
<ITQ> <itq>
<Fr> <ft>
footnote in the text, start/end
arrow to introduce text
<arrow>
border around text
<BO> <bo>
word listing, start/end
<L> <1>
7
vii
0
Introduction
Children develop language to represent experience, to explore the
world, to reflect upon it, to communicate and interact with others
(Christie 1989). In the classroom, little if any of the competency
developed by language learners in their social environment
outside of school is exploited to build language knowledge.
Nevertheless, in their theoretical works, scholars have long
pointed to the necessity of complementing the teaching/learning
context with a social approach:
A model of language must design it with a face toward communicative
conduct and social life. (Hymes 1972:278)
Interaction is, in fact, a fundamental fact of classroom
pedagogy, since "everything that happens in the classroom
happens through a process of live person-to-person interaction"
(Allwright 1984:156, cited in Ellis 1994). However, although
many pedagogists agree that language learning is a
social
enterprise and that it develops best through social interaction,
promotion of interactional ability in the classroom is not always
central to the language teacher's practice. Too often, learning
activities focus to a large extent on form, with a correspondingly
strong regard for the learner's "language product," rather than the
learning process.
on
focus
do
activities
classroom
language
When
communication, this usually means, as Aston (1988:8) points out,
"developing the ability to convey information," disregarding
satisfactory
establish
to
need
learners'
entirely
almost
interpersonal relationships to fit in socially.
establish
to
failure
that
argues
(1983)
Geoghegan
satisfactory interpersonal relations is one of the major causes of
8
Introduction - 1
distress among second language' students, who consider making
friends and socializing to be one of their main purposes when
learning a language.2 And yet, although "classrooms are places
where people socialize as well as learn" (Ellis 1984:126), the
language for social purposes is too rarely taught, and worse yet,
too rarely used in any truly natural way in the classroom context.
Language teaching has long had a bias toward transaction-
style information transfer, following an A to B model of
communication as the main business of talk. Enhancement of
interactional ability in the language classroom became secondary
to that model. It is not surprising, therefore, that the notion of
learning has also been assimilated to a matter of information
transfer.
This bias has directed educators' attention to the learner' s
final product rather than the learner's learning process. However,
because instruction can only partly control the learning process,
(Prabhu 1987 [reported in Aston 1988 & Brodine 1990]),
acquisition is today being viewed more and more as a learner-
their
coping
own
with
learners
process,
directed
with
developmental learning stages, and the teacher seml as a strategic
element inducing perlocutionary effects on this building and
consolidation of language knowledge.
1 In this analysis, no distinction is made between the use of the term English as a second
language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL), even if the distinction is not
irrelevant for the use of dialogue journals.
2 An exchange student from Norway who was attending the fourth-year class in this study
reported in her journal that she felt frustrated because she could not socialize within the
Italian community: "One thing Fm sad about: <p> <i> The thing that bothers me most these
days is probably the fact that I don't speak Italian fluently. I know I will learn it in time, and
that I have to have some patience, but it's still frustrating. It makes me feel rather left out of
everything: I can't read a newspaper the way Fm used to, I get headaches from trying to
understand television series and movies, and since my vocabulary isn't that varied, I have to
keep my language simple and can't really say all the things I want to. But the biggest
problem may be how it hinders my social life: it's hard to make close friends when the
subjects of discussion are still limited "emphasis added." <S17/22.11>
Introduction 2
The pedagogical implications concerning natural language
through which the learner could
use in the classroom
are
experiment with the social potential of the target language
extremely interesting. In fact:
We are generally required to use our knowledge of the language system
in order to achieve some kind of communicative purpose. That is to
say, we are generally called upon to produce instances of language use:
we do not simply manifest the abstract system of the language, we at
it as meaningful communicative behavior.
the same time realize
(Widdowson 1978:3)
Through genuine social interaction, learners are afforded the
opportunity to negotiate meaning and face, and therefore decode
the language system, on the one hand, while understanding
appropriate social behavior, on the other. While using the foreign
language, students are fully engaged in the production of
authentic discourse, generating functional language to attain their
communicative pur;,oses through the exercise of capacity.
The following research has looked into the possibility of
creating functional language use through written interaction. By
writing interactively on a regular basis, students and teacher can
within the
open up channels of authentic communication
classroom context. Students are thus allowed to get involved in
the discourse process to generate meaningful language and
experience real pragmatic complexity. The teacher, in turn, can
become a collaborator, helping students to go beyond their level
of proficiency, and simultaneously gets insights into the learning
process of each student.
The learner is thus using English to learn it rather than
learning to use English and is empowered by the authenticity of
for personal
direct
calls
writing
Interactive
activity.
the
at stake is the
investment in the process because what is
participants' real self. The interaction turns into a meaningful
social activity, where rapport can also be negotiated. Students
and teacher are concerned with defining their positions in a
0
Introduction - 3