The Handbook of Discourse Analysis

508 Carolyn Temple Adger
American students’ classroom participation style. What teachers saw as failure –
students’ demurring from individual engagement with the teacher in whole-group
lesson talk – reflected community values that favor collective talk. The discontinuity
between the community and the school norms for interaction also led to schools’
disciplining Native American students who had misinterpreted the school norms for
physical activity. (For related study of contrasting norms between Native American
communities and Anglo schools, see also Erickson and Mohatt 1982; Scollon and
Scollon 1981.)
Another strand of ethnographic research on classroom discourse developed
microethnographic research methods that contributed new understanding of the role
of nonverbal communication and timing, in particular the ways in which cultural
differences between home and school may systematically constrain the chances of
success for some groups of students (e.g. McDermott 1976; Mehan 1979; Erickson and
Shultz 1982). For example, Florio and Shultz (1979) undertook a complex analysis of
participation structures during mealtime at home and lessons at school, events that
exhibited some structural similarities. Comparison showed differences between home
and school in the alignment between a participation structure and the phase of an
event. Thus when dinner was being prepared in the Italian American homes that
were studied, conversation had a single focus and one person talked at a time. But in
the preparation phase of a lesson, several conversations could co-occur and children
could chime in. Italian American children had trouble meeting the expectations for
classroom participation structure in various lesson phases.
Studies of cross-cultural mismatch illuminate the culturally based discourse practices
that schools have taken for granted – patterns based on the middle-class European-
American traditions that have predominated in US institutions. A few studies shed
light on classroom discourse patterns that are based on other traditions. Foster’s
(1995) description of interaction in a community college class taught by an African
American professor showed strategic use of stylistic features associated with African
American culture. The professor’s lecture style included the call and response typical
of gospel meetings, repetition, vowel elongation, alliteration, marked variation in
pitch and tempo, and features of African American Vernacular English – discourse
strategies that invited her mostly African American students to chime in. Foster
suggests that where cultural norms are shared, this interactive style may serve a
special instructional function. Students reported to Foster that the professor repeated
information that they needed to know, but the data did not bear that out. Foster
surmises that the students’ sense that some information had been stressed may
have derived from the teacher’s discourse style rather than from actual repetition of
information.
The following excerpt shows an African American teacher using such an interactional
style in an upper elementary school classroom. The effect here is to engage more than
one student in a discourse task that is part of preparation for a high-stakes standardized
test:
(4) The teacher is introducing a worksheet on frequently misspelled words:
1 Teacher: It’s a word called a spelling demon. These letters sometimes are
silent letters. What is a word that means to eat little by little.
Which letter would . be missing.