English Language Teaching in its Social Context

340 JOAN SWANNTable 20. INumber and type of student-initiated moves in two types of lessonType of class Number of Clarification Meaning of Single word Longerstudent-initiated seeking words contributions contributionsmovesTraditional 11 3 2 5 0Video Led 38 2 3 0 33Source: Jayalakshmi (1993): 287Chapter 18 in this volume provides a more formal and detailed example of quantification.Assia Slimani was interested in the relationship between students’ claims about whatlinguistic features they had learnt, and the direct teaching of such features. Table 18.2(p. 296) illustrates this, showing the number of linguistic features that had been explicitlydealt with in lessons (identified from audio recordings), and the proportion of these thatwere recalled by students, those that were not recalled, and those that were said to havebeen learned on a previous occasion.By contrast, a qualitative approach tends to be used if the questions that are asked of apiece of data are more open-ended: if you wanted to know, for instance, what happenedduring a meeting; how students worked together in certain learning situations; howrelationships were established and maintained; or how students achieved an understandingof certain concepts. Most of the chapters in this volume that look at classroom languageadopt a qualitative approach to the analysis of talk. In Chapter 15, for instance, Neil Mercerdiscusses how teachers use language to guide students’ learning. While Mercer identifiescertain teaching techniques, these are not systematically coded and quantified. Mercer ismore concerned with analysing the function of the techniques teachers use than withcounting the frequency with which techniques are used, and illustrates this by quotingextracts from transcripts. In Chapter 16 Pauline Gibbons examines children’s progressionfrom ‘everyday’ language to the use of scientific discourse, focusing on the experiences ofone student. The language used at different points in a series of lessons is illustrated bytranscripts along with a close linguistic commentary. Angel Lin, in Chapter 17, also usesextracts from transcripts of classroom talk to illustrate the extent to which differentstudents’ ‘habitus’ is compatible with what is required of them in school English lessons.There have been several debates within educational research about the relative meritsof quantitative and qualitative approaches. Features of each approach, and some advantagesand disadvantages that have traditionally been associated with them, are summarised in thebox opposite.While some researchers argue for an integration of quantitative and qualitativeapproaches, it has also been suggested that they embody fundamentally different views ofthe meaning of spoken language (coding language into discrete categories, for instance,suggests that meanings are relatively fixed and unambiguous, whereas qualitative approachesoften emphasise ambiguity in language and argue that utterances need to be interpreted incontext). For an overview of this debate see, for instance, Edwards and Westgate (1 994).Wegerif and Mercer (1 997) suggest that it is possible to progress beyond this apparentdivide by drawing on corpus, or computer-based forms of analysis. Corpus-based analysesallow researchers to process huge amounts of spoken or written language and establishquantitative patterns of language use. They have frequently been used to identify meaningsof words and phrases and to aid the compilation of dictionary entries.They may also be used