I'll leave the subject of carnival for the time being, though I
think it can be a productive one. Just to say that I agree with
Francoise that internet sites where people can adopt various
identities may be more like what Ellice seems to have originally
envisioned about carnival than the actual historical tradition or
most of Bakhtin's appropriation of it. There was some interesting
discussion of cybermasks at a 'Computers, Freedom, and Privacy'
conference I attended a year or two ago, and a lot of
controversy. The potential subversion of bourgeois notions of
singular identity and personal responsibility may be able to do
even more for us than Carnival did for medieval Europe.
My main comment, though, is on Eugene's notes on the IRE (aka
IRF, aka in my parlance, 'triadic dialogue'). Gordon's paper was
published in our journal _Linguistics and Education_ (giving me
yet another chance to plug it!), vol 5, no. 1, 1993. While I
generally agree with what he says there, and with the spirit of
Eugene's message, I think that the objections to both IRE and its
dominance go a bit deeper than is sometimes appreciated.
In _Talking Science_ (and more in the original research report on
which the book was loosely based) I tried to distinguish between
form and function. There are many different functions which the
IRE form subserves, and indeed I would claim that the meaning of
an act within the form, such as a question in the I-slot, differs
significantly from one functional context (e.g. review, or going
over homework) to another (e.g. introducing new material). There
are a _lot_ of things you can do via the IRE form, and that is
one of the reasons that it is so ubiquitous. Many different kinds
of interaction are going on, but the form is the same.
So intelligent objection to the IRE means objection to
consequences of the _form itself_, rather than to some of its
uses or abuses. My principal objection in _Talking Science_ was
that the form tends to reduce the amount and semantic-discursive
complexity (not to mention genre diversity) of students' talking
science (i.e. use of the scientific register). In effect it
minimizes the amount of practice they get speaking this new
language. There are reams of boring studies which show the
statistical correlation of the IRE form with the high ratio of
teacher talk to (aggregate) student talk in lessons. Student
responses in the IRE pattern are often single words or phrases
and generally sub-clausal. In effect they are 'over-scaffolded'
and the scaffolding is never supportively withdrawn; the ZPD
expands enormously with the IRE, but it is not clear that
individual capacity ever recapitulates joint capacity under these
conditions.
Another feature of the form, which applies across functional uses
of it, is that it tends to maxmize teacher control of and
discretion over both topic and interaction, within exchanges and
especially from one sequential exchange to the next. It is quite
discusively disempowering of students locally, and globally
deprives them of the opportunity to practice more general
strategies of intellectual reasoning that would occur in more
conversational genres of talk.
I think these are very serious objections.
All of which is not to say that students don't often become quite
adroit at playing the IRE game with teachers and manage to
recover some measure of control, or that IRE is not a reasonably
useful way of leading students step by step through a complex
argument or the exposition of a new concept. But guidance and
exposition are not sufficient even for reproduction, which
requires that students come to _use_ arguments and concepts in
standard ways, and not just to 'comprehend' them or know about
them. Fluency in use requires substantial opportunities for
practice across contexts and genres. In IRE dominated classrooms
students generally do not get much of this.
One could even argue that monologic exposition is superior to IRE
for the purposes for which IRE is itself most effective, as
above. It lacks the feedback and active participation level of
IRE, but it puts the thematic formations together more cleanly by
far. Analysis of even very good teachers using IRE shows that it
is an enormous feat of induction for students to work out what
the global thematic content of a long sequence of IRE exchanges
actually summarizes to. I am impressed that very many people
actually can do it at all, and I suspect that a lot of the time a
lot of students are not in fact doing it. Local success in IRE
exchanges (e.g. acceptable answers) does not mean global success
in communicating an argument, a concept, or especially a complex
of related concepts. This is a more serious problem when we leave
the early grades and have a curriculum whose main content is such
complexes.
Eugene also notes the similarity of the IRE pattern to other
'information-withholding' strategies in education. Unfortunately,
many of these seem to based on the positivist faith that left to
themselves, logical inquirers will recapitulate the specific
historical conceptualizations of their community. Lacking this
faith, I don't see why they should, and I observer that very
often they do not. As an alternative to withholding, I recommend
providing, and then questioning or critiquing or seeking
alternatives to what was provided. I was once asked when was the
right moment to give students the answer to a question; my
answer: when they ask you. If you believe that withholding
prevents premature pre-emption of student's reasoning for
themselves, consider: (1) that reasoning is rarely sufficient to
come up with a historically evolved answer, and (2) that in
independent learning, the student seeks and finds information,
but then learns to evaluate it. When are we more likely to
evaluate answers, when they are others? or when they seem to be
our own? I believe that hidden dialogic manipulation of students'
reasoning (as in expert use of IRE, or Socrates and Meno) tends
to repress critical stances to socially accepted views.
Finally, a minor note re Eva's data, quoted again by Eugene. In
the IRIRE variant of the pattern, in most of her examples, we
have the well-known phenomenon of the elided positive evaluation.
When the questioner goes on to a new question, the default
assumption of the IRE activity genre is that the evaluation was
positive: IR(+E)IRE. This is especially common when exchanges are
'chained' so that the implicitly evaluated ones are taken as
cumulative, and united as a block by the culminating explicit
evaluation. Thus the implication is that the questions and
answers of each constituent exchange in such a block are closely
thematically related (by similarity, logical consequentiality,
etc.). JAY.
PS. I hope Gordon has a rejoinder to this! which I'd welcome as
part of the long and fruitful dialogue between us and others on
these issues. Hopefully Eugene and others, too, may want to worry
these themes further.
----------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU