Jay,
When I had analyzed the discourse in my classrooms, there were some
IRF
exchanges, but most of them were student initiated. When I delved
further
into the discourse and went into areas where the discourse was based
on an
idea or a discussion of one student's question, the discourse was
not the
typical IRF but a much more complex round of dialog. In my analysis I
compared the IRF patterns to my discourse patterns and show that
within the
IRF exchange it is more than likely obvious to a listener even
within one
exchange as to what the students are talking about.
But with more complex dialog, a listener wouldn't be able to
decipher what
the dialog was about after listening to a small part of the dialog. I
labeled the IRF pattern as contextual dialog, meaning that even
isolating
one IRF pattern out of a regular classroom series of many IRF patterns
following one another, the listener could identify easily what the
discourse
topic was about. Even looking at Prabhu's book, the transcripts
clearly show
(even though it is labeled as TBL) that the IRF pattern prevails and
the
three part exchanges clearly show what the dialog is about even if
you were
to isolate just one IRF exchange.
But looking at the dialog from a classroom where the students have
control
of the dialog - there is a much larger exchange that needs to be
looked at.
In some of my classroom data, a single contextual exchange could
take as
much as 20 exchanges.The entire discourse is needed to understand
what the
students are discussing. And within that discourse there is evidence
of
scaffolding, meaning making and the teacher not standing in the way
of the
student! Of course this is in an EFL context so it is slightly
different
than the discourse that Gordon Wells was looking at, but I'm anxious
to see
what's in your book. I think there could be something very useful to
extract
from your work to see if it is effective in the kinds of classrooms
I'm
managing at the moment.
Cheers,
Mark
Mark and all,
Yes, it certainly sounds like you are on a productive track with this
approach.
The ubiquity of IRE dialogue in classrooms has many contributing
factors. Some are ideological, and even once progressive, as for
instance the effort to replace lecture by more interaction, despite
students' lack of knowledge about the topic to be discussed. Some are
based in authority and power relationships as often mentioned. Some
are based simply in the fact that in classrooms there is not much else
going on except talk; they are activity-poor environments.
Taking learning outside the emptiness of classrooms, into activity-
rich and artifact-rich environments, allows students and teachers to
DO things together, in the course of which IRE just dwindles because
it is not functional for the discursive support of complex activity.
Observe teachers and students in a science lab, or on a field trip to
a nature preserve, and you find (except for novice or poor teachers)
much less IRE and a lot more "authentic dialogue". You can also get
this in classrooms if teachers ask students not about textbook
knowledge but about students' actual experience.
The case of student-initiated dialogue, which I also discuss in
Talking Science, can be a very powerful learning mode for students,
but it is much harder to control in terms of curriculum sequencing.
One question just leads to another, and the dialogue quickly diverges.
I once observed a teacher over an extended period in which he
regularly gave time for students to ask him questions. This grew to
the point where he could no longer "cover the curriculum", but the
students were more excited about learning than I have seen in most
classrooms. The mass-education model, in which we expect 30 or more
students to all learn the same thing at the same time, also
contributes to reliance on IRE. If students are given the initiative
in learning, they will not follow parallel paths in groups of that
size.
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>
Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093
On Nov 28, 2009, at 10:08 PM, Mark de Boer wrote:
I haven't had a chance to look at this article either, and I'm not
sure of
the context but from my own classroom research I have found something
different.
Recently at the JALT conference in Shizuoka Japan, I did a talk on
the
discourse analysis of a classroom where IRF was not the predominant
form of
discourse. I have been looking at the classroom from a different
perspective
- where the scaffolding takes on a different form and the students
are the
ones asking the questions and the teacher is not necessarily the one
answering. The familiar F is virtually non existent as it usually
perceived
as - such as Jay points out as the T is the judge of the students
answers to
questions. Instead the discourse is no longer an easy to recognize
simple
1-2-3 pattern and it no longer fits the Sinclair Coulthard model for
analysis. My talk focussed on this aspect of 'scaffolding' as in the
form of
negotiation for meaning and how it relates to the zpd. The
scaffolding that
occurs in the classroom is not from the teacher providing hints to
the
student on how to continue, but instead the scaffolding comes from
lack of
knowledge and negotiation of meaning using limited available
language in
order to gain more language. The IRF pattern where the teacher plays
the 'I'
can't be very effective in language internalization.
From my perspective, the classroom needs to move from the IRF
pattern of
focus on knowledge to one of learning how to mean and the focus on
using
English as a tool for communication. I recently published a paper on
the use
of this Socratic elenchus in the EFL classroom and its virtual trap
for the
teacher and how this form of question and answer strategy doesn't
belong in
the EFL classroom.
The Japanese in their English language classrooms have predominantly
used
the IRF pattern as the basis of their teaching methodology.
I think the real answer to removing this ubiquitous IRF discourse
structure
from the EFL classroom is to begin to remove teaching from the
classroom and
turn it into self discovery or meaning making. I have done a bit of
discourse analysis on this sort of classroom and found that the IRF
pattern
disappeared and in its place a very jumbled form of discourse,
difficult to
follow and difficult to analyse. I've had a number of talks with
Gordon
Wells over Skype and although there are a few questions that still
need
ironing out, creating a new model for discourse analysis as well as
analysing the discourse using functional grammar - combining
Halliday with
Vygotsky may give some answers as to what actually happens in the
classroom
and how language is acquired when language is no longer explicitly
taught. I
do believe that there is a link between language acquisition and
classroom
teaching methodology using the concept of the zpd as the basis for
how the
classroom is managed.
Mark
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