Dear Eugene,
Thanks for that: you have really made me feel better about my work.
Gill
Eugene Matusov <ematusov@UDel.Edu> wrote:
From: "Eugene Matusov"
To:
Subject: RE: Activity Theory and tools for analysing language
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 10:51:19 -0400
Dear Gill–
This is a great message!!!! I am sure that other xmca folks would like to participate in discussion of issues you are bringing. May I suggest posting it on the xmca list, please? However, if you decide not to do that, I can answer privately to your very interesting issues and concerns that you are raising here. What do you think?
Take care,
Eugene
-----Original Message-----
From: Gill Boag-Munroe [mailto:gillboag@yahoo.co.uk]
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 5:26 AM
To: ematusov@UDel.Edu
Subject: RE: Activity Theory and tools for analysing language
Dear Eugene,
Many thanks for your help: perhaps an editor will pick up on our searches and decide it's important to translate him for us. (And I hear the Danish Bacon squadron revving their engines already!)
I'm working on my PhD at present, and feeling very uncertain about my knowledge and understandings. Please forgive me if I state what seems to you to be terribly obvious.
I came across Jager's work in Wodak and Meyer (2000) as I was reading about Critical Discourse Analysis. I am quite fired by the political aspects of Initial Teacher Training and the way that it is assumed in England that teachers have limitless time and energy to fit the complex work of inducting trainees into a workload that is in constant flux and already overcrowded. Perhaps because my subject is English, and the English subject curriculum has been in greater turbulence than any other, I am more sensitive to this pace of change.
So, in attempting to answer the question 'how do teachers make sense of their work in ITT in the context of all their other work?' through an activity theoretical frame, I felt that I wanted to answer the question by investigating two key tools: the personal philosophy of education that teachers bring to their work, and the language they use in order to understand and shape their work. As we presently have a government which plays with words to shape the reality it wishes to bring about - in the minds of its electorate, at least - and as I had become aware that government directives on education appeared to be manipulating the language with which it wanted teachers to work (no new thinking here!) I wanted to explore the language tool in detail to find out how far teachers create their own discourse, how far they absorb government discourses, whether the two are actually different, etc. The question then comes, which methodolgy do I use for analysing my textual data? Whi!
ch is
compatible with an overarching activity theoretical frame?
I like the work of Norman Fairclough, which I'd used a lot in Senior school teaching - I share much of his rebellious attitude, perhaps -, and there seems to be much in CDA which is compatible with AT thinking - contextualisation, language as social, language as constructing reality, hierarchies of language. So I explored further and came across Jager, who explicity links AT and CDA, in his chapter in Wodak and Meyer. I'm sure that others make the link, too, but I haven't found (or realised that I've found) them yet.
Sometimes I feel as though I'm trying to reinvent the wheel here, and if I were just bright enough, I'd see that others have done a lot of this work before. However, I plod on, trying to separate out the strands of Activity Theory and the strands of linguistic thinking used by the theorists. I would really welcome some pointers!
Gill
Gill Boag-Munroe
23 Shenstone Avenue
Norton
Stourbridge
DY8 3EJ
01384 863590
gxb822@bham.ac.uk
---------------------------------
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Gill Boag-Munroe
23 Shenstone Avenue
Norton
Stourbridge
DY8 3EJ
01384 863590
gxb822@bham.ac.uk
---------------------------------
Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo!Messenger
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