Re: [xmca] Inside Outside

Dear Mark:
   
  You write:
  
"First of all, your juxtaposition of a 'native speaker' and an
'expert?' teacher, to me has very little validity. Your first example
of the teacher using a display question to elicit information is, in
my mind the wrong way round for education."
   
  I don't understand how these two sentences are connected. It seems to me that the "validity" of the native speaker construct (not mine) is one issue and the use of display questions (again, not a term I introduced and not a distinction I accept) is an entirely different one. Neither is really relevant to this research.
   
  I have to take the foreign teachers as I find them: they are being hired in tens of thousands. Whether I reject the construct of "native speaker" or not I will still have a situation where foreigners are being hired and Korean teachers are being fired. I don't think that handwaving about the death of the native speaker (Davies, Kramsch, etc.) will do anything to alter this policy. But I DO think that if I can show systematic differences in discourse, I can at least remove one of the spurious justifications of the policy.
   
  Both "native teachers" (by which I mean Koreans) and foreign teachers use display questions and both use nondisplay questions. This distinction is not relevant to my research, as far as I can see.
   
  You write:
  
"Display questions too, don't have a place in the classroom, much more
than open ended up intonation questions that leave the student
wondering what's coming next. Is this the way you try to avoid display
questions?"
   
  I'm a little unsure about the grammar here. Do you mean "any more than open ended intonation questions"? But it doesnt matter. I don't try to decide what does and does not have a place in the classroom. I do research.
  
"This intonation... is this really how we talk? The use of display
questions though to discuss gestures versus intonation, I just don't
understand."
   
  I don't really know what you mean by "we". It seems to me that this research is not about "we". It is about the data, and I am not in the data. But the intonation is.
   
  To observe intonation I use phonemic analysis programme called "Praat" which Wolff-Michael has also used. You can download it for free here:
   
   
  www.praat.org
   
   
  I see my work as being quite close to Wolff-Michael's work, which is why I was quite surprised when he implied that work based on the kinds of distinctions I am using (e.g. gesture, intonation, or old information and new information) is not really cultural-historical. But perhaps it was mere rhetorical excess!

David Kellogg
  Seoul National University of Education

       
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Received on Tue Mar 25 18:59 PDT 2008