Re: [xmca] Inside Outside

From: Andy Blunden <ablunden who-is-at mira.net>
Date: Tue Mar 25 2008 - 19:30:05 PDT

Wolf-Michael,
I know I just put myself in the position of devil's advocate to defend
dichotomies against being brushed aside too lightly, but I cannot
understand your advocacy of theory/practice dichotomy as something you'd
actually like to strengthen?

Andy
At 07:19 PM 25/03/2008 -0700, you wrote:
>Hi David,
>I think you misunderstood me and I am sorry you feel you have to
>apologize. I wasn't saying anything about your use of praat or other
>stuff. I was saying something about my hope that we abandon internal/
>external. The problem is that educators, interested in modifying
>individuals, require this kind of talk. I do understand. I was a
>teacher for many years.
>
>But I think ANALYTICALLY you don't want to maintain that distinction.
>
>I see the problems resurfacing in this message, where David takes
>about his praxis, but discussions where about analytic categories.
>This is not a good mix, and we have discussed this here in earlier
>strands when people discussed the confusion between activity (or
>community of practice or . . . ) as analytic concepts versus when
>they are used as design concepts.
>
>This is along the same lines that I see Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger
>to have parted ways, the former continuing to insist on the analytic
>nature of the concepts they forged (CoP, LPP) and the latter using
>the concepts to help companies to change practices of training people
>at work....
>
>I think it would help to separate out the two different discourses,
>related to very different value system. The problem with education
>and other fields is that their declared intent is in most cases not
>growth and development of the best in them but manipulation of people
>to speak specific discourses----just look at math and science
>education, two disciplines I am more familiar with. It is all about
>making people conform to standards that conservative politicians in
>cahoots with GWB and the likes impose on an entire nation,
>indoctrinating everyone to a particular ideology, and getting
>researchers, who ought to know better, buy into the ideology so that
>they get something from the granting feeding trough.
>
>:-)
>
>Cheers,
>
>Michael
>
>PS: Again, David, I did not critique your work, your analyses---it's
>all about the categories. :-)
>
>
>On 25-Mar-08, at 6:57 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
>
>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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  Andy Blunden : http://home.mira.net/~andy/ tel (H) +61 3 9380 9435,
mobile 0409 358 651

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Received on Tue Mar 25 19:31 PDT 2008

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