Hester, Stephen & Eglin, Peter,(eds.) (1997),_Culture in Action: Studies in
Membership Categorization Analysis_ Washington, DC.: International
Institute for Ethnomethodology and University Press of America;
Sacks, H. (1996 or 1997, I believe) _Lectures on Conversation_, G.
Jefferson (eds)
MCD analysis shows how institutional discourse (talk) is constituted around
sense-making and order-producing activities. There's a chapter in the
Hester and Eglin collection that cites several studies of organizational
work constituted through talk in educational settings, including classrooms.
The relationship between MCDs and genres is that the former are an
important constituent of the latter and MCD analysis is a powerful
analytical tool for identifying speech genres and for distinguishing among
them--
Hope this info is helpful. Good luck with your project.
Carol Berkenkotter
P.S There is some interesting work in sociolinguistics being done by Amy
Sheldon at the University of Minnesota that describes pre-school speech
genres in a play setting with tools and artifacts from that setting. From
coding 25 videotapes of different trios of children of the same gender and
mixed genders, Sheldon identified typified interaction patterns (speech
genres) that are highly context dependent-- context refering to the
activity system and its constitutive elements-- mentioned above--
gestures, bodily orientation, manipulation of tools and artifacts, and so
on.
On Wednesday, June 10, 1998, Glen Humphreys wrote
>David (and the others who replied in back channel notes),
>
>Thanks for the leads on my genre question. I have replied back channel to
>most of these replies since they were sent this way to me.
>
>I know these hidden conversations sometimes exasperate Mike Cole (sorry,
>Mike!), so I am appending a snippet from a note I sent to one of my
>correspondents to suggest what I am looking for -- for those who might be
>interested in such issues. My apologies for any incoherencies, and for
>taking up the disk space of those who are not interested:
>
><Begin Quotation>
>Gordon [Wells] did two things. First, he identified genre patterns as
>instances of the "operational" level of Leontiev's tri-level model of
>activity, which ends up making them out to be mediational "tools" (in
>Vygotsky's sense) in an action. Second, he hypothesized the notion of
>different levels of genre pattern, and then suggested the I-R-F discourse
>pattern as an instance of a micro-genre. It was all quite theoretical,
>although illustrated by some interesting case work data. He did not go on
>to talk about other genre types. His notion of the micro-genre seems to
>look a bit like Eggins' instances of narrative genre patterns that appear
>in casual conversation.
>In my own situation, I created a certain kind of trans-situational literacy
>program for adult highschool students, and then recorded the instructional
>talk that took place. Hence, I created my own instructional discourse
>patterns (can I even call them "genres"?). I isolated a "major stage"
>structure for the whole instructional discourse episode, in the manner
>Eggins describes in her book __An intro to systemic functional
>linguistics__. (This looked to me like the kind of process that
>ethnographers go through when they are coding data). I then decided
>(discovered?) that each of these major stages could be broken down into
>some smaller component "minor" stages. As I go "down", it looks like the
>pattern of the minor discourse stage sequences become even less regular
>than are the major stages. I now suspect that it makes more sense to talk
>about rearrangements of the major and minor stage sequences as happening
>according to context influences than it does as a result of any inherent
>structural regularity in the discourse patterns themselves. In other
>words, this kind of instructional discourse seems closer to Eggins' "casual
>conversation" than it does to the kind of very highly ritualized discourse
>that Hasan describes in her "service encounters".
>
>In any case, it was this kind of thinking that is making me look for
>articles that talk about these kinds of discourse patterns that show up
>between the two extremes of the "service encounter" and the "casual
>conversation". For example, although I would say my patterns are situation
>specific, how widespread do they have to be before I can even call them
>"genre" patterns? That is, do we need a new term such as "situational
>discourse patterns" that recognizes regularities, but doesn't want to make
>any claims for wide universality of occurence??
>
>I suspect that such articles are going to have to wrestle with the whole
>notion of who gets to say what counts as a genre "instance" (perhaps only
>the experienced culture member?), and what considerations a researcher must
>keep in mind when coding these patterns ( the typical concerns of the
>ethnographer, such as "rapport building" and "triangulation procedure"?).
>Since I was the teacher of this instructional program, in a school with
>which I was intimately familiar, I was both teacher (i.e. experienced
>culture member) and researcher. If it is the culture members who get the
>last word on what is a situational "genre" then I guess that I (as a
>teacher-researcher) get to say whatever I want about my patterns, don't I?
>An interesting situation to be in . . .
><End Quotation>
>
>
>--glenn
>
>
>Glenn D. Humphreys
>P.O. Box 11
>Echo Bay, Ontario
>Canada, P0S 1C0
>Telephone: (705) 248-1226
>Internet: glenhump who-is-at soonet.ca
>Fax (Phone/Email to arrange fax transmission): (705) 248-1226