Re: [xmca] Inside Outside

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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Received on Tue Mar 25 19:23 PDT 2008