RE: [xmca] Friesen Article: question on kinds of talk analysis

["Peter Smagorinsky" <smago@uga.edu>]

It looks as though my old friend Betsy Rymes has a new entry in this area:
http://www.hamptonpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=
978-1-57273-902-4&Category_Code=DSP

Peter Smagorinsky
Professor of English Education and Program Coordinator
The University of Georgia
125 Aderhold Hall
Athens, GA 30602
smago@uga.edu
http://www.coe.uga.edu/lle/faculty/smagorinsky/index.html

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of O'Connor, Kevin
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2009 11:30 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Friesen Article: question on kinds of talk analysis

Steve,
I'd agree with the suggestions below, and can add a few more that address
comparisons of different approaches.

Debra Schiffrin¹s Approaches to Discourse (1994) compares several different
approaches to the analysis of discourse.  It¹s older, but is still a good
source.

Jaworski and Coupland's The Discourse Reader (2nd ed 2006) is an excellent
collection of abridged readings (maybe sometimes maybe too abridged to do
justice, but useful nonetheless) from a range of perspectives.  There¹s good
editorial material that helps to see the big picture.

There¹s a debate in Discourse & Society between authors representing
conversation analytic and a type of critical discourse analytic approaches
coming from the Loughborough tradition of DA.  One of the issues in 1999 has
several articles ­ you could trace the earlier articles from this one.

Jan Blommaert¹s book Discourse (2005) has a nice discussion of CDA and CA,
and goes on to build on the strengths of these approaches by adding the
perspective of contemporary north american linguistic anthropology.
Duranti¹s Linguistic Anthropology and Hanks¹ Language and Communicative
Practices are two others, a bit older, that bring together discussions of
similar perspectives.

Kevin


On 5/19/09 11:01 AM, "Adam Lefstein" <alefstein@gmail.com> wrote:

> Stef Slembrouk has an excellent web page on the differences between
> various approaches to discourse analysis and cognate terms (including
> CA) here: http://bank.rug.ac.be/da/da.htm
> Hope this helps,
> adam
> 
> 2009/5/19 Au, Wayne <wau@exchange.fullerton.edu>:
>> Steve,
>> I would highly recommend getting into James Paul Gee's work. He's all
about
>> video games and learning right now, but his earlier stuff about Discourse
and
>> discourse analysis is brilliant. My favorite book of his is "Social
>> Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses" (but there is a newer
>> 2007 edition of the original 1996 one) and he also has a really good
>> Discourse analysis book: "An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory
and
>> Method" (2005). Jim is a really good academic writer - one of my
favorites,
>> and he really gets language.
>> 
>> I've taken two courses with him, and from what I've gleaned, I would say
that
>> conversation analysis generally falls under the larger umbrella of
discourse
>> analysis. In conversation analysis people look at how actors in a given
>> conversation position themselves (vis-à-vis language) relative to the
other
>> actors in the conversation and relative to their intended goals. In this
way
>> conversation analysis has the potential to speak to issues of culture and
>> power very concretely at the level of individual and/or group
interaction.
>> Discourse, in Gee's terms at least, is a broader concept than
"conversation"
>> in that Discourse (with a capitol "D" specifically) speaks to how one
>> communicates their identity through language as well as through other
means
>> (posture, clothing, style, etc.). So Discourse analysis also has the
>> potential to look at language and power, but it does so within a broader
>> framework and tries to take in larger issues of identity.
>> 
>> But this is all coming out of "New Literacy Studies" (which, frankly,
isn't
>> that "new" anymore), and I'm sure there are many more traditional and/or
>> historical takes on discourse analysis and conversation analysis that
would
>> disagree with what I've offered here.
>> 
>> For what its worth...
>> 
>> Wayne
>> 
>> 
>> On 5/19/09 4:59 AM, "Steve Gabosch" <stevegabosch@me.com> wrote:
>> 
>> This passage got my attention in Norm Friesen's article on discursive
>> psychology:
>> 
>> "the computer can be understood to have the same status as other
>> psychological phenomena in discursive analysis ..."  (page 133)
>> 
>> Speaking of discursive analysis, I need some education about the
>> differences and similarities between conversation analysis, discourse
>> analysis, discursive analysis, and perhaps other kinds of talk
>> analysis that are out there.  Any suggestions?
>> 
>> - Steve
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On May 11, 2009, at 11:03 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:
>> 
>>> Mike, I think you have very well, but this is a tough problem. There
>>> are some people on this list who are marvellously transdisciplinary
>>> (no names lest I omit someone) but it is hard to see how to get
>>> something really going in this direction, beyond heroic islands and
>>> a few brilliant scholars.
>>> 
>>> Something which has increasingly been grabbing my attention is the
>>> idea of an *emancipatory science*, the possibility of getting a
>>> discussion going amongst people in absolutely any discipline about
>>> how to break from the dominant positivist approaches around this
>>> principle. There has been a longstanding desire to do this, but
>>> efforts have been limited I think to certain currents of social
>>> theory, or more or less commitment to ethical code.
>>> 
>>> 1. The 80 years discussion in the CHAT tradition around "unit of
>>> analysis," seems to be recognised in no other current of science. I
>>> think this idea needs to be better understood and used in criticism.
>>> 
>>> 2. The interest in Idiographic as opposted to Nomothetic science
>>> which you, Mike, have introduced as something which Luria was
>>> committed to.
>>> 
>>> 3. Related to (2) the kind of knowledge accumulated by self-help
>>> groups as opposed to "specialists" and "generalists."
>>> 
>>> 4. "Emancipatory science" as a banner to organise a "crusade"
>>> against Behaviorism, Structuralism, and other currents of science
>>> which deny agency.
>>> 
>>> 5. Habermas's idea of "emancipatory interest"?
>>> 
>>> Perhaps a kind of social movement within science could open the way
>>> for transdisciplinary approaches? What do you think?
>>> 
>>> Andy
>>> 
>>> Mike Cole wrote:
>>>> Darn.
>>>> My experience with "interdisciplinary" has been so different than
>>>> yours,
>>>> David, it might even be enough of the opposite to motivate my
>>>> search for
>>>> some other formulation, like transdisciplinary without evoking
>>>> fears of a
>>>> coercive Foulcaudian master discipline. Seems like any route we
>>>> search end
>>>> leads to oxen and their
>>>> droppings. :-(
>>>> I started out an experimental psychologist for whom rats and
>>>> sophomores were
>>>> simply different kinds of the same sorts of "subjects" who one
>>>> studied for
>>>> convenience sake, depending upon particulars of how to get at the
>>>> common
>>>> underlying "psychological processes."  Istumled into and out of
>>>> Moscow
>>>> barely understanding what I was doing. Was sent to Liberia with
>>>> about the
>>>> same depth of understanding. Spent decades trying to sort it out
>>>> and piece
>>>> it together and ended up helping start a "communication
>>>> department" (no s at
>>>> the end).
>>>> Communication HAD to claim to be discipline to become a department
>>>> with a
>>>> grad program or had to disappear and that would have stranded me
>>>> back in a
>>>> psychology who thought that culture was only the "glove that goes
>>>> on the
>>>> hand." (Lovely metaphor from Gessell). But i could no longer
>>>> swallow that
>>>> and had come to believe that cultural mediation is central to human
>>>> behavior.  I was FORCED to create a DISCIPLINARY
>>>> department of Communication or flee into somewhere else and it
>>>> would be no
>>>> better.  And Communication, I fully believed was not a discipline
>>>> and was
>>>> not about to become one I could sign on to. It had to be created.
>>>> So what happens? We get hailed as this neat interdisciplinary
>>>> department.
>>>> And what does that mean? Incommensurate data, no way to say that
>>>> someone
>>>> said something actually wrong, not just some other
>>>> discipline's way of looking at things. What things? Ohn, most any
>>>> would do,
>>>> so long as it could be related,
>>>> post hoc mostly, to communication.
>>>> When people do anthro and psych as interdisciplinry we get a new
>>>> way to do
>>>> positivist cause effect science for subjects and objects who have the
>>>> misfortune of contributing to their own histories, thus screwing the
>>>> interdisciplinary logic of their combination.
>>>> Or we get a department of communication which aclaims its
>>>> interdisciplinarity. Cites Bakhtin, Foucault,
>>>> Bourdieu, inter alia, and the oxen of anyone with a yearning to
>>>> gore or be
>>>> gored.
>>>> Tis a puzzle.
>>>> My students are struggling with these issues in one class, and
>>>> trying to
>>>> come to grips with their lives as
>>>> middle class college students who spend two afternoons a week with
>>>> kids who
>>>> havnt enough to eat, parents only partly there or in prison or on
>>>> welfare to
>>>> work, or......  All those paradoxes to and moral conundrums to
>>>> work out.
>>>> And hoping that its true there is nothing so practical as a good
>>>> theory, so
>>>> they actually start searching for and evaluating candidates for such
>>>> theory(s).
>>>> And all we have jointly is this thin and tangled medium.
>>>> So it goes.
>>>> mike
>>>> Ps-- If you could help me out with the technology quesion I would
>>>> appreciate
>>>> it.
>>>> On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 4:05 PM, David Kellogg
<vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>  Since CHAT is an open house, I'm going to offer an extended
>>>>> cautionary
>>>>> tale for discursive psychology from my own bailliwick, applied
>>>>> linguistics.
>>>>> H.G. Widdowson, who practically founded our field, pointed out
>>>>> that there is
>>>>> a basic contradiction in the claim that applied linguistics (or
>>>>> cognitive
>>>>> science or chat) is "interdisciplinary".
>>>>> 
>>>>> The contradiction is this: on the one hand, we claim to be a
>>>>> discipilne in
>>>>> our own right, with our own mediating relations between theory on
>>>>> the one
>>>>> hand and praxis on the other. On the other hand, we claim to exist
>>>>> "interdisciplinarily", in the interstices between disciplines, by
>>>>> virtue of
>>>>> THEIR mediating relations between theory on the one hand and a
>>>>> praxis which
>>>>> is actually alien to our own.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I think matters are not helped when we replace the word
>>>>> "interdisciplinary"
>>>>> with "transdisciplinary". That involves a claim to some kind of
>>>>> metadiscipline; terribly good for our sense of self-importance, but
>>>>> disastrous for our relationship with our own praxis. In applied
>>>>> linguistics,
>>>>> this inflation of the discipline from a technological bull frog to
>>>>> an
>>>>> interdisciplinary ox meant that we ended up replacing applied
>>>>> linguistics
>>>>> (that is, the solution of real problems in the real world where
>>>>> language, if
>>>>> not linguistics, is a real and central concern) with something
>>>>> that looked a
>>>>> little more like linguistics applied (that is, now that we've got
>>>>> this keen
>>>>> body of theory let's figure out what it's good for).
>>>>> 
>>>>> At conferences it became very easy to tell the dwindling groups
>>>>> bullfrogs
>>>>> from the exploding groups of oxen. Bullfrogs were always reading,
>>>>> and oxen
>>>>> were always writing. Bullfrogs tended to hang out with teachers
>>>>> and even
>>>>> students, while oxen travelled in herds, mooing to each other in
>>>>> various
>>>>> incomprehensible postmodern dialects.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Concretely, it was even easier. The bullfrogs were STILL
>>>>> interested in
>>>>> language teaching, even though a lot of our student base was taken
>>>>> over by
>>>>> something called TESOL and enrollments were plunging. The oxen
>>>>> became
>>>>> interested in a kind of literary critical discourse applied to the
>>>>> ordinary
>>>>> language of (notably prestigious) fields like medicine and law and
>>>>> advertising. After all, if texts are texts and discourses are
>>>>> discourses
>>>>> (and maybe texts are discourses too) then there is no reason we
>>>>> can't apply
>>>>> the lit crit techniques of Kristeva and Barthes and why not
>>>>> Bakhtin to the
>>>>> discourses overheard in surgeries, courtrooms, and the texts in
>>>>> glossy
>>>>> magazines.
>>>>> 
>>>>> It was sexy, but ultimately sterile as far as practical
>>>>> discoveries of new
>>>>> modes of problem solving went; a lot of the systemic functional
>>>>> analyses
>>>>> (and also the discursive psychological analyses) pretty much
>>>>> discovered what
>>>>> we already knew was there (e.g. that South African newspapers under
>>>>> apartheid tended to cover events in the townships from the white
>>>>> point of
>>>>> view rather than the black one) and it even ignored stuff that we
>>>>> didn't
>>>>> know was there (e.g. that the same newspapers had some clear
>>>>> indications
>>>>> that white jounalists were getting fed up with the crap they were
>>>>> writing).
>>>>> 
>>>>> There were also groups of oxen which went into computers and corpus
>>>>> linguistics. But here the "linguistics applied" problem was even
>>>>> worse,
>>>>> because computer corpora were full of native speakers and finished
>>>>> linguistic products, and this tended to neglect exactly the kinds of
>>>>> problems we should have been attending (the kinds of problems that
>>>>> Alex
>>>>> Kozulin's article in the latest MCA tackles). Having cut their
>>>>> ties with
>>>>> praxis by becoming "interdisciplinary" the oxen invariably tended
>>>>> towards
>>>>> what was easy to study, uninteresting, and irrelevant.
>>>>> 
>>>>> That's why I worry a little about little words like "resource" as
>>>>> opposed
>>>>> to "tool". I know that "tool" has a distinctly early twentieth
>>>>> century
>>>>> sound; it belongs to a better time, when the future seemed somehow
>>>>> malleable, if only we had the right implements. I know that
>>>>> "resource"
>>>>> sounds a lot more twenty-first century; it sounds more suited to a
>>>>> time when
>>>>> things are scarce and precious and need to be valued without being
>>>>> used, and
>>>>> it seems more important to remind ourselves of the "embodiment" of
>>>>> communication than its instrumentality, its sign and tool using
>>>>> quality.
>>>>> These are evil times, and it is hard to trust in the artifacts of
>>>>> sociocultural progress; at times like these, as Volosinov says,
>>>>> academics
>>>>> shake their heads and repeat that man is only an animal.
>>>>> 
>>>>> But the students I will teach in about half an hour will graduate
>>>>> next
>>>>> year, and then they will teach eight and nine year old children.
>>>>> Some of
>>>>> them, perhaps most of them, will live to see the twenty-second
>>>>> century. So I
>>>>> still think, rather stubbornly and sometimes even stupidly, that
>>>>> we had it
>>>>> right the first time; in the long run, the future must be
>>>>> malleable if only
>>>>> we have the right tools and if only we stick to the right
>>>>> problems! After
>>>>> all, that's how we got this far.
>>>>> 
>>>>> David Kellogg
>>>>> Seoul National University of Education
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> --- On *Sun, 5/10/09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>* wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
>>>>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Friesen Article
>>>>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>>>>> Cc: "David Middleton" <D.J.Middleton@lboro.ac.uk>
>>>>> Date: Sunday, May 10, 2009, 6:27 PM
>>>>> 
>>>>> David--
>>>>> 
>>>>> Thanks for getting us directly connected with this article.
>>>>> I have a question, the answer to which is presupposed in your term,
>>>>> technology. One of the aspects of the study of communication as I
>>>>> experience
>>>>> from a department so named is that technology is a term that
>>>>> applies almost
>>>>> exclusively to electronically powered digital devices.... by my
>>>>> *colleagues*,
>>>>> who also treat "media" as a singular noun and a "cause" in the
>>>>> positive
>>>>> sense of "the media are responsible for the degeneration of our
>>>>> moral
>>>>> order."
>>>>> 
>>>>> Put aside my parochial question about media and focus on
>>>>> technology. What
>>>>> is
>>>>> a technology? I trace my own, vague understandings to the idea
>>>>> of technea in ancient Greece where teoria referred to the audience
>>>>> at a
>>>>> dramatic performance. I am guessing you have thought about this a
>>>>> lot.
>>>>> Can you help me out here? I think it is relevant to the article
>>>>> because of
>>>>> the everyday interpretation of "educational technology" .
>>>>> 
>>>>> I hope that someone knows how to reach Norm Friesen so that he can
>>>>> join the
>>>>> discussion. I think that discursive psychology is an important
>>>>> intellectual
>>>>> enterprise and would like to understand its relationship to the
>>>>> issues we
>>>>> are used to discussing.
>>>>> mike
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 4:37 PM, David Kellogg
<vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
>>>>> <http://us.mc01g.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> Yes, xmca is a bit of a three ring circus: when there isn't a
>>>>>> tiger loose
>>>>>> on the other thread, then he's either backstage--or prowling the
>>>>> audience.
>>>>>> I've got some non-rhetorical and non-display questions about the
>>>>>> Friesen
>>>>>> article:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> a) My first question has to do with "interdisciplinarity", a recent
>>>>> thread
>>>>>> that snapped befoer it could get as far as "Discursive Psychology
>>>>>> and
>>>>>> Educational Technology". In applied linguistics we used to think
>>>>>> we were
>>>>>> inter-trans-disciplinary: we thought we were language teaching
>>>>>> plus any
>>>>>> discipline you need to make language teaching more fun, effective,
>>>>>> affordable, useful. Then we discovered that we were really just a
>>>>>> TECHNOLOGY. It's not the same thing. For one thing, being a
>>>>>> technology is
>>>>>> more fun, effective, affordable, and useful. For another, it's
>>>>>> not nearly
>>>>> as
>>>>>> prestigious, which means good riddance to an enormous amount of
>>>>>> careerist
>>>>>> baggage. Isn't "cognitive science" (and even CHAT) just in the
>>>>>> process of
>>>>>> discovering the same thing?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> b) My second question concerns p. 133, where Friesen has this to
>>>>>> say:
>>>>>> "Discursive psychology does not understand (?) discourse or
>>>>>> conversation
>>>>> in
>>>>>> terms of communication in its conventional technologized (??)
>>>>>> meaning as
>>>>> the
>>>>>> transmission of information; instead, it understands discourse
>>>>>> above all
>>>>>> (as?) a kind of activity--a type of action or work through which
>>>>>> the
>>>>> social
>>>>>> field of interaction itself is constituted". I can think of a lot
>>>>>> of ways
>>>>> in
>>>>>> which you could transmit information without "action" or "work"
>>>>>> or even a
>>>>>> social field of interaction (involuntary signals). I can't think
>>>>>> of a
>>>>> single
>>>>>> way in which you could constitute a social field of interaction
>>>>>> without
>>>>>> transmitting information. So am I to conclude that discursive
>>>>>> psychology
>>>>> is
>>>>>> a narrower notion than the convental technologized one?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> c) My third question has to do with a sentence later in teh same
>>>>> paragraph
>>>>>> that goes like this: (...Mind, computer, and other terms and
>>>>>> categories
>>>>>> woudl emerge from this type of analysis not so much as causes or
>>>>>> tools to
>>>>>> produce certain results but as rhetorical and interactional
>>>>>> resources
>>>>>> for discursive, social action." To me this suggests that they are
>>>>>> not
>>>>> tools
>>>>>> but only potential tools. Given that I am a proud technologist
>>>>>> with no
>>>>>> pretensions to interdisciplinarity, why is that a step forward?
>>>>>> It looks
>>>>>> like a giant leap backwards from where I am standing.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> d) Finally, I wonder about the whole exercise of analyzing a
>>>>>> tidbit of
>>>>>> interaction between a human and a chatbot for evidence that the
>>>>>> human is
>>>>>> responding to the chatbot as we humans are supposed to, that is,
>>>>>> as a
>>>>> more
>>>>>> or less successful performance of a perverse kind of role play. The
>>>>>> particular role play that chatbots are supposed to enact is NOT,
>>>>>> however,
>>>>>> a machine pretending to be human, but rather a human pretending
>>>>>> to treat
>>>>> a
>>>>>> machine as a human. Isn't the missing precondition for real (as
>>>>>> opposed
>>>>> to
>>>>>> potential) social action the ASSUMPTION that the other person has a
>>>>> genuine
>>>>>> intention to interact?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> David Kellogg
>>>>>> Seoul National University of Education
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> --
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/
>>> Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
>>> From Erythrós Press and Media
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>> 
>> --
>> Wayne Au
>> Assistant Professor
>> Department of Secondary Education
>> CSU Fullerton
>> P.O. Box 6868
>> Fullerton, CA 92834
>> Office: 714.278.5481
>> Editorial Board Member: Rethinking Schools (www.rethinkingschools.org)
>> http://ed.fullerton.edu/SecEd/Faculty/Full_Time_Faculty/Au.html
>> 
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