An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (2nd ed.

Much of our daily lives are spent talking to one another, in both ordinary conversation and more specialized settings such as meetings, interviews, classrooms, and courtrooms. It is largely through conversation that the major institutions of our society - economy, religion, politics, family and law - are implemented. This book Emanuel Schegloff, the first in a series and first published in 2007, introduces the findings and theories of conversation analysis. Together, the volumes in the series constitute a complete and authoritative 'primer' in the subject. The topic of this first volume is 'sequence organization' - the ways in which turns-at-talk are ordered and combined to make actions take place in conversation, such as requests, offers, complaints, and announcements. Containing many examples from real-life conversations, it will be invaluable to anyone interested in human interaction and the workings of conversation.

Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis

This article is a survey of methods for measuring agreement among corpus annotators. It exposes the mathematics and underlying assumptions of agreement coefficients, covering Krippendorff's alpha as well as Scott's pi and Cohen's kappa; discusses the use of coefficients in several annotation tasks; and argues that weighted, alpha-like coefficients, traditionally less used than kappa-like measures in computational linguistics, may be more appropriate for many corpus annotation tasks---but that their use makes the interpretation of the value of the coefficient even harder.

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Inter-coder agreement for computational linguistics

This paper conceptualizes the development of teacher professionalism as passing through four historical phases in many countries: the pre-professional age, the age of the autonomous professional, the age of the collegial professional and the fourth age-post-professional or postmodern. Current experiences and perceptions of teacher professionalism and professionalization, it is argued, draw on all these ages. Conclusions are drawn regarding new directions in teacher professionalism, and the linking of professional projects to wider social movements for public education and its transformation.

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Four Ages of Professionalism and Professional Learning

is to be found in a cluster of terms that pervade the oral and printed discourse on this issue—including especially the ‘futuristic business literature’ that Bereiter cites in his target article: lifelong learning, flexibility, creativity, higher-order thinking skills, collaboration, distributed expertise, learning organizations, innovation, technological literacy. At times these appear to be empty buzzwords, but they may also be thought of as attempts to give expression to a central intuition that has yet to be formulated in terms that are clear enough to be very useful in generating designs and policies. In this chapter I attempt to extract a main idea from these vague terms and show how it can be applied to generate a kind of education that really does address new challenges in a new way. A central idea is collective cognitive responsibility. Although this concept does not capture everything suggested in the foregoing list of terms, it captures much that they have in common and something more. Let us first expand upon the idea in the context of adult work and then apply it in the context of education.

R. M. Coulthard

Papers

Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English Used by Teachers and Pupils