Discourse analysis

About: Discourse analysis is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 16055 publications have been published within this topic receiving 515384 citations. The topic is also known as: DA & discourse studies.

From “truth” to “invented reality”: A discourse analysis of high school physics students' talk about scientific knowledge

Abstract: Students' views of the nature of scientific knowledge have been recognized as an important component of science learning environments. In this study, we analyze an extensive data base consisting of 23 students' written and oral discourse about ontology, epistemology, and sociology of scientific knowledge collected over a 15-month period in the context of two consecutive junior- and senior-level physics courses. Over a 2-month period at the beginning of the second year, students read, reflected on, and talked about a text which discusses epistemology in the context of physics. Our study shows that students drew on nine types of discursive resources to support their ontological, epistemological, and sociological claims. Toward the end of the study, the range and number of supportive statements had increased. Simultaneously, few students changed their ontological and sociological claims, but a considerable number changed their epistemological claims. Two case studies illustrate the development of student discourse in the course of the study. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 34: 145–179, 1997.

Hugh Mehan’s Learning Lessons Reconsidered: On the Differences Between the Naturalistic and Critical Analysis of Classroom Discourse

Abstract: This article begins with a review of the place of Hugh Mehan’s Learning Lessons in the development of the naturalistic study of classroom discourse studies, and especially the sequential analysis of naturally occurring classroom discourse. It then turns to the emergence of an alternative program for classroom discourse studies, in the particulars of critical discourse analysis. There we find a “formal–analytic” program for discourse studies. The middle section of the article takes up the characterization and the differences between these two programs through a critique of formal—and critical—studies of classroom discourse. The article then concludes with an analysis of a fourth-grade lesson on fractions, to suggest what the sequential analysis of naturally occurring classroom discourse may tell us about the work of instruction in the early grades. My aim throughout is to reaffirm the premise and program of naturalistic inquiry as the central innovation of classroom studies in the last 30 years.