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.

Reflections on Foucauldian discourse analysis in planning and environmental policy research

Abstract: Discourse analysis is becoming an increasingly common approach in planning and environmental policy research This paper asserts that the generic treatment of discourse analysis obscures distinct approaches in which ‘discourses’ can combine different elements of text, systems of thought and action Textually oriented approaches have been more prevalent during the 1990s, but this paper explores a different approach, grounded in the theory of Michel Foucault, which broadens discourse to embrace social action Comparing and contrasting two studies that have utilized this approach, the paper suggests that there is considerable room for variation concerning the subjects of study, the institutional scale of analyses, the methods of investigation and process of analysis Nevertheless, this paper identifies certain core elements of a Foucauldian discourse analytic approach The paper concludes that this emerging approach to discourse analysis promises considerable insights if applied more widely in planning and e

Scientific discourse in three urban classrooms: The role of the teacher in engaging high school students in argumentation

Abstract: Argumentation is a core practice of science and has recently been advocated as an essential goal of science education. Our research focuses on the discourse in urban high school science classrooms in which the teachers used the same global climate change curriculum. We analyzed transcripts from three teachers' classrooms examining both the argument structure as well the dialogic interactions between students. Between 19% and 35% of the discourse focused on scientific argumentation in that students were using evidence and reasoning to justify their claims. Yet in terms of dialogic interactions, only one teacher's classroom was characterized by student-to-student interactions and students explicitly supporting or refuting the ideas presented by their peers. This teacher's use of open questions appeared to encourage students to construct and justify their claims using both their scientific and everyday knowledge. Furthermore, her explicit connections to previous students' comments appeared to encourage students to consider multiple views, reflect on their thinking and reflect on the thinking of their classmates. This study suggests that a teacher's use of open-ended questions may play a key role in supporting students in argumentation in terms of both providing evidence and reasoning for students' claims and encouraging dialogic interactions between students. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed94:203–229, 2010

Children's use of verbal strategies in resolving conflicts1

Abstract: (1981). Children's use of verbal strategies in resolving conflicts. Discourse Processes: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 149-170.

Scientific literacy and discursive identity: A theoretical framework for understanding science learning

Abstract: In this paper we propose the construct of discursive identity as a way to examine student discourse. We drew from the work of Gee (2001, Review of Research in Education, 25, 99–125) and Nasir and Saxe (2003, Educational Researcher, 32(5), 14–18) to consider the multiple contexts and developmental timescales of student discursive identity development. We argue that theories of scientific literacy need to consider the sociocultural contexts of language use in order to examine fully affiliation and alienation associated with appropriation of scientific discourse. As an illustrative case, we apply discursive identity to series of short exchanges in a fifth-grade classroom of African-American students. The discussion examines potential co-construction of student identity and scientific literacy. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed89:779–802, 2005

Discourse Analysis Organizational Analysis

Abstract: The question of discourse, and the manner in which it shapes our epistemology and understanding of organization, are central to an expanded realm of organizational analysis. It is one which recognizes that the modern world we live in and the social artefacts we rely upon to successfully negotiate our way through life, are always already institutionalized effects of primary organizational impulses. Social objects and phenomena such as ‘the organization’, ‘the economy’, ‘the market’ or even ‘stakeholders’ or ‘the weather’, do not have a straightforward and unproblematic existence independent of our discursively-shaped understandings. Instead, they have to be forcibly carved out of the undifferentiated flux of raw experience and conceptually fixed and labelled so that they can become the common currency for communicational exchanges. Modern social reality, with its all-too-familiar features, has to be continually constructed and sustained through such aggregative discursive acts of reality-construction. The idea that reality, as we know it, is socially constructed, has become an accepted truth. What is less commonly understood is how this reality gets constructed in the first place and what sustains it. For the philosopher William James, our social reality is always already an abstraction. Our lifeworld is an undifferentiated flux of fleeting sense-impressions and it is out of this brute aboriginal flux of lived experience that attention carves out and conception names: