Social Obligations

Today’s class marked something of a turning point, I think. We moved from a teacher-centered discussion to a teacher-facilitated one. I brought in two blog posts and the subsequent comments for each—one from sportsfilter and one from redstate. I wanted the students to talk about how the comments represented some form of Discourse. That is, how do the people leaving the comments establish and respond to conventions while also performing particular language tasks—such as building identities, exchanging “social goods,” or making connections among each other? The discussion touched on all the major points from the Gee reading: Conversations (capital C) as contexts and background information; intertextuality as a tool for creating identity and excluding others from the discourse; social languages as markers of relationships and affiliations.

What’s becoming clear to me is that I need to connect more directly the functional grammar with the “tools of inquiry” Gee is laying out. I have to resist the assumption that the connection is self-evident—because it’s really not. For example, Gee makes very little use of the grammatical terms in his early chapters. And while I know that the social theory that drives his type of inquiry is much like that which drives the functional perspective on language, I shouldn’t assume that others who haven’t studied either can make the connections.

ASSUME = ASS+U+ME

Functional grammar provides us with a distinct terminology for describing the words we see and hear in the texts we encounter. We can certainly do discourse analysis without it, but I believe that the close attention to clause construction provides us with another way of understanding what’s happening in a text—what its social action is. When our texts are described in terms from both FG and Gee’s discourse analysis, we provide ourselves and our readers with that much more data on which we can negotiate.

And there’s a point I haven’t made clearly enough in class. Discourse analysis—even functional analysis—is meant to be social, to be done by people willing to share their interpretations with others and to reconfigure those interpretations in light of the ideas of others. No analysis happens in a vacuum, in the sense that every text is steeped in context and that every analyst must bounce her or his ideas off of others. Just as meaning is made through the (often uneven) negotiation between speaker and hearer, writer and reader, analysis is done through the (preferably even) sharing of ideas between analysts. Asking the groups to respond to each other’s DAJs might be a good start. Groups could, for a week or so, analyze the same texts and then compare notes. Perhaps when the new groups form next week, that could be the first assignment. A good way to build trust?

Billy says:

I've lived long enough to have learned,
The closer you get to the fire, the more you get burned
But that won't happen to us,
Because it's always been a matter of trust.

I’m beginning to think, however, that the FG stuff could have waited two or three weeks. It just seems to have freaked people out more than helping them. I need to think about how I open this class in the future. The idea of diving right in is one that I like, but it may just be too much. I’m a bit concerned that the trouble with the grammatical terms—and the justified concerns about what this class is really about—are too distracting. Did I chase people from the class who should have otherwise stayed? Have I strengthened my position as class center by teaching the hard stuff first? Have I made myself indispensable in wrong ways and for wrong reasons? These are legitimate questions, I think. I wonder if my enthusiasm for language studies led me to overlook the rightful concerns of my students.