This paper analyses the contribution of student agency and teacher contingency in the construction of classroom discourse in adult English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) classes for refugees and asylum seekers, for whom the identity of student itself can constitute a stable point in a highly unstable and potentially threatening lifeworld. In contrast to accepted ideas of the prevalence of teacher-initiated initiation–response–feedback (IRF) sequences in whole group teacher-fronted activity, characteristic student- initiated moves for bringing the outside into classroom discourse are identified. These are discussed in terms of the student agency and teacher contingency involved, drawing on the Bakhtinian notion of “answerability.”: teacher and students are robustly claiming interactive space in classroom talk, bringing the outside into discussion. This data, drawn from narrative and classroom data in case studies of Adult ESOL classrooms, points to less docile more agentive and open-ended models of classroom discourse than have typically been evidenced in the literature.
This paper describes a methodology for the analysis of classroom talk, called socio-cultural discourse analysis, which focuses on the use of language as a social mode of thinking – a tool for teaching-and-learning, constructing knowledge, creating joint understanding and tackling problems collaboratively. Its application involves a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods and enables the study of both educational processes and learning outcomes
The paper describes how sociocultural discourse analysis was used to analyse talk in the primary classroom, which focuses on language and the social mode of thinking