Carole Edelsky

Who's got the floor?

This study into the nature of “the floor” actually began as an open-ended inquiry into sex differences that might occur beyond the sentence level in the multi-party interaction of five informal committee meetings. Technical difficulties prompted the trying out of several different transcription displays, most of which failed to capture the “feel” of the interaction and each of which biased (in its own way) the perception of what had actually gone on. The type of unconventional display eventually used was intended to show the floor holder in the center of the page, flanked by co-occurring talk. Because there were many episodes for which a single floor holder could not be identified, the primary focus of the study shifted to the nature of the floor itself. Questions about sex differences became a secondary and succeeding focus. In the analysis, “floor” and “turn” were distinguished on the basis of “participant-sense” rather than technical criteria. Two kinds of floors were subjectively identified: F1, a singly developed floor; and F2, a collaborative venture where several people seemed to be either operating on the same wavelength or engaging in a free-for-all. The two kinds of floors were differentiated objectively by such features as quantity and frequency participation, language functions, number of nonturn utterances, overlaps, and pauses. There were indeed sex/language differences, but these were related to the type of floor being developed. Men took more and longer turns and did more of the joking, arguing, directing, and soliciting of responses F1 s. Turn length and frequency differences were neutralized in F2s, and certain language functions were used by women to a greater extent in F2s than in F1 s. (Conversational analysis, gender and language, qualitative research methodology.)

Writing in A Bilingual Program: The Relation of L1 and L2 Texts†

This is a report on the relationship between first language and second language writing. Nine first, nine second, and eight third graders in a unique bilingual program (emphasizing writing, a whole-language approach to literacy, and literacy in the first language before second language literacy instruction is begun) provided the writing data. The L1/L2 writing relationship might be viewed as either interference of L1 with L2 writing or as application of L1 to L2 writing. Taking the second view, but given that texts written by the same child in Spanish and in English demonstrate both similarities and differences, the question remains: what is it that is applied? The answer: everything—from particular local hypotheses regarding spelling, to more global hypotheses regarding differential constraints on oral vs. written texts, to abstract processes for producing texts. Some factors that might influence the level of knowledge and hypotheses that are used in L2 writing are: the nature of the written systems of the two languages, the writers proficiency in the L2, the nature of the literacy experience, sociolinguistic constraints, and the nature of the writing process itself.

Whose Agenda Is This Anyway? A Response to McKenna, Robinson, and Miller

One of McKenna, Robinson, and Miller’s major problems in proposing a research agenda for whole language is that they do not understand what whole language is. It is not an alternate methodology for language arts instruction. It is an educational paradigm complete with theoretical, philosophical, and political assumptions. As such, it has its own congruent research agenda. What prevents McKenna et al. from understanding whole language and from seeing the legitimacy of whole language-generated research is paradigm blindness. What encourages them to pretend to a role of neutral statesmen are particulars of their own paradigm (which they are also blind to) and the dominant position of that paradigm. What makes their proposal so outrageous is their presumption to speak for whole language educators and their attempt to impose their whole language-violating agenda on them while expecting those educators to cooperate in the violation.

Creating Inequality: Breaking the Rules in Debates

As both unabashed contests for power and forums for political candidates who, presumably, already have relatively substantial societal power, political debates offer a site for investigating the creation of more powerful language use for some, less powerful for others. Since the canonical debate form promises an equal distribution of turns and topic control to all debators through prespecification of practically everything that might vary in conversation (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974), the instances within actual debate which violate rules for prespecification are prime sites for revealing gender issues. The out of order and oddly functioning talk in six televised political debates was analysed, holding the promise of fairness of canonical debates as a yardstick. Un-rule-y talk violated rules for who was to speak (uninvited and out of turn order UNs) and what was to be happening (unexpected and oddly functioning MOVEs). UNs and MOVEs were categorised, sorted, and analysed as to where they occurred, who did them, what special features they had, and what consequences they had for subsequent topics, turns, and event structuring. The analysis has implications for the study of gender and language as well as the study and conduct of political debates.

A Discourse on Academic Discourse

Abstract This is a study of the organization of talk and of some outstanding features of the teacher’s discourse in a recurring curricular event (literature study) in one atypical fifth/sixth-grade classroom. The investigation was propelled by our assumption that the teacher was inducting students into a Discourse, a mesh of value-laden ways of talking and acting associated with a certain community. Our analysis showed the talk to be aligned with both the culture of school and the culture of “literati,” to be episodic and two-part, and to display two clusters of discursive strategies: apprenticeship-style teaching strategies and solidarity strategies. Both structure and strategies reflected the teacher’s beliefs about curriculum, learning, and teaching and the academic work infused with those beliefs.

Language Acquisition and a Marked Language

Five Anglophile children and their bilingual first grade classroom were studied to investigate the acquisition of Spanish as a second language. Weekly participant observations and three test/play sessions yielded data on learning strategies, the second language learning context, the children’s ultimate nonacquisition, and comparisons with findings from a previous study. Markedness of the target language is used to account for asymmetrical contexts and results in second language acquisition.

Whole Language in Perspective.

Perspectives on instruction. In P. L. Carrell, J. Devine, & D. E. Eskey (Eds.), Interactive approaches to second language reading (pp. 223-238). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giroux, H. (1978). Writing and critical thinking in the social studies. Curriculum Inquiry, 8(4), 291-310. Graman, T. (1988). Education for humanization: Applying Paulo Freires pedagogy to learning a second language. Harvard Educational Review, 58(4), 433448.

Variation and Authenticity in a Study of Children's Written Humor

Presented here is a brief report of a study along with an extensive criticism of this and other studies that use contrived tasks for investigating childrens humor and writing. The original study had hoped to anwer questions related to how child-produced humor might vary with the sex and age of the intended audience, how writing would figure in child-produced humor, and any relationships that might exist between production of and talk about humor. Two middle-class fourth-grade classrooms were told a contrived story and asked to produce something funny for some sick children. Children in one class produced something for two sick children, both male, one in first and one in eighth grade. The other class produced something for two sick children, both female, one in first and one in eighth grade. Productions (N = 136) were collected and analyzed. Of the fourth graders, 9 were then interviewed about their conceptions of humor and of their productions. Childrens productions did vary according to the age and sex of the intended audience. There were no particular relationships between the humor of variability of the productions and the talk about humor. The major criticism in this and similar studies is that the data are flawed. Despite efforts in the opposite direction, the contrived task produced a confused pragmatic context. Once the pragmatics were distorted, the data no longer represented the phenomena of interest—humor and writing. Without extensive observations and interviews, there is little evidence that these findings represent what the chosen variables make them appear to represent. An argument is thus made for increased sensitivity to what phenomena research data actually represent.