Joan Swann

Reading groups and the language of literary texts: a case study in social reading

This article analyses discourse arising in reading group discussions as an instance of a real-world literary reading practice; it arises from and reports on the AHRC-funded Discourse of Reading Groups project. This naturalistic, observational approach to literary reading is contrasted with experimental approaches. Excerpts from the total dataset in which the language of literary texts is discussed are here subjected to two forms of analysis: software-assisted qualitative analysis suggests that where participants appear to make reference to their subjective responses to texts, this often has the function of presenting evaluations of those texts in mitigated form; interactional sociolinguistic analysis shows the sequential emergence of ‘language’ as a discussion topic, how discussion of language is co-constructed between participants and how such literary activity is culturally, interactionally and interpersonally contingent. ‘Face’ emerges as a key explanatory concept in both analyses.

Researching literary reading as social practice

This article first discusses ‘the reader’ as generally conceived within literary studies (including stylistics), grounding its claims with an empirical analysis of articles published in Language and Literature from 2004 to 2008. It then surveys the many ways in which real readers have been empirically investigated within cultural studies, the history of reading, and cultural sociology. Lastly, it introduces the remaining papers in this special issue as contributions to the study of language and literature.

Designing 'educationally effective' discussion

This paper analyses data from a curriculum intervention project designed to introduce new forms of discussion, seen as educationally effective, into the primary classroom. While the introduction of talk as an aid to learning is premised on a social approach to learning, such interventions are often evaluated in terms of cognitive benefits and gains in subject knowledge, and considered independently of social and interpersonal factors that affect the conduct of interaction. The study discussed in this paper is intended to complement such cognitively based approaches. I argue that it is difficult to ‘bracket off’ official educational activity within interactions, and that research needs to take into account how talk is used to a range of effects in specific interactions, as well as differences between pupils in their take-up of the communicative strategies they have been taught. I also suggest that the context-dependency, variability and potential ambiguity of utterance meaning raises important issues for the implementation and evaluation of projects designed to introduce particular ways of speaking within education. These points are illustrated by the analysis of transcripts of small-group discussions between pupils taking part in a recent intervention project.

Doing Gender Against the Odds: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Educational Discourse

Contemporary studies of the performance of gender in spoken interaction have tended, understandably, to focus on contexts in which there is likely to be evidence of gender being done. In this paper, by contrast, I shall look at a context in which the odds seem to be stacked against the interactional performance of gender. The data I examine come from an intervention project carried out in primary classrooms in the south east of England, designed to encourage children to use talk effectively for learning. Children are carrying out various problem-solving activities, exploring ideas together and engaging in collaborative interaction. Both the topic and the interactional style are relatively constrained (the children have been taught to use particular ways of speaking) and the context is not one in which gender is likely to be salient. I shall examine ways in which gender may nevertheless be invoked, albeit rarely, and the strategic use to which gender — and gendering — is put in this context.

What Do We Do about Gender

Several concerns have been raised, within education, about differences and inequalities in girls’ and boys’ spoken language and interactional styles. Principally, there has been concern about the w...

The Mediation of Response: A Critical Approach to Individual and Group Reading Practices

In this chapter, we attempt to put into practice Martin Lyons and Lucy Taksa’s argument that, when it comes to data, ‘the historian’s duty is not accumulation, but analysis and interpretation’.1 With regard to the book historian’s traditional materials — sales figures, library records, typefaces, book bindings, etc. — this is fairly self-evident. However, when we deal with the sorts of materials on which it has been proposed that a ‘new book history’ be built — autobiographical references to reading experiences, and the like — then this principle is sometimes forgotten, because materials of this nature seem to come to us, as it were, pre-interpreted.2 People do not memorize textual encounters and then spew them out unmediated but produce narrative accounts in which these and other events are given a meaning and a form comprehensible within a given cultural context. This means that it can be difficult — in many cases impossible — to get at the reality of narrated events. This has been noted by historians of reading, such as Katie Halsey: Memoirs and biographies, like autobiographies, are involved in fashioning an image of the subject they treat. And because the books someone reads can be used as a sort of shorthand to describe the kind of person they were, it is wise to be wary of such descriptions. While they may well be true… they may not tell the whole truth.3

School Librarians as Leaders of Extracurricular Reading Groups

The research object of this chapter is school librarians as leaders of extracurricular reading groups in secondary schools. The study was undertaken in England where young people continue to read less independently and find less pleasure in reading than many of their peers in other countries (Twist, Schagen, & Hodgson 2007; Twist, Sizmur, Bartlett, & Lynn, 2012).

Storytelling and Story-Acting: Co-Construction in Action.

In the light of sustained interest in the potential value of young children’s narrative play, this article examines Vivian Gussin Paley’s approach to storytelling and story-acting, in this case with 3- to 5-year-olds. It scrutinises how children’s narratives are co-constructed during adult–child and peer interactions through spoken and embodied modes, as their stories are scribed by an adult and later dramatised by their peers. Data are drawn from an evaluation of an 8-week training programme, based on Paley’s approach, designed for early years professionals and undertaken in different geographic and demographic locations in England. Naturalistic data collection techniques including video and field notes were used to record the storytelling and story-acting of 18 case study children. The resultant data were subject to close discursive and multimodal analysis of storytelling and story-acting interactions. Findings reveal discursive co-construction ‘in action’ and illustrate how the child storytellers, story actors and practitioners co-construct narratives through complex combinations of gaze, body posture and speech in responsive and finely tuned interactional patterns. The study contributes significantly to knowledge about how young children’s narratives are co-constructed through multiple modes in the classroom.