Karen Patricia Smith

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.