Discourse Analysis and Foreign Language Teacher Education
DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS
Teacher agency
Case study 1: Fran
Valuing expertise in discourse analysis
On the whole, Fran seemed to value those aspects of DA that were thematically (or theoretically) related to issues that she had encountered previously in her courses on literary and cultural studies. She confirmed this interpretation of her reception of DA in an email to me: “I think your interpretation of my journal is right on-target.” She was particularly receptive to those discourse-analytic concepts that resonated with issues of identity, hybridity, and plurality. She did not, for example, show any special interest in the linguistic structure of conversational discourse (e.g., turn-taking mechanisms) or the theoretical fine points between various approaches to discourse as outlined by Schiffrin (1994). Her tendency to respond positively to those aspects of the seminar that she perceived to relate to her interests in literature is illustrated well by her reaction to Kramsch (1987). In this piece, the author argues for and exemplifies the discursive construction of foreign reality in American-produced textbooks of German. Fran remarked: “What I thought was interesting about this article – well, two things but first of all, I found the issue of censorship particularly interesting. I immediately thought about the topic of the body, since this is one of my foci in literary texts. In American textbooks, the depiction of the body tends to be...emasculated...When I looked at a German-published textbook of German...it was not surprising at all to see drawings of completely nude men and women with their genitalia labeled [Fran; reaction journal; italics added].” The truncated opening clause of this excerpt, the colloquial particle ‘well’, and the ellipted expression ‘two things’ are characteristic of oral speech (Ong, 1988) and give the impression that Fran wrote her reaction journal in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, i.e. she reported the first thing that came to her mind. With respect to Kramsch (1987), this ‘first thing’ was the thematic connection between an example in the article and one of Fran’s interests in literary studies. The ‘naturalness’ of Fran’s reaction is underscored by her use of the adverb ‘immediately’ to describe the manner in which the connection was made. It is important to note that Fran did not, at this point, pick up on the way that Kramsch applied the tools of DA in order to provide a critical analysis of a text (the leading activity in Fran’s future profession), but rather that she honed in on themes that were of interest to her, although these were peripheral to the main argument in Kramsch (1987).
If Fran was attracted to those aspects of DA that resonate with her particular interests in literary studies, then she was sometimes critical of those course readings in which the author espoused views that appeared to detract from those ideas that she values. For example, she responded in the following way to Fowler’s (1996, p. 82) explication of textual cohesion: “Fowler’s Enlightenment-informed assertion that “We expect the propositions in a cohesive text to be arranged to make a progressive sequence of ideas” is betrayed by the existence of deconstructionist texts and criticism. Not all texts present progressive sequences; nor should we attempt to interpret texts that do as gaining their cohesion and coherence from this logical sequencing...I found it unfortunate that Fowler did not bring in postmodern theory at this point, especially considering that this edition came out in 1996.”
