Discourse Analysis and Foreign Language Teacher Education
DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS
Teacher agency
Case study 1: Fran
Levels of response
In general, Fran responded to those aspects of DA that she valued at the level of techniques. To illustrate, Fran commented that she found the in-class scripting (Cazden, 1992) of Allen Ginsberg’s poem A Supermarket in California to be “very helpful for [my] own teaching” because it can be used as a way “to bring students to a level of more critical reflection about the texts they’re reading.” In the same entry, she noted that it would be untenable to integrate such an exercise into her classroom teaching within the confines of the language program in her particular department because “with the readings we have now, it is difficult to find space for creativity in the classroom.” Fran referred to the readings in question as “mostly factual news articles” that “do not seem to lend themselves to this kind of technique.” Nevertheless, Fran remained optimistic about using scripting in her FL classes at a latter date when she remarked that she “look[s] forward to trying this out in class when [she’s] teaching again.”
In his explication of point of view in literary texts, Fowler (1996, p. 177) remarks that the “double voice” of free indirect discourse (FID) allows James Joyce to present and question virtually simultaneously the attitudes of Eveline, a character in his Dubliners stories. According to Fowler (ibid.), Joyce can “place two sets of values in an implicit dialogue with each other” through his judicious use of FID. Fran was so intrigued with this proposition that she wrote in her reaction journal that it will be her “hobby horse for the next couple of months” to find literary texts that incorporate multiple perspectives through the use of FID “so that I can be ready to teach with them when I’m finally back in the classroom next year.” Fran also suggested that E. T. A.
Hoffman’s short story The Sandmann might be an appropriate choice in a fourth semester language course for teaching Fowler’s (1996, pp. 178-180) type D point of view. This perspective, in which the use of “estranged, metaphorical language” contributes to portraying literary characters as “grotesque automata”, may have proven to be of special relevance to Fran’s later activities as a literary critic, which include analyses of obscure B-movies such as David Friedman’s (1974) Ilse, She-Wolf of the SS.
Fran often suggested rudimentary lesson plans for the implementation of discourse-based classroom exercises. To illustrate, she was positively impressed by the way in which one of her peers didacticized the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia by suggesting that students could rewrite the lyrics of famous songs in order to imbue them with the voices of their own socio-cultural contexts. As an example of how this process might work in a German-language classroom, Fran offered the following satirical re-write of the opening lines of the Billy Joel song, The Piano Man, in an entry in her reaction journal: “It’s three in the afternoon on a Wednesday, and I’m on my paid three-hour lunch break from the Auslandsamt...I wait for half an hour for the waitress to come, and then someone asks ‘Ist hier frei? ”’ She further suggested that teachers in her department could incorporate this activity into a particular chapter of the prescribed language textbook. Fran’s enthusiasm for this discourse-inspired classroom activity was conveyed by her placement of three consecutive exclamation points at the end of this suggestion.
At four points in the course of her reaction journal, Fran responds to discourse-level linguistic phenomena with respect to their perceived function as a tool of professional development for FL teachers. To illustrate, Fran considered how her new awareness of bracket signals or “instructions for putting the ongoing talk or text on hold” (Hatch, 1992, p. 26) might translate into a classroom advantage for her students: “Also: bracket signals. This I find extremely useful for the lg. classroom. How can I as a lg. teacher be more clear when I’m about to make an aside or tell a joke in [the FL]? How do I help to avoid students getting lost [Fran; reaction journal]?”
On two occasions, Fran appeared to use her new expertise in DA as a developmental tool with regard to her professional activities as a literary critic. Illustrative of this reaction is Fran’s discussion of William Labov’s (1972) well-known article in which he proposes a syntax for narratives of personal experience in American English. In this same contribution, Labov (1972, p. 395) provides a re-evaluation of what he refers to as Black Vernacular English (BVE) by demonstrating that the African-American adolescents in his study had more advanced narrative skills than their white counterparts. In response to reading this piece, Fran wondered whether or not it would be possible to co-opt Labov’s (1972) framework in order to provide a similar re-evaluation of women’s speech: “...in my research on women’s writing, I’ve encountered criticism in the secondary literature that often depicts women’s narratives as crazy, schizophrenic, unstructured, irrational, and/or illogical...My question is then: If we take this way of speaking, for the strategic purposes of research, as typical of women (a sort of “strategic essentialism”), then how can we imbue that sort of speaking with value and/or reevaluate that speaking in the way that Labov has re-evaluated Black Vernacular English [Fran; reaction journal]?”
