Spoken Discourse Four

Ah, OK then. Lectures. Nice to see that I wasn’t completely off track last time.

Mainly practical, this one, again. Which is nice but doesn’t give me all that much to get my teeth into here. One thing I would ask is why “staying very close to the classroom analysis” is necessarily an “advantage”. I can see why it’d be pleasingly symmetrical to produce a unified theory, but square pegs, round holes and all that.

Lastly, I ended up writing up SD3 twice, by accident. So I’ll include that stuff here as it seems I did a slightly better job the second time round –

The first thing to note here is that this all seems very culturally specific. Working in an education culture where the overwhelming method of tuition is the lecture, I’m left with a raised eyebrow (or two) at statements like, “more than anything else teachers ask questions or elicit.” Not sure how true that is round these parts. On which note, the statement that, “it is quite possible to have an exchange where only one of the participants makes an identifiable contribution,” seems to warrant further examination.

  

And if we follow that train of thought past the station named ‘lectures’ and further down the line perhaps the realization that there is as much variation in spoken genres as there is in written, and while it’s all very well to start specific, this is still all very much in its infancy. There’s a project for someone, try to identify and categorize spoken genres without just importing written ones wholesale.

From the M+C reading we also get the question, “Should our concern with spoken grammars only begin at upper-intermediate or advanced levels?” I’d suggest it can only begin there. There’s quite an artful phrase from one of the metaphor readings about lower students ‘lacking the necessary meta-language’ for productive classroom activities, and I think the same hold true here.

One final, slightly random thought on the importation of ideas. It is, due to a whole host of cultural and institutional factors, incredibly difficult for me to get my students to perform the basic paralinguistic and discourse functions during an L2 conversation that they’d perform automatically in their L1. Is this just a result of my situation, or is this common across lower-level L2 learners everywhere?