RESEARCHING CLASSROOM DISCOURSE

RESEARCHING CLASSROOM DISCOURSE

Researching classroom discourse can be a good idea for teachers to become active reflective practitioners, become researchers of their own contexts. Classroom discourse can give teachers a great understanding of their environments and ideas about how to improve processes that enhance both, learners and teachers developments.

In this chapter three important elememnts are mentioned, the context, data, and interaction.

The context is essential, teacher have to understand it, the author argues that teachers researchers, are both, producers and consumers of their research, enhancing understanding of their own contexts is the target, more than generalizing a new one, it leads to developing and effective teaching and learning process.

Secondly, is the data, there are a lot of ways for collecting evidence of the practies in the classrooms, but the author suggests that the best way to make evidence based decisions is data. In this part the teachers researchers have to develop the ability to collect analyze data, it is central for their professional development.

And third, it is the interaction , According to Kumaravadivelu, understanding classrooms have to start with descriptions, describing interactional processes, teachers needs abilities to develop language and interactions as powerful tools to meditate about learning,

It is in the interaction part that teachers can take many issues to reflect about, the important thing here is to learn to see things in the data that is being collected. What is that data telling to the teachers, otherwise any process is going to be change.

It is said by the author that teacher have the responsibility to pay attention to their classroom and based on the interactions describe their classrooms as a way to prove that their pedagogical goals are achieve. When people talk about collecting classroom data, it mostly refers to making a recording and a transcription or that data.

The author affirms that in every single classroom there are too many things happenings at any time and capture avery interaction, gesture movement, comment, an so on, it is quite difficult. Teachers researcher can find trouble at the moment of collecting data. It can be difficult recording everything happening in the classroom and in fact more difficult representing that data in a written form,

In the text, there are some suggestion about the technical procedures to have a good recording, like use of digital recorders located carefully around the room, use of multidirectional microphones among others. Making and audio recording can be sometimes the easiest wat to collect data, the problem with it is that avoid visual representation of what is happening , many  of the spoken gestures communicate even more than spoken words. It is suggested in the text to use to cameras, one in the front part of the classroom and the other in the back. This means that can be possible to capture all what is happening in the classroom. The disadvantages found when video recording are, first, can cause unexpected behaviors by students or teachers, second, transcribing gestures, movements, actions in a writing in a written form is quite hard and time consuming.

It is important to say that when teachers decide to video record their classrooms, written and signed permission must be obtained. All participants involved in the recording must sign, if they are young children the parents are the ones who sign the permission. In some cases identity of some students must be protected, so their faces appear invisible .the participant should know what is the purpose of the recording, how is it going to be use, they have to know that they are able to leave at any time if they want.

In the text emerged a questions, how much data do I need ? the author says that it depends both on the purpose of the recording and the approach to analyze. The quality of the data can lead to good analysis; there is nothing more frustrated that working with data that can be heard well.

Once you have the data you have to transcribe it, the purpose here is to represent reality, as accurately as faithfully as possible. Well conducted transcription is not an easy job, and some teacher find it tricky to represent everything in a written form, in fact there are many symbols and codes use to do a good transcription it means close to the real intention of the participants.

Having read this chapter have gaiven me a broad idea about how to conduct research classroom discourse, I highlight the importance of observing our contexts as a way to understand and improve not only my practices but also my students ones. Of course it is not an easy job to collect data and transcribe it, but starting doing this can gives us the ability to perform better when applying classroom discourse searching.