Chapter 5
Language, interaction, and culture at school
An overview
The chapter provides an overview of selected studies that, from the mid-twentieth century, have variously dealt with classroom language, interaction, and culture. Moving from the recognition that schools represent (at least in western societies) a major site for children’s socialization into the adult world, several ethnographic accounts of how this process concretely takes place in and through everyday classroom practices are presented and discussed. As the chapter illustrates, the focus on situated language use allows to appreciate how school is a lieu where the micro-macro dialectic emerges with particular evidence. Specifically, the chapter reports on research dealing with (a) classroom’ typical interactional structures, (b) teachers’ and pupils’ communicative practices, and (c) the interactional competence needed to appropriately participate in classroom everyday activities. An appraisal of the challenges that this multifaceted research field is facing in contemporary societies concludes the article.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Studying the language of education: An historical background
- 3.The ethnography of schooling
- 4.Teaching and learning as socially organized communicative activities
- 4.1On doing “being the teacher”: Three resources for pursuing an answer
- 4.2On doing “being the teacher”: Assessing and the ratification of knowledge in instructional sequences
- 4.3Communicating in the classroom: The interactional competences of the students
- 5.Language as a learning object and language as a learning tool: The case of second language acquisition
- 6.Contemporary challenges
-
Notes
-
References
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EDUCATION SCIENCES AND SOCIETY :1
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