De Participatiestructuur Van Spreekvaardigheidslessen
Een Verkenning Van Een Complexe Discourse Situatie
In SLA methodology it is recommended that students engage in conversation in fluency classes. The assumption underlying these recommendations is that conversational roles and tasks can be brought into and practised inside the classroom.
This article is a report on research in progress and uses a discourse framework to demonstrate that the complexity of these settings has been underanalyzed (Polanyi & Scha, 1988). What exactly are the consequences of the fact that these conversations are not, of course, 'ordinary' 'authentic' conversations but pseudo-conversations acted out in institutional settings? If only because they occupy a position between 'instructions' and 'reporting back to the class', they construct a different type of unit. Constraints of the real-world social situation are not invalidated by embedding them into a pseudo-informal 'conversational' domain: speaking and hearing roles just become increasingly complex both for the students and for the teacher (Goffman, 'Footing', 1979).
The data consist of freshmen fluency classes at Amsterdam University in various types of tasks and with varying group sizes.
Article language: Dutch