WHAT TEACHERS SAY WHEN THEY TALK ABOUT DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Findings
Daily routines and affective investment
As the category “daily routines” very often overlaps, in several extracts, with that of “affective investment”, the findings of the analysis of the two categories are presented in tandem.
When STs talk about their daily routines, they often use the lexical item try (mostly as a collocate of the verbs use, apply and work) to refer to the practical procedures employed in order to introduce the study of discourse in their classrooms, as in:
I tried to use, apply, in one of the language schools I work for, the difference between [...] what kind of language is used in dialogues and what kind of language is used when you write.
I’ve been trying to guide them, in a way using a bit more of textual cohesion, I try to pass on to them some linkers[...] So, what I have been trying to pass on to them is really textual cohesion, that’s what I manage to do with my students.
In the data, STs frequently state that they have been applying the contents acquired in the D A modules, as well as experimenting with specific discourse activities, so as to examine whether or not they are adequate and useful. However, these recounts are worded, revealingly, as attempts.
By the same token, practical procedures are seen to be constrained by STs’ perception of the potential difficulties which hinder innovation in their classes:
There’s not much you can do, first because we cannot teach the same group of students the following year, and sometimes you teach a seventh grade which has not had English in sixth and fifth grades and you have to start from scratch...
Besides this, this [ working with authentic texts that need photocopying] is also against the school’s policies, because we work with texts and students have to run copies of them.
Yes, and this too... My school, for instance, doesn’t provide students with copies for free.
Mine doesn’t either.
These recurrent negative perceptions might be viewed as reflecting and reiterating the discourses circulating within the group teachers belong to. Of particular interest is the use of war of my own in the fragment below, which can be understood as evidence of a permanent conflict between the teacher’s desire to change and the institutional constraints affecting her.
... but this is a war of my own, as coordinator, against Faetec [a federal college of further education] who do not want me to use that, because for them it is more of an advantage if students buy the coursebooks.
However numerous, not all perceptions are negative. STs tend to be positive about the impact of the modules on their performance by emphasizing transformations undergone. They word their positive reaction, for example, by means of comparatives and superlatives, seen by Martin (op.cit: 160) as indicators of APPRECIATION:
... the benefits are a lot greater for us as professionals, and even at those moments when we act as students: when you sit down to write a paper, an academic paper, this has a lot more value because you’re more aware of the discourse markers you’re supposed to use, your text has to be a cohesive text, you have to be more concerned with the reader, with whom is reading your paper;
Now, something that was very real, that really happened to me, it [the course] made me more critical towards the pedagogic material.
The best thing was that our view [of language] has at least broadened.
I try to observe in the texts I’m using what I should show them in terms of grammar, so in relation to this, I guess it [DA] helped me a little.
In the excerpts above, the STs report that the study of language as discourse has helped them become more aware of academic conventions, which they try to incorporate into their own academic writing tasks. Thus, the most conspicuous impact of the discipline DA may be seen as one of personal improvement, since the utterances in which this representation is found all carry the pronouns I, me or my.
Some STs, on the other hand, pointed out that their DA course lacks practical application:
... in this course we took, something I missed right at the beginning was [the teacher’s] clearly showing the purpose of its straight application, because a lot of theory...
... But, and this is what I think, how are we to apply this in our classrooms? I guess [the course] lacked this sort of guidance right from the start, even for us to become more motivated.
One ST feels so strongly about the inadequacy of the modules that she suggests that the group “exert pressure” so that the syllabus is changed to reflect their actual teaching realities:
Now, learning theory, theory, theory, this leads nobody nowhere. So I think we should exert pressure so that these courses become better thought of [...] [and] include a bit more of our everyday practices in our [DA] classroom.
Summing up, the STs complain that they are subject to varied institutional constraints, but also mention their attempts at adopting new pedagogical practices despite these difficulties. In addition, they complain that their DA course lacks practical application, but their own accounts of those same attempts show that the course was not as fruitless as it might seem at first. These two instances of contradictory stances, present in the data, may signal what Spink (op.cit. :138) argues are valuable guides to help us understand the role of “affective investment”. In other words, either the course did allow them to somehow bridge the gap between theory and practice, or their being experienced teachers counted as the key factor that enabled them to do so, or both.
