What Teachers Say When they Write or Talk about Discourse Analysis
WHAT TEACHERS SAY WHEN THEY TALK ABOUT DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Treatment of the spoken data
Once transcribed, the spoken data was manually tagged in terms of Spink’s methodology for qualitative content analysis. Spink posits (op.cit:131) that talk around a very specific theme is best analyzed through the identification of what she has labelled “daily routines”, “cognitive elements”, “affective investment” and “emergent themes”. These four broad semantic categories may be perceived, according to the author, by means of lexicogrammatical signals.
In the particular case of this research, what Spink has termed “cognitive elements” was encompassed by the STs’ perceptions of Discourse as a discipline, the part they play in it, as well as their roles as teachers at the institutions where they work for. Descriptions of their practical procedures both in their capacity as EFL teachers and as post-graduate students were also targeted. “Daily routines” were seen to be related to the practical procedures they adopt as either students or teachers and, in our informants’ exchanges, these routines were signalled by expressions such as I try to..., This is what I generally do when..., 1 am used to doing X.... “Affective investment” corresponded to our subjects’ attitudes towards the discipline, their jobs as teachers, and their institutions, and were signalled by inherently evaluative lexical items such as It is often hard to....; One problem I often face is... but also, by inference, in clauses such as You have to have a lot of patience in such cases. For the mapping of “affective investment”, it was felt that Martin’s (op. cit.) markers of Appraisal discussed above would reveal our subjects’ attitudes towards their pedagogical practices and the course under focus. Finally, as the label suggests, “emergent themes” are those which had not been foreseen at the onset of the research, but are recurrent across different respondents’ talks.
