تسجيل الدخول

تسجيل

Discourse Analysis and Foreign Language Teacher Education AGENCY AND STRUCTURE IN THE INTERPRETATION OF SOCIAL ACTION

المؤلف:  Julie A. Belz

المصدر:  Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education

الجزء والصفحة:  P343-C20

2026-09-12

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Discourse Analysis and Foreign Language Teacher Education

AGENCY AND STRUCTURE IN THE INTERPRETATION OF SOCIAL ACTION

This study draws on social realism (Layder, 1993) in order to provide a detailed and dynamic account of these student-teachers’ responses to DA (see Belz, 2002a; Carter & Sealey, 2000). In general, social realism recognizes the culturally and historically shaped nature of human beings as well as that of the various human activities in which they are situated. Theoretically, the realist position construes the empirical world as highly complex and multifaceted. Within this variegated and layered world, social action is shaped by an intimate interplay of both macro-level phenomena such as context and setting (i.e., structure) and micro-level phenomena such as (linguistic) interaction and psycho-biography (i.e., agency). Furthermore, social action is embedded within history and (inequitable) relations of power and both of these influences the ultimate meanings and shape of human activity in important ways. Methodologically, social realism relies on a theory-generating, multistrategy approach which attempts to make as many “analytic cuts” (Layder, 1993, p. 108) into the research site as possible in order to elucidate the meanings of particular social actions for the people involved. In sum, social realist investigation advocates the examination of the ecology of a particular action in order to elucidate the meaning(s) of that action for the people involved.