Towards Practitioner Research: Analyzing Classroom Talk as Forms of Life

Wu Zongjie

（吴宗杰）Zhejiang University

Misleading concepts of teacher research

•Purpose: To improve the efficiency of classroom teaching•Way: To develop “better” teaching techniques•Reason: Causal relationships between action and result (cause and effect)

Three types of research

• Empowering research: academic research• Disempowering research: teacher doing

academic research (action research)• Research for understanding: exploratory pr

actice

Re-activate the human potential of enquiry.

Allwright, 2003

Life and work

• Work is constitutive in life, and life extends itself through our work for a better life. Life and work stand for a unitary phenomenon of human beings. However, the problems of modern society, including education, precisely originate from the division of life and work. ‘Living’ and ‘making a living’ are differentiated, and made into two contending matters.

Life and work

• “it must make a contribution to the quality of life in the language classroom before it can hope to make a contribution to the quality of any teaching and learning that take place there” Allwright (2001)

What is Quality?

Remove ghosts, you will see the life

• ``Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.'‘ (Pirsig)

The quality of life emerges when language is put in a proper position.

• 荃者，所以在魚，得魚而忘荃；蹄者，所以在兔，得兔而忘蹄；言者，所以在意，得意而忘言。吾安得夫忘言之人而與之言哉？ ( 莊子外物第二十六 )

• A fish-trap is for catching fish; once you’ve caught the fish, you can forget about the trap. A rabbit-snare is for catching rabbits; once you’ve caught the rabbit, you can forget about the snare. Words are for catching ideas; once you’ve caught the idea, you can forget about the words. Where can I find a person who knows how to forget about words so that I can have a few words with him? (Zhuang Zi Chapter 26)

Classroom life beyond words• 学完了美国诗人惠特曼的《草叶集》后，老师对草是什么东西这几节诗

进行了深挖，然后让学生到自然界去找一片叶子，创作一首诗。有位在找的过程中对叶子产生了感情，接连化了一个星期才找了一张落叶，因为他不忍心从树上摘叶子，他说树会痛的。下面是同学写的几首诗歌，虽然他们的诗歌语言还不完美，但是他们所表达的情和意已经跃在纸上。读者似乎能看到他们在创作诗歌时的那份动情。 (Teacher diary)

• The Leaf• The Leaf sitting in the middle of the tree,• Looking gently at me.• Look! She is like a newborn baby,• Clean and innocent.•  • And I know when it approaches summer,• She turns a bright beauty.•  • There is her cradle.• As an angle she smiles,• Shy but sweet.• …..

Language games as a way of life

• ‘to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life’. Wittgenstein (1953:sec. 19)

• ‘Meaning is never going to be satisfactorily explained by pointing to the mental, to things like intention’ (Genova 1995: 120) but is an aspect of pictures and activities within social contexts.

Language in ontological perspective

• Look on the language game as the primary thing. And look on the feelings, etc., as you look on a way of regarding the language game, as interpretation.

• (Wittgenstein 1953: sec. 656; emphasis in original)

Listening as a way of playing a game

• A teacher or participant is listening from a hermeneutic perspective, rather than an evaluative stance, joining in the game instead of trying to get the game to take a predefined course or reach particular known ends.

• Evaluative listening ‘tends to forget its own responsibility in interactions’ and focuses on eliciting correct responses. The goal becomes clear and concise presentations of verbal information, and listening to make sure students have ‘got it’. Interpretive listening includes ‘listening to what learners were saying’, as ongoing negotiations in which the evolution of ideas and knowledge is a social construct and part of the language games of society rather than known ‘facts’.

Speaking is a disclosure of your understanding

• Speaking is essentially to speak to yourself for understanding, rather than to enact others’ action

• Speaking is showing

Knowledge transmitting

Knowledge making

Knowledge critique

Look at the classroom as a picture

What teachers have failed to realize as they teach is precisely that what they are trying to do is to share with their students a form of life.

Exploratory Practice

Action Research

Being

Life oriented Work oriented

Authenticity Efficiency

Self seized by everyday dwellings

Self chosen from public discourses for its hero

Exploratory practice in comparison

Knowing

Understanding in focus Skill/knowledge in focus

Emancipatory interest Technical/strategic interest

Narrative (intuitive) Paradigm (propositional)

Concreteness (primordial) Generalisation (average)

Holistic Analytical

Personal criteria Official criteria

Convincing selfSituational interpretation (convictions)

Convincing othersTheoretical interpretation (justification)

No purpose Purposive

Authentic critique (no value) Critique laden with a value

Doing

Standing out by a personal puzzle

Initiated by research and technical agenda

Led by everydayness dwellings

Led by expertise and institutional conventions

Implicit (tacit) change Explicit change

No deliberate action oriented Action oriented (Behaviour manipulation)

Sustainability Project bound

No steps to follow Systemic institutional means

Community tied to an marginal practice

Community tied to an institutional practice

Communication with private language (for showing things)

Communication with public language (for exchanging ideas)

Genre as form of life

Genres are not just forces. Genres are forms of life, ways of being. They are frames for social action. They are environments for learning. They are locations within which meaning is constructed. Genres shape the thoughts we form and the communications by which we interact. Genres are the familiar places we go to create intelligible communicative action with each other and the guideposts we use to explore the unfamiliar. Bazerman (1997:19)

Thanks