Dialogic Discourse Analysis: A methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text

Abstract

Bakhtin is a source of theoretical inspiration for educational research. This article will be an attempt to activate also Bakhtin’s analytical practice and his methodology. I will explore and elaborate the typology of discursive relations which are suggested in Bakhtin’s book on Problems of Dostoevsky’ Poetics (Bakhtin ,1984), and the potential application of it in the study of discourse in the classroom. In order to do so properly it will be necessary to activate Bakhtin’s understanding of the utterance as a meaningful unity, and thus also the problem of authorship and the relationship between author and hero.Bakhtin’s analytical practice can be considered a consistent methodology for the study of literature in schools as well as in the scholarly study of literature (cf. Skaftun, 2009; 2010), and I have called it dialogic discourse analysis (DDA). The first main part of the article elaborates key features of DDA in dialogue with Bakhtin’s work. In the other main part, DDA is applied to educational settings in order to enter the educational dialogue on how to make sense of authorship and the adhering conception of the classroom as a text. My ambition here is primarily to elaborate DDA as a powerful and dynamic toolkit also for educational research. In doing so I also hope to contribute to the ongoing work of transferring Bakhtin’s dialogism as a whole from the study of literature to the study of education. Examples will in part be drawn from literature, but for the most part from educational settings.

Cool kids' carnival: Double-voiced discourse in student conversations about literature

“…4 Cf. Skaftun (2019) for a more detailed overview of Bakhtin's types of discourse. 5 Bakhtin uses parodistic when referring to the specific type of discourse, as opposed to parodical features in general.…”

“…Our main framework will be Bakhtin's approach to literary discourse (Bakhtin, 1981;1984a;1986), conceived of as dialogic discourse analysis (cf. Skaftun, 2009;2019).…”

Putting Arendt, Bakhtin and atmosphere to work: Exploring different paths concerning the language development of multilingual children

“…Goodwin’s (2000) work, for example, suggests that face-to-face interaction involves semiotic resources, including the body, speech and materials. Nordic scholars, including, for example, Skaremyr (2019: 16), describe how children who are leaning an additional language combine oral speech, body language and materials so as to be understood. Similarly, Björk-Willén (2007: 2133) describes how multilingual children can coordinate non-vocal actions with speech in order to both participate and sustain participation when playing.…”

Theoretical Promises and Methodological Troubles Capturing Dialogical Discourse in Classroom Research

“…Consequently, a pressing question persists: can structuralist-based methodologies, such as CA, reveal the complexity of dialogism? Skidmore and Murakami's collection adheres to such structuralist methods, but there are other practitioners, which I will address later, who adopt post-modern, mixed-method approaches that may provide another solution (Fecho, 2005;Juzwik, Borsheim-Black, Caughlan, & Heintz, 2014;Skaftun, 2019).…”

“…Given the limitations of structuralist-based methods to describe and analyze dialogism in the classroom in this work, I would like to recall a recent work published in this journal by Skaftun (2019), which introduces a methodology that may offer a glimpse into future practices. Introducing dialogical discourse analysis (DDA) as a toolkit for educational researchers, Skaftun stressed the "dialogizing background" of each utterance, situating it in a chain of utterances both within and between agents in the classroom.…”