Abstract
In the seven chapters of this book, Waring aims at showcasing how empirical insights from conversation analysis (CA) can contribute to building a theory of educational discourse. To do so, she draws data from various pedagogical settings, including second-language classrooms, tutoring sessions, writing skills centers, graduate seminars and post-observation conferences, and explores the principles of pedagogy in the moment-by-moment structuring of interaction in such settings.
Chapter 1 is an introduction where Waring previews the topics in each of the ensuing chapters. She offers an initial glimpse into the tradition of building theories of educational discourse, the relationship between CA and theory, and the principles of pedagogical interaction together with their limitations and implications. The plan of the book is provided at the end of the chapter.
Chapter 2 first reviews the classic studies on classroom discourse that have laid down the foundation for subsequent work and have shaped current understandings of the structure, rules and nature of classroom discourse and its relationship with learning. Then it considers the various approaches to classroom discourse, including (applied) linguistics, sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, education and educational psychology, language socialization and sociocultural theory, and explains the insights they have yielded and the questions they have posed concerning the discourse of education.
In Chapter 3, Waring introduces CA as both a theoretical framework of and a methodological approach to social interaction. Upon familiarizing the readers with the assumptions, goals, tools and distinguishing features of CA, she addresses contentious issues regarding validity, reliability and generalizability of findings obtained through the lens of CA, and also explicates the way CA views context. The chapter provides a brief review of previous conversation analytic studies on classroom discourse and ends with an explanation of how CA furthers the existing body of knowledge and contributes to building a theory of pedagogical interaction.
Chapters 4–6 focus on three Cs and introduce them as principles of pedagogical interaction: competence, complexity and contingency. The relevance of these principles is portrayed in transcripts and detailed in analyses of interaction from various pedagogical contexts. Chapter 4 first presents learners’ concern for appearing competent by illustrating how tutees, mentees, second-language students and graduate students manifest this concern in interaction through defending, maintaining and asserting their competence. After that, it details how teachers can carefully attend to the concern both verbally and non-verbally in the structuring of interaction. This chapter concludes with a discussion on the affinity of the principle with the concepts of play and prolepsis in Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural theory. The principle of complexity, which is described in Chapter 5, centers on the multivocality of teacher talk in the sense that it straddles two forces: exercising control and fostering participation. Waring uncovers various instances in which multivocality tends to function as an impediment or a resource in pedagogical interaction. In the conclusion of this chapter, she explains how multivocality echoes Bakhtin’s (1986) thinking and how it can be situated in complexity theory. Chapter 6 describes the principle of contingency and considers ‘responsiveness to the moment’ as its manifestation in interaction. It then considers various cases in which lexical, prosodic, sequential and gestural features of teacher talk either violate or observe the principle. It also discusses theoretical paradigms that are compatible with the principle of contingency.
In the concluding chapter of this book, Waring revisits the principles and unites them as an embodied theory. She then explains the significance and implications of the theory. Finally, she mentions the limitations of her theory of pedagogical interaction.
The centripetal force of the book brings together years of extensive conversation analytic work on educational discourse. In other words, the three principles proposed in the book effectively assemble and summarize meticulous CA findings and reinterpret them on a larger canvas. Another merit of the book is its potential to function as both a theoretical guide to understanding CA and a resource book for practicing analysts to explore how CA is implemented. The inclusion of over 60 extracts taken from various pedagogical contexts, together with their detailed analyses, not only familiarizes the reader with the language of CA, but also provides a better picture of educational discourse, including but not limited to classroom discourse. Waring makes her analytical claims quite convincing by attending to the validity, reliability and generalizability of her findings through skillfully uncovering participants’ practices of social interaction, making public highly detailed transcripts and analytically generalizing the principles to theories. The book is highly structured and very readable; it is easy to discern the common thread that runs through all the chapters, that is, gradually and systematically approaching a theory of pedagogical interaction.
Despite all these merits, the bulk of research that the book reviews in Chapters 2 and 3 is limited to classroom discourse. Moreover, in the final chapter where Waring presents the principles as an embodied theory, it would have been more informative and persuasive if she had elaborated on how the principles might interact with one another and how they might work as a system.
Overall, this book offers both an in-depth and a comprehensive picture of educational discourse. It is also innovative as it does not merely pair CA with theories; rather, it uses CA to theorize. I highly recommend this invaluable resource to students, scholars and practitioners in applied linguistics, educational linguistics and communication studies.