This volume gives intellectual space to a range of current perspectives on classroom discourse research and provides a forum for conversations about the research process. Classroom discourse researchers from different theoretical perspectives provide five separate analyses of the same instructional unit in a high school biology class, using the same set of data. Interwoven with the five research reports are several conversations among the editors and researchers regarding specific aspects of the research process. These conversations illuminate some of the actual decisions that researchers make when looking at data and crafting their analyses.
This book is intended for graduate students, researchers, and teacher educators across the fields of applied linguistics and education who are interested in studying classroom discourse and, more generally, language-in-use. With its focus on both the research process and the outcomes of research, as well as on the theory-method relationship, this book is relevant for courses in research methodology, language in education, applied linguistics, discourse analysis, language development, and multiculturalism in the classroom.