Abstract
This chapter deals with classroom interaction and discourse in monolingual and bilingual educational settings. It traces the development of research in classroom discourse and interaction between teacher and learners, and the meaning-making practices taking place in contexts where English is a second or foreign language. Interaction in these contexts usually takes place around texts, texts of different kinds, either printed materials, text books, oral texts, or texts that are created or re-created from other texts, and others that are the object of mediation by teachers. Different research traditions in sociolinguistics such as ethnography, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and micro ethnography have contributed to inform the analysis of classroom discourse and talk around text. More recently, linguistic ethnography, based on these previous traditions, adopts a critical stance, with a post-structuralist orientation, and critiques “essentialist accounts of social life” (Blackledge and Creese 2010, p. 61). Research studies in post-colonial contexts in the South reveal the tensions arising from and the impositions or restrictions of new education policy; these studies highlight the impact of language policies on classroom interactions, and show how global processes impinge on the local. Due to the rapid spread of English and globalization, English has now become a commodity. In the Northern hemisphere, recent studies in multiliteracies and multilingualism have focused on the impact of globalization on education, now transformed by immigration,and the complexities of meaning-making and negotiation of multilingual and multicultural identities.
Silvia Valencia Giraldo has retired.
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I wish to thank Marilyn Martin-Jones and Anne-Marie de Mejía for their suggestions and feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Giraldo, S.V. (2015). Talk, Texts, and Meaning-making in Classroom Contexts. In: Wortham, S., Kim, D., May, S. (eds) Discourse and Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02322-9_26-1
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