Developing exploratory talk and thinking in secondary English lessons: theoretical and pedagogical implications

This is a year-long, action-research project investigating how to develop pupils' exploratory talk and higher-cognitive thinking in secondary English classes. Four teachers, their Year 8 classes (110 pupils) in Sussex and an ITE educator collaborated to investigate whether the quality of pupils' exploratory talk could be improved by a structured, pedagogical approach, and to explore contextual factors and other conditions for its development. The approach included making the skills of this formal, oral discourse explicit to pupils, using pupils' ground-rules, teacher modelling and structured tasks; regular practice and critical reflection on talk. It also involved cross-school collaboration, for example, classes evaluated each other‟s developing talk on video; and teachers met throughout the project to reflect on individual and collective issues and to review data and emerging findings. The data include qualitative analysis of pupil discourse taken from throughout the project, supported by associated observations and interviews with teachers and pupils. The study concludes that a rich, apprenticeship model inducting students in how to use exploratory, dialogic talk, including student critical reflection on this, contributes to the development both of this discourse and its associated higher-cognitive processes, especially in relation to the reading of texts. However, these appear to be necessary, but insufficient conditions for such development. The transformation in students‟ discourse depends on a more significant transformation in their identities, which is contingent on a similar shift in the range of teacher identities being performed. Practising exploratory talk gives students experience of a wider range of identities, especially for those who are unconfident, low-achieving and/or from low socioeconomic backgrounds, in particular boys, but also girls, enabling them to gain a 'voice' in school precluded by the discourses and identities generally adopted. This, thus, enables students to develop ways of talking and thinking essential for achievement across the curriculum, moving from silence at the margins to speech at the centre. Teachers need to appreciate the extent to which discourse exceeds language structures, encoding ways of behaving, valuing and 'being' and therefore being related to both the relationships and teacher/pupil identities generated in the classroom. Furthermore, the study concludes that there is a highly significant relationship between pupils practising dialogic, exploratory talk in groups and developing sophisticated reading comprehension skills: critical literacy, a key aim for all English teachers. The study defines a particular type of exploratory discourse that emerges in English lessons, when pupils are reading and collaborating in groups: 'tentative talk about text'. This is characterised by its speculative, tentative and analytical nature; its openness to plural interpretations of texts and its coconstruction of meanings

Can you "dig up the hatchet"? : on the semantic transparency of idioms in English.

Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2013.This thesis is concerned with the connection between syntax and semantics regarding the construction of special meaning in English. To investigate this construction I have taken a selection of English idioms, modified them in structured ways and then presented them to a group of English mother tongue speakers to test whether, although modified, these idioms retain their idiomaticity. These modifications took the form of two specific operations, those of mobility and transferability (the latter operation was created for the purpose of this thesis). An idiom’s parts are considered mobile if its parts can undergo movement and retain an idiomatic reading. In this thesis, the movement operation that I was concerned with was passivisation. An idiom’s parts are considered transferable if one of its parts can be replaced (e.g. the verb with another verb or the object determiner phrase with another determiner phrase) and idiomaticity is retained. I hypothesise that whether an idiom’s parts are transferable and mobile is dependent on whether the idiom is compositional or not. I will discuss the above hypothesis against previous work of both Chomsky’s (1995) Minimalist Program and Jackendoff’s (1997) representational modularity. The results gained in this study show that idioms cannot be categorised neatly as compositional or non-compositional, but rather exist on a continuum of idiomaticity. On the one end of the continuum exist idioms that are completely inflexible and the rate of flexibility increases the further the continuum extends. Therefore on the one side of the scale is an idiom such as “trip the light fantastic” which is inflexible and on the other side is an idiom such as “I lift my hat to you” which is flexible but in restrained ways

‘Just reading’: the impact of a faster pace of reading narratives on the comprehension of poorer adolescent readers in English classrooms

Poorer adolescent readers are often regarded by teachers as unable to read whole narratives and given short, simplified texts, yet are expected to analyse every part in a slow laborious read through. This article reports on a mixed methods study in which 20 English teachers in the South of England changed their current practice to read two whole challenging novels at a faster pace than usual in 12 weeks with their average and poorer readers ages 12-13. Ten teachers received additional training in teaching comprehension. Students in both groups made 8.5 months’ mean progress on standardised tests of reading comprehension, but the poorer readers made a surprising 16 months progress but with no difference made by the training programme. Simply reading challenging, complex novels aloud and at a fast pace in each lesson repositioned ‘poorer readers’ as ’good’ readers, giving them a more engaged uninterrupted reading experience over a sustained period. However, the qualitative data showed that teachers with the additional training provided a more coherent faster read and better supported poorer readers by explicitly teaching inference, diagnosed students’ ‘sticking places’ mid-text and created socially cohesive guided reading groups that further supported weaker readers but also stretched the average/good readers