A REVIEW ON CRITICAL CLASSROOM DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
WRITTEN BY B. KUMARAVADIVELU
Bibit Suhatmady
Universitas Mulawarman
Abstract: This is a review on a journal article written by B. Kumaravadivelu entitled Critical Classroom Discourse Analysis (CCDA). Kumaravadivelu’s primary purpose in writing this article is to conceptualise a framework for conducting CCDA. He starts with a critique of the scope and methods of the current models of classroom analysis, arguing that they offer only a limited and limiting prospective on classroom discourse. He, then, asserts that the concept of discourse enunciated in Foucauldian poststructuralism and Saidian poscolonialism can be employed to develop a critical framework for understanding what actually transpires in the L2 classroom. From the two discourse traditions, Kumaravadivelu tries to construct a conceptual framework for CCDA and presents basic principles and procedures that might make CCDA possible. At the last part of his article, Kumaravadivelu conclude the article with suggestions for further exploration that CCDA might open up.
Keywords: Kumaravadivelu, CCDA, Foucauldian poststructuralism, Saidianposcolonialism, and L2 Classroom
Abstrak: Tulisan ini adalah sebuah ulasan dari sebuah artikel jurnal yang ditulis oleh B. Kumaravadivelu yang berjudul Critical Classroom Discourse Analysis (CCDA). Tujuan utama Kumaravadivelu menulis artikel ini adalah untuk mengonseptualisasikan sebuah kerangka berfikir dalam rangka melaksanakan CCDA. Ia memulainya dengan sebuah kritikan terhadap batasan dan metode yang berlaku pada model analisis kelas yang sedang ramai dilakukan sekarang ini. Ia menngatakan bahwa batasan dan metode tersebut hanya menawarkan perspektif wacana kelas yang terbatas dan membatasi. Kemudian ia memberikan argument bahwa konsep wacana yang dicetuskan dalam post-strukturalisme Foucauldian dan post-kolonialisme Saidian dapat digunakan untuk mengembangkan sebuah kerangka berfikir kritis sebagai pemahaman tentang apa yang sebenarnya terungkap dalam sebuah kelas Bahasa Kedua (B2). Dari kedua tradisi wacana tersebut, Kumaravadivellu berupaya mebangun sebuah kerangka konseptual CCDA dan mempersembahkan prinsip-prinsip dan prosedur dasar yang membuat CCDA menjadi memungkinkan untuk dilaksanakan. Pada bagian akhir artikelnya, Kumaravadivelu membuat simpulan artikel yang dilengkapi dengan saran-saran untuk pengembangan CCDA selanjutnya.
Kata kunci: Kumaravadivelu, CCDA, post-strukturalisme Foucauldian, post-kolonialisme Saidian, and Kelas B2
A. Introduction
This article is a survey of critical classroom discourse analysis (CCDA), a recent school of discourse analysis that concerns itself with relations of power and inequality in language. CCDA explicitly intends to incorporate educational-theoretical insights into discourse analysis and advocates educational commitment and interventionism in research. Another section reviews the genesis and disciplinary growth of CCDA, mentions some of the recent critical reactions to it, and situates it within the wider picture of a new critical paradigm developing in a number of language-oriented (sub) disciplines. In this critical paradigm, topics such as, inequality, and power figure prominently, and many scholars productively attempt to incorporate educational-theoretical insights into the study of language classroom interaction.
Kumaravadivelu describes in his article that the purpose of his article is to conceptualize a framework for conducting critical classroom discourse analysis (CCDA). He begins with a critique of the scope and method of current models of classroom interaction analysis and classroom discourse analysis, arguing that they offer only a limited and limiting perspective on classroom discourse. He then contend that the concept of discourse enunciated in Foucauldian poststructuralism and Saidian postcolonialism can be employed to develop a critical framework for understanding what actually transpires in the L2 classroom. Drawing insights from these two discourse traditions, he attempt to construct a conceptual framework for CCDA and present basic principles and procedures that might make CCDA possible. Kumaravadivelu stated in his journal that the concept of discourse and the practice of discourse analysis as delineated by classroom discourse analysts marked a notable departure from the behavioristic approach associated with the earlier interaction approach. Thus, within the confines of their stated research agenda, classroom discourse analysts were able to achieve what they set out to achieve, that is, the explication of contingent relationships reflected in the textual cohesion and discourse coherence created by discourse participants during the course of their classroom interaction. He also touches upon appropriate analytical tools that might be fruitfully employed in critical classroom discourse analysis (CCDA) and suggest new directions for further exploration that the approach might open up. To achieve his goals, he derives insights from the concepts of discourse associated with two major schools of thought in cultural studies: Foucauldian poststructuralism and Saidian postcolonialism. For reasons of brevity and clarity, he formulates his discussion under the concepts of discourse rubric of classroom interaction analysis, classroom discourse analysis, critical perspectives on discourse, and CCDA. He conclude the article with suggestions for further exploration that CCDA might open up.
B. Getting Started
Kumaravadivelu started his remakable article with an observation of classroom interaction in a program of advanced international students class. Kumaravadivelu emphasized that "classrooms are decontextualised from the learners' point of view when the learners' feelings, their beliefs about what is important, their reasoning and their experience are not part of the assumed context of the teacher's communication" (Young, 1992:59).
C. Classroom Interaction Analysis
Classroom interaction analysis involves the use of an observation scheme consisting of a finite set of preselected and predetermined categories for describing certain verbal behaviors of teachers and students as they interact in the classroom. The oldest and the best known scheme in the field of general education: the Flanders Interaction Analysis Categories, proposed by Flanders in 1970. The scheme all share four crucial limitations: (a) They focus exclusively on the product of verbal behaviors of teachers and learners and give little or no consideration to classroom processes or to learning outcomes; (b) they depend on quantitative measurements, thereby losing the essence of communicative intent that cannot be reduced to numerical codification; (c) they are unidirectional, that is, the information flow is generally from the observer to the teacher, the observer being a supervisor in the case of practicing teachers or a teacher educator in the case of teacher trainees; and (d) they are unidimensional, that is, the basis of observation is largely confined to one single perspective, that of the observer, thus emphasizing the observer’s perception of observable teacher behavior. Kumaravadivelu then insert an important development of classroom interaction proposed by Allen, Frohlich, and Spada (1984) that is Communicative Orientation Language Teaching (COLT) observation scheme.
D. Classroom Discourse Analysis
In term of classroom discourse analysis, Kumaravadivelu adds a discourse analytical approach by Allwright (1980) and Mehan's (1979) ethnomethodological work in general education convinced Allwright (1988:171) that "whatever happened in the classroom was indeed a co-production, and therefore that it no longer made sense to look at classroom interaction as if it was only the teacher's behaviour that mattered. Allwright's (1980) emphasis on ethnography finds a strong echo in the work of van Lier (1988), who very effectively uses ethnographic means to understand classroom aims and events. The interpretive nature of classroom discourse analysis advocated by Allwright (1980) and van Lier (1988) also entails an analysis of multiple perspectives-the teacher's, the learner's, and the observer's (research-er's)-on classroom discourse (Kumaravadivelu, 1991, 1993). In the 1993 study, Kumaravadivelu demonstrate how classroom discourse analysis can facilitate an under-standing of the degree to which classroom participants are able or unable to create and utilize learning opportunities in class. He also provide guidelines for helping practicing teachers explore their own classrooms so that they can self-observe, self-analyze, and self-evaluate learning and teaching acts and thus, ultimately, develop the capacity to theorize from practice and practice what they theorize. The context of discourse and the discourse of context are a common thread that runs through the discourse analytical studies, thus, to use a distinction made by Widdowson (1979), discourse analysts are mainly concerned with textual cohesion, which operates in the surface-level lexis and grammar, and discoursec oherence, which operates between underlying speech acts. The emphasis on social context has helped classroom discourse analysts look at the classroom event as a social event and the classroom as a minisociety with its own rules and regulations, routines, and rituals. Their focus is the experience of teachers and learners within this minisociety. Such experience, as Breen (1985:140) writes, "is two-dimensional: individual-subjective experience and collective-intersubjective experience. The subjective experience of teacher and learners in a classroom is woven with personal purposes, attitudes, and preferred ways of doing things. The intersubjective experience derives from and maintains teacher and learner-shared definitions, conventions, and procedure which enable a working together in a crowd". Classroom discourse that embodies such a two-dimensional experience "is a central part of this social context, in other words the verbal interaction shapes the context and is shaped by it" (van Lier, 1988:47).
E. Discourse and Postcolonialism
Cultural theorist Said's (1978) Orientalism/postcolonialism was the first account to offer a comprehensive theoretical framework for postcolonial discourse analysis. Said (1978:3) used the term Orientalism to refer to the discursive field constituted by Western representations of the other. Orientalism is a systematically constructed discourse by which the West "was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively". The relationship between poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and feminism and pointing to the wide acceptance of such totalizing, monolithic constructs such as Third World or Third-World woman, Spivak (1988) suggests that the colonial construction of knowledge has become the only reality that now constitutes both the colonizer and the colonized and the only currency that is usable both in the West and in the East. Nationalism is a derivative discourse has succeeded in replacing colonialism with neocolonialism. Although Spivak (1985a) sympathizes with attempts to recover the subaltern voice, she sees difficulties and contradictions in constructing a speaking position for the subaltern.
F. Educational Applications Of Poststructuralism And Postcolonialism
Educational applications of poststructuralism and postcolonialism of the Foucauldian and Saidian concept of discourse have enormously influenced thought and action in several academic circles, three of which bear direct relevance to applied linguistics and TESOL: critical linguistics, critical pedagogy, and feminist pedagogy. Feminist pedagogists such as Lather (1991), Luke (1992), and Ellsworth (1992), agree with critical pedagogists that the classroom is one of the powerful ideological sites within which counterhegemonic discourses and practices can be organized. They contend, however, that discourse analysis should be concerned with the deconstruction of the political, social, psychological, and historical formations of gendered discourse because all discourse production is gendered.
G. Critical Classroom Discourse Analysis
For critical classroom discourse analysis, Kumaravadivelu states that the poststructural and postcolonial discourse perspectives that CCDA should be conceptualized as transformative function. Classroom interaction is the normative and the informative function. CCDA, with its transformative function, seeks to play a reflective role, enabling practicing teachers to reflect on and cope with sociocultural and sociopolitical structures that directly or indirectly shape the character and content of classroom discourse. It also equip them with the knoledge and skill necessary to conduct their own CCDA, thus directing them away from knowledge transmission and towards knowledge generation, away from pedagogic dependence and towards pedagogic independen.
Conducting CCDA, Kamaravadivelu suggests to use qualitative technique in characterizing the research as micriethnography based. Because it seeks to deconstruct dominant discourses as well as counterdiscourses by posing questions at the boundaries of ideology, power, knowledge, class, race, and gender. As McLaren (1995:281) states, the task facing critical ethnographers "is not to render knowledge as something ultimately to be discovered, but rather as social texts that are relationally produced in a multiplicity of mutually informing contexts". In that sense, critical ethnography is what real ethnographic research should be: "not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning" (Geertz, 1973:5). Critical ethnography involves the gathering of spoken and written, audio and video data from multiple sources, including interactional episodes, participant observation, and interviews and discussions with participants at different levels and at different times. It also involves thick description and thick explanation.
H. Conclusion
The conclusion of Kumaravadivelu’s article is it presents an overview that teachers need to develop their skill in conducting CCDA in particularly their necessary knowledge of how is CCDA conducted. Conducting CCDA requires the skill to analyze the interaction in the classroom. Classroom is the place where CCDA taken place, is socially consturcted, politically motivated, historically determined, gender racialized, minisociety, that describe an ethnographical drama which is inside that there are social inequality, power strugle, and also power inequality.
I. References
Allen, J. P. B., Frohlich, M., & Spada, N. (1984). The communicative orientation of language teaching: An observation scheme. In J. Handscombe, R. A. Orem, & B. P. Taylor (Eds.), On TESOL '83: The question of control. Washington, DC: TESOL.
Allwright, R. L. 1980. Turns, topics, and tasks: Patterns of participation in language learning and teaching. In D. Larsen-Freeman (Ed.), Discourse analysis in second language research. Rowley, MA: Newbury House
Allwright, D. 1988. Observation in the language classroom. London: Longman.
Breen, M. P. (1985). The social context for language learning-a neglected situation? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 7, 135-158.
Canagarajah, A.S. 1997. Safe House in the Contact Zone: Coping Strategies of African-Ameican students in the Academy. College Composition and Communication, 48, 173-196
Flanders, N. 1970. Analysisng Teaching Behaviour. Reading MA: Addison – Wesley.
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Kumaravadivelu, B. 1999. Critical Classroom Discourse Analysis. San Jose University. TESOL Quarterly Vol.33, No.3
Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons: Social organization in the classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pennycook, A. 1998. English and the Discourses of Colonialism. London: Routledge.
Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Spivak, G. 1985a. Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculation on Widow-sacrifice. Wedge, 7, 120-130.
Spivak, G. 1985b. Three Women’s Texts and a critique of Imperialism. Critical Inquiry, 12, 243-261
van Lier, L. 1988. The Classroom And The Language Learner. London: Longman.
Widdowson, HG. 1979. Exploration in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Young, R. Critical Theory and Classroom Talk. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
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