Dialogicality in university classroom talk

University classroom talk is a collaborative struggle to make meaning. Taking the perspectival nature of interaction as central, this paper presents an investigation of the genre of spoken academic discourse and in particular the types of activities which are orientated to the goal of collaborative ideas or tasks, such as seminars, tutorials, workshops. The purpose of the investigation was to identify examples of dialogicality through an examination of stance-taking. The data used in this study is a spoken corpus of academic English created from recordings of a range of subject discipline classrooms at a UK university. A frequency-based approach to recurrent word sequences (lexical bundles) was used to identify signals of epistemic and attitudinal stance and to initiate an exploration of the features of elaboration. Findings of quantitative and qualitative analyses reveal some similarities and differences between this study and those of US based classroom contexts in relation to the use and frequency of lexical bundles. Findings also highlight the process that elaboration plays in grounding perspectives and negotiating alignment of interactants. Elaboration seems to afford the space for the enactment of student stance in relation to the tutor embodiment of discipline knowledge.

UNITALK: a corpus of university classroom talk

This is a dataset of recordings and transcriptions of spoken English collected from a range of university classrooms. UNITALK is a modest-sized untagged synchronic specialized full-text corpus of spoken academic discourse collected from fifteen university classrooms. UNITALK was designed to study the genre of small group teaching contexts across academic divisions and subject disciplines and specifically designed to study those teaching events whose goal is to work on collaborative ideas or tasks. The corpus is over 100,000 words and can be used to investigate academic language use and small group university teaching and learning contexts.

'You' and 'I' in university seminars and spoken learner discourse

You and I may be little words but they do a great deal. In spoken discourse they reference shared knowledge and mark stance. In pedagogical contexts, they maintain relations in teacher-student discourse. However, language classrooms may rarely explore this array of pragmatic meanings. A lack of awareness of the variety of these functions may be problematic for learners when seeking to construct interpersonal relations and operate successfully in particular spoken contexts. This paper presents a study of you and I in two spoken corpora: a corpus of English language learner task talk and a corpus of university seminar talk. Findings illustrate different patterns of I and you between the two corpora: I and you have a higher rate of occurrence in learner discourse, and pronoun repetition is more frequent in learner discourse, though it does not account for the higher rate of you and I. These findings suggest that language learner task talk displays more features tied to speech production and self-regulation and fewer features associated with attempting to point to the informational space of others, a key feature of university classroom talk. This paper concludes by outlining pedagogical applications to overcome features perceived as disfluent.

Research Protocol: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Functional Family Therapy: An Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) Partnership between Croydon Council and Queen's University Belfast

The paper presents a protocol for ‘A Randomized Controlled Trial of Functional Family Therapy (FFT): An Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) Partnership between Croydon Council and Queen's University Belfast’. The protocol describes a trial that uses FFT as an alternative intervention to current use of the youth justice system and local authority care with the aim of reducing crime/recidivism in young people referred to Croydon Council. The trial will take place over a period of 36 months and will involve up to 154 families. Croydon Council will employ a team of five Functional Family Therapists who will work with families to promote effective outcomes. The Centre for Effective Education at Queen’s University Belfast will act as independent evaluators of outcomes for families and young people. The work is supported from the United Kingdom Economic & Social Research Council/Early Intervention Foundation Grant Number ES/M006921/1.