Using Cultural Categories in Language Classroom Discourse

초록

Lee, Yoan. 2010. Using cultural categories in language classroom discourse. Discourse and Cognition 17.2, 69-94. Culture is a constant companion in the language education curriculum; it is an important object of teaching while teaching itself can be considered cultural. The question is to what extent cultural phenomena can be described analytically from within the local contingency of classroom interaction; after all, it is through social interaction that we encounter, act on, and thus experience culture. In prior research, language classrooms are analyzed in reference to underlying cultural categories with particular focus on the nonnative identities of the students. This line of research, however, takes for granted the detailed ways in which the participants discover and act on cultural categories. Building on Harvey Sacks’ revolutionary work on membership categories (1972) in conversation analysis (CA), the present study argues that the parties to classroom interactions recognize and produce categories in their talk and their categorical works influence the discourse forms they use. Based on the transcribed talk exchange in college classrooms in USA and Korea, this paper offers an alternative way to examine how categories are used in classroom interaction and what forms of discourse are generated (Sogang University)

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