Gee Units 3 & 4

Unit 3: Building Things in the World

Speaking reflects context and context reflects (is shaped by) speaking (what was said). (85)

I loved the discussion of the chicken and egg scenario in terms of context and language.  ‘When we speak we build and design what we have to say to fit the context in which we are communicating.  But, at the same time, how we speak—what we say and how we say it—helps create that very context. usage to a context that our language, in turn, helps to create context in the first place (84).’  It is true.  Gee later goes onto discuss identity and how we choose our identity based on the context that we are in.  In response to the readings, I thought about the identities that have for myself…mother, wife, dog owner, home owner, Jeep driver, vegetarian, Democrat, Southern Baptist, Tennessean, Southerner, teacher, ESL teacher, Spanish learner, student, divorcee, orphan, rap fan…to name a few.  So many of those identities have specific characteristics of language that are specific to those individual identities.  Things I would talk about or ways that I would talk about them in one context I would never talk about in another.  Others seem more fluid or cohesive. ‘We build an identity here and now as we speak.  We act out different identities in our lives in different contexts.  Each of these identities can influence the others when any one of them is being performed (106).‘

‘I will call this identity our “live word identity”.  The life world is all those contexts in which we speak and act as everyday people (107).’  Something that I wondered about here that doesn’t really fit or wasn’t something that I read about here concerned what I am referring to ‘portrayed’ vs. ‘perceived’ identities.  I am sure that somewhere there is a label that I am missing, but I think you will understand what I am getting at.  There is a professor here at UT (not you) that portrays him or herself as wanting to have a classroom community.  This person consistently talks about the openness and low risk environments that he or she is working to establish in their classrooms.  However, actions do not match this person’s words.  As time passes, this is increasingly the case.  In research, how much of that is presented in your study if identity isn’t the focus of your study?  If I were looking at classroom discourse, would this be something that I was concerned with since it is one of the seven areas of reality?  Is there a label for these identities that I am missing?

“Face” is the sense of worth or dignity each of us has and wants to be honored by others in society.  Face is something that can be lost, maintained, or enhanced (119).’  There are a ton of examples that I could give for this, but I related this concept/issue to an occurrence in my life that I am ashamed of on some level.  A few summers back, my husband and I had a yard sale in which another ESL teacher came.  Based on things that I had put in the yard sale, she initiated a discussion on teaching and we learned that we were both ESL teachers.  We had a great conversation and shared contact information.  A few short weeks later, our new ‘relationship’ was challenged. 

‘Making a request of someone can be “face threatening,” that is, seen as an imposition or a form of over-involvement (119).’  I came home from work and there was an older car parked in my driveway.  I was terrified.  I wouldn’t go into my house for fear there was an intruder.  I called my husband and while I was waiting on him, a man pulled up in another car and started to explain to me that his wife was an ESL teacher.  I cut him off and ordered him to get both vehicles off of my property immediately.  I went inside and locked it up tight.  My house wasn’t a junkyard or car repair store.  The man moved his car and rolled the other car into the subdivision road.  When my husband came home, he talked to the man and learned that he was the wife of the teacher that had come to our yard sale.  She was having trouble with her car and thought our house would be a safe place to park it until he could work on it that evening after work.  What those people didn’t know was that our house had been broken into and the people who did it drove a very similar car to the one that belonged to the wife.  Our relationship experienced a ‘face threatening’ situation because she exhibited what I felt like was an imposition.  Now, every time that I see her at a conference, I run in the opposite direction.

I had one of those random moments when I felt smart in the reading.  In this unit, started thinking about the view of bilingual education as a pro or con based on the person’s perspective of its use.  For TPTE 617, I looked at bilingual education and found two distinct views on language learning.  If the researchers were talking about Spanish instruction to supplement home language, the support wasn’t there.  If the researchers were talking about Spanish instruction for mainstream classroom students to teach a second language, there was much support for Spanish instruction.  As Gee put it, ‘We humans contest the value of different languages and other sorts of sign systems.  We context, as well, different ways of knowing the world…We can build privilege or prestige for one sign system over others (136).’  Later, he used the example of Arizona’s Proposition 203 mandating English-only instruction (141).  I was simply excited that I was on the same line of thinking as Gee.

Gee Unit 4

I know that we are supposed to read this with an invested interest in how it will help us with our data analysis, which I did.  A lot of the reading that I have been doing for my mini-literature review had ties to the five theoretical frameworks that Unit 4 opened with, such as situated meanings and figured worlds. However, I mentioned in my blog post for last week that I found this reading relevant for ESL teachers either at the onset of their careers or as a refresher to grammar elements.  This section also seemed to tie to the current state of education form, especially in regards to TN’s interpretation of CCSS and Knox County School System’s recent implantation of the standards in the middle school grades.  The interpretation and plan has been for teachers to avoid working with students on building prior knowledge in their reading of texts or using what they know about a subject to interpret a text.  Instead, everything is supposed to be text-based.  The problem with this view is connected to an element expressed by Gee:

What is in our heads is probably a combination of the following things:  images or prototypes of what is typical of the things the word refers to; information and facts we know about; and typical uses of the word and the typical range of contexts in which the word is normally used (151).

This is in relation to the idea of situated meanings.  As humans, we bring with us knowledge that influences what we understand or how we interpret things.  We cannot help it.  It is who we are.  It ties back to an earlier concept that we discussed in our readings about the view of a word or concept in terms of a net.  On the basic or initial level, you have a word and it has a dictionary meaning.  With every step or move away from that, the meaning changes based on other connected elements.  So the context changes our understanding of the word. I think the example that was given was the word ‘dog’.  There is a dictionary definition of what a dog is that guides understanding of what the speaker means by the word ‘dog’ in an interaction.  Based on my past experiences with dogs, I create a different picture in my mind of what is meant by the word ‘dog’.  If I have had a positive experience with a ‘dog’ or owned ‘dogs’, the meaning that is attached to that word.  If I have had a negative experiences with a ‘dog’ or haven’t never had previous experiences with ‘dogs’, my interpretation of the concept/word ‘dog’ will be different than others.

Another example from this reading that I tie to my experience as an ESL teacher comes from the section 4.10 The Big D Discourse Tool:

Children acquire a secondary Discourse when they go to school that involves the identity of being a student of a certain kind and using certain kinds of “school language.”  This identity and these forms of language can, at points, conflict with the identities, values, and ways with words some children have learned at home as part of their primary Discourse.  For other children there is a much better fit or match (180).

The text gave the example of Native Americans experience transitioning between the home-school environments. According to Gee, these children have been taught at home to respect authority figures and teachers are authority figures.  It is hard for the children to participate/speak out in the classroom setting, which can go against the expectations or needs of the school setting.  This has come up in my classroom as well.  I am used to working predominantly with Hispanic students from only a handful of Central American countries. These students typically are very collaborative in nature and construct their understanding of classroom instruction by working with the teacher and their peers.  However, I have also worked with students who come from African and Asian countries and their participation resembles that which was described for the Native Americans only for different reasons. These students have been taught that women are lesser and that they don’t have to acknowledge them.  It takes a lot of time to help the students overcome this bias and fully participate in the classroom setting.  I can really understand the importance of identity in these examples and how important context is in understanding participant perspectives. 

Reading Notes…

Gee Unit 4.1 Five Theoretical Tools

1. Theory from Cognitive Psychology:  “situated meanings”-humans actively build meanings “on line” when we use language in specific contexts

2. Theory from Sociolinguistics: about how different styles or varieties of using language work to allow humans to carry out different types of social work and enact differently socially situated identities; social language-any language is composed of a great many different social languages where each is connected to meanings and activities associated with particular social and cultural groups

3. Theories from Literary Criticism: “intertextuality”-when anyone speaks or writes they often make reference to what other people or various texts or media have said or meant; they may quote or just allude to what others have said, which means one “text” refers to or points to another “text”

4. Theory from Psychological Anthropology: about how humans form and use theories to give language meaning and understand each other and the world; notion of “figured words”, which are narratives and images that different social and cultural groups of people use to make sense of the world

5. Theories from Various Areas: about how meaning goes well beyond human minds and language to involve objects tools, technologies, and networks people collaborating with each other (150)

Gee Unit 4.2 The Situated Meaning Tool

Any word or structure in language has a certain “meaning potential”, that is, a range of possible meanings that the word or structure can take on in different contexts of use (151)

No one knows exactly how definitions work in our heads (151).

In actual situations of use words and structures take on much more specific meanings within the range of their meaning potentials.  This is what I will call “situated meanings” (152).

People must in context actively “make up” (guess) the meanings of the words and phrases they hear.  Often this is fairly routine, since they have shared meanings like this before.  But sometimes they must do more work and actively seek to ask what people must mean here and now, if they have said what they said in the context in which they have said it (152-153).

Meaning-making is not a “look up” process.  It is an active process (153).

All utterances make assumptions about people’s previous experiences and knowledge.  They assume certain experiences and knowledge in order to be understood (153-154).

Gee Unit 4.3 Working with the Situated Meaning Tool

The Situated Meaning Tool tells us to ask what words and phrases mean in specific contexts (154).

Gee Unit 4.4 The Social Languages Tool

People do not speak any language “in general”.  They always speak a specific variety of a language and they use different varieties in different contexts (156)

To understand what a speaker says, a listener needs to know who is speaking.  But it is not enough to know, for example, that Mary Smith is the speaker.  I need to know what identity Mary is speaking (156).

Social languages are what we learn and what we speak (156).

To know a particular social language is either to be able to “do” a particular identity or to be able to recognize such an identity when we do not want to or cannot actively participate (156).

Gee Unit 4.8 The Figured Worlds Tool

What counts as a typical story for people differs by their social and culture groups (169).

A figured world is a picture of a simplified world that captures what is taken to be typical or normal.  What is taken to be typical or normal, as we have said, varies by context and by people’s social and cultural group (170). 

Gee Unit 4.9 Working with the Figured Worlds Tool

We all have a myriad of such figured worlds.  We all use them so that we do not have to consciously to think about everything before we talk and act.  The best way to get at what figured worlds a speaker is assuming in a given context is to ask the following question:  What must this speaker assume about the world—take to be typical or normal—in order to have spoken this way to have said these things in the way they were said?  Often interviewing people is a good way to uncover figured worlds (173).

Gee Unit 4.10 The Big “D” Discourse Tool

People talk and act not just as individuals, but as members of various sorts of social and cultural groups.  We do not invent our language, we inherit it from others.  We understand each other because we share conventions about how to use and interpret language (176). 

When we enact an identity in the world, we do not just use language all by itself to do this.  We use language, but we also use distinctive ways of acting, interacting with others, believing valuing dressing and using various sorts of objects and tools in various sorts of distinctive environments (177).

The whole points of talking about Discourses is to focus on the fact that when people mean things to each other, there is always more than language at stake.  To mean anything to someone else (or even to myself), I have to communicate who I am. I also have to communicate what I am doing in terms of what socially situated activity I am seeking to carry out, since Discourses exist in part to allow people to carry out certain distinctive activities (178).

Gee Conclusion

Validity is never “once and for all.”  All analyses are open to further discussion and dispute, and their status can go up or down with time as work goes on in the field.  Validity for discourse analysis is based on the following four elements:

1. Convergence

2. Agreement

3. Coverage

4. Linguistic Details (185-186)