Analysing cultural models in socio-cultural discourse analysis

This paper illustrates how classroom discourse demands a multi-layered analysis. The first analysis focuses on classroom discourse and provides a picture of pupil participation in teacher–pupil interactions: who is inducted into discourse and who is not. However, this local micro-analysis does not afford interpretation at the level of the teachers’ intentions, and hence of the way that ideology (e.g. of social class, gender and policy) is mediated by the discourse. Thus, interview data, inter alia, is used to develop themes such as ‘time pressure’, which can then be applied to a second interpretation of the discourse. A final layer of analysis establishes the extent to which such themes can be defined in terms of ‘cultural models’ which are aligned/disaligned with policy and institutional discourses. Thus, the paper illustrates how dialogue can be situated within a socio-cultural framework in which macro-concepts enter the data through discussion of the teacher's intentions.