Teacher scaffolding in SEN classrooms: insights from corpus methods
Gill Smith
CASS, Lancaster University
This research applies a corpus-based method to the study of teaching (and specifically teacher scaffolding) in SEN classrooms, thus enabling the exploitation of a larger and therefore more representative sample of language used than previous research in this field. In particular, this talk shall focus upon the use of directives. Directives are utterances which function to elicit some kind of action or response on behalf of the listener. I shall being by outlining the scaffolding literature's definition of directives, making distinctions between verbal and physical action directives. However, these definitions of directives are often extremely ill-defined from a linguistic perspective. Thus, in order to define corpus queries, the next step is to move from these vague descriptions to grammatically sound definitions of linguistic forms. This process was informed by the grammars of Biber et al. (1999) and Quirk et al. (1987), where links were made between directive forms and imperative sentence structures. The next step is to translate these grammatical definitions into corpus queries. In the case of the directives feature, this was done by translating the grammatical forms into a multiword regular expression query appropriate for CWB/CQPweb. For example, the linguistic structure of verbal directives was translated to the following CQP syntax: [pos="V.*0" & semtag="Q2.*"] These queries were created through a trial and error process, and were successful to varying degrees, which shall be explained throughout this talk. The final stage is to apply these queries to the SEN corpus to look at the use of directives in SEN classroom interactions. This is a two-step analysis: first looking at the frequency and linguistic structure of different teacher directives and then looking in depth at pupil responses to these directives. We can use these findings to make inferences about teacher-pupil interactions in SEN classrooms and the significant role teacher directives play in this, which I shall explore in more depth throughout this UCREL talk.