Discourse and Education

Abstract

Discourse analysis is a research method that provides systematic evidence about social processes through the detailed examination of speech, writing, and other sign use. In a recernt book (Wortham and Reyes 2015) and in this chapter, we argue that educational research on processes that occur across events -- such as learning, socialization, and identity formation -- can benefit from cross-event discourse analysis. This chapter outlines a linguistic anthropological method for doing discourse analysis both within and across events, showing how to study the pathways that linguistic forms, utterances, cultural models, individuals, and groups travel across linked events.