Using legimation code theory to track pedagogic practice in a South African English home language poetry lesson

Abstract

This paper utilises two dimensions of Legitimation Code Theory, Specialisation and Semantics, to describe and analyse aspects of the poetry pedagogy of a South African home language subject English teacher. The Specialisation analysis illuminates how, while the lesson is oriented towards social relations in its focus on cultivating learners’ literary gaze, the teacher’s pedagogy exhibits varying emphases on epistemic relations and social relations in different phases of the lesson. These concepts facilitate more precise description of the pedagogy, which assists in clarifying and explicating the nature of the pedagogy of a teacher working with a cultural heritage orientation to literary instruction. Analysis within the Semantic dimension enables the tracking of pulses of shifts in abstraction and particularity through the lesson. This highlights the ways in which the teacher moves between more and less abstract and concrete forms of knowledge, which implicitly models ideational networks required for higher levels of close textual analysis.