Analyzing Classroom Discourse
Tuesday, November 3rd
11:00am-12:00pm
Hosted by Dr. Sofía Chaparro
In this seminar, I will demonstrate the analysis of classroom discourse in order to answer the question, how do children from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds interact with one another within a bilingual classroom? As part of an ethnographic discourse-analytic study of a bilingual Two-Way Immersion program, I analyze one literacy event among three young readers from different linguistic and ethnoracial backgrounds and varying knowledge of Spanish and school literacy. This literacy event illustrates how students expand their communicative repertoires to include a variety of Englishes and Spanishes as they experiment with different ways of communicating and expressing themselves. Furthermore, it illustrates how students orient to one another as they take on various roles and identities during interaction. Participants will gain an understanding of various approaches to the analysis of classroom discourse and will see one particular approach in action. Presentation will be followed by Q&A.
Sofía E. Chaparro is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she teaches in the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education program at the School of Education and Human Development. Her research investigates how race and class influence ideologies of language development and bilingualism, as well as the rise of two-way immersion bilingual programs in urban contexts. She obtained her PhD in Educational Linguistics from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. A former bilingual teacher, she is originally from the border between the United States and Mexico, from the west Texas town of El Paso.