The discursive construction of a family literacy, language and numeracy programme: an exploration of practitioners' narratives-in-interaction

Chilton, Elizabeth Helen (2012). The discursive construction of a family literacy, language and numeracy programme: an exploration of practitioners' narratives-in-interaction. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

Preview

Chilton_12_PhD.pdf
PDF
Download (931kB)

Abstract

This study examines the discursive practices of two Family Literacy, Language and Numeracy practitioners teaching a family literacy programme together. Drawing on positioning analysis and linguistic ethnography, I am exploring how the practitioners use narratives-in-interaction to position themselves, each other, the parents with whom they work, and the programme on which they teach.

This research reveals how both dominant and locally constructed discourses are invoked, reworked and embedded within the practitioners’ narrative allusions, with such discourses often becoming naturalised through their repeated citation. Analyses of the interactional and lexical content of narratives-in-interaction facilitate this study’s twin-focus on the social identification of the narrated, and the narrators’ emergent identity construction. Investigating the discourses that circulate about parents uncovers how the telling of narratives not only impacts on the ways in which the parents are socially identified in discursive terms, but suggests that this may affect how the parents are dealt with in more practical ways by the practitioners. Through the sharing and co-construction of small stories, the practitioners make claims in relation to their own identities, particularly in terms of their working relationship with one another and the roles they undertake in concert and in counterpoint to each other.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):