Love, Kristina
The University of Melbourne

Kristina Love
Faculty of Education
The University of Melbourne
Parkville
Victoria 3052
Australia

k.love@edfac.unimelb.edu.au

Strand: discourse (English)

Title: Phases and Functions: the 'shape' of classroom literary response

This paper will examine how the beliefs of teachers who hold different theories about the nature of Literary Response are manifest in different discourse practices in secondary English classrooms. Transcripts will be examined of two different year 10 English classes as they negotiate the meanings of selected readings in oral discussion. In terms of the staging of each curriculum cycle, a genre analysis after Christie (1994) will indicate what the distinctive 'shape' of each discourse is. Then a phasal analysis after Gregory (1981, 1984) and Young (1994), will identify how distinctive linguistic selections made at a local level contribute functionally to the shape of the overall text which is the whole class discussion. Such phasal analysis will be demonstrated at a primary, secondary and tertiary level of delicacy in order to indicate how the ideology of the teacher is manifest in the linguistic selections.