About "Classroom Discourse Analysis"

For teachers, teacher educators, and anyone interested in the insights to be gained from the analysis of talk in classrooms, this book makes discourse analysis accessible and encourages readers to investigate assumptions about what goes on in classrooms, what counts as knowledge, and how features of talk and interaction influence who gets to learn. Separate chapters illustrate the analysis of interactional resources such as turn taking, participation frameworks, narrative, and contextualization cues, modeling forms of discourse analysis teachers may practice in their own classrooms.

Advance Praise for Classroom Discourse Analysis

"With extraordinary ease, Betsy Rymes makes complex theoretical and methodological tools accessible to teachers while treating them as intellectuals and professionals. She provides an inviting "way in" to the wondrous world of language in use that will remind teachers who are facing unprecedented outside pressures why they became teachers in the first place."
– Joanne Larson, Michael W. Scandling Professor of Education, Margaret Warner Graduate School, University of Rochester

"For teachers who want to inquire into their practice in order to improve it, this book is both an incredible read and a beautifully written and inspiring guide to becoming a savvy, thoughtful discourse analyst. Ways to ask questions, to become aware of students' cultural and linguistic resources, and importantly, to study how inequality is produced and intentionally subverted — these and many other salient topics invite rich consideration by groups of teachers who want to see differently and to develop new and valuable knowledge from and about their day-to-day work."
– Susan Lytle, Penn GSE

"I have a confession to make. I have not used discourse analysis in my own work, and I haven't always valued it in the work of others. Sometimes I have felt that too much is lost — the big picture, the historical context, the full narrative, the critical lens — when writers focus on a brief moment in a lively, complex classroom. Betsy Rymes changed my mind. In each chapter she gave me the big picture by fully explaining the importance of both the interactional context and the larger social context, and showing how to bring those contexts to bear in discourse analysis."
– From the Foreword by JoBeth Allen, Professor, College of Education, University of Georgia

Publication Information
Hampton Press