Acquiring Discourse Competence
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P119-C6
2025-10-01
267
Acquiring Discourse Competence
James Gee's idea that discourses are acquired in natural settings and that discourse competence is realized socially through interaction also emerges in the last scene of Timothy Chiu's play, No Pain, No Gain. After his disappointing presentation performance in Mr. Kendall's class, Timothy began to practice English wherever he could. In the process, he tells the audience, he met a lot of new friends, with whom he could interact socially, and his ability improved to speak English in public.
Moving from the ethnographic fictional world of No Pain, No Gain to playwright Timothy Chiu's own world of schooling, one way that Chiu, himself, tried to "practice English wherever he could" was to join the 12-session summer playwriting workshop that was facilitated and videotaped by our research team. Through the discussion, reading, and reading activities undertaken in the workshop, Chiu was able to develop his English language, or, in Gee's terms, discourse skills through interaction with others.
What follows is another excerpt from the post-workshop interview Wing-Yee Chow undertook with Chiu. At the time of the post-workshop interview, Timothy was in his last year of high school and taking the last set of Ontario Academic Credit (OAC) courses, he needed to complete in order to gain admission to university.
Wing-Yee: Did you find that the workshop has had any impact on you since it ended, 7, 8 months ago?
Timothy: The whole, the whole workshop aimed to help us to improve public speaking skills. I feel that after I attended the workshop I regained some confidence ... Actually, today, I have brought something for you to see. This is my speech, English OAC. I am happy because I got 100%.
Wing-Yee: Wow!
Timothy: I used what I have learned from the play: Not to be afraid. That is, you know what you are talking about. You [need to] walk up, no matter how many people there are, even if there is a group of people, even if there are several hundred people. I think that the workshop has helped me in achieving the result this time.
Wing-Yee: How did the workshop help you? In providing opportunities to practice?
Timothy: Yes, [I] got the opportunities and I could explore, that is, I could talk about why we faced obstacles. [We] could discuss and realize that the classroom environment, the conversations between the teacher and student can also change the classroom performance. And [it was] very relaxed. Tara made us feel very comfortable. "It's okay, just say whatever you want to say." I find this pretty good. [Interview, April 7, 1999]
Using this interview excerpt to think about the ways the playwriting work-shop helped Timothy Chiu to develop the discourse competence that he needed to make more effective presentations, two things seem important. First, that fact that Timothy was actually given an opportunity to spend the month of July using English to write, read, and listen to others' ethnographic reflections, dialogues, and dramatic scenes was important ("Yes, [I] got the opportunities."). As well, because the workshop took place during the summer break, the participants had the opportunity to practice English outside a traditional school or classroom setting. Workshop designer and lead facilitator Victoria Shen responded to the students' work, but did not evaluate it by assigning it a mark or grade. The stakes associated with performing in English were lower than they were during the school year ("And [it was] very relaxed."). Because there were only 15 students enrolled in the work-shop (six spoke English as a primary language whereas nine were ESOL speakers), we sat on chairs in a circle where everyone could see each other's face. This arrangement helped us create an affirming audience of believing listeners for the ESOL speakers in the group.
The second thing that helped Timothy Chiu develop the discourse competence he needed was the opportunity to explore and talk about the obstacles ESOL presenters faced in multilingual classrooms. As can be discerned from Timothy's interview, some of the discussions we had in the workshop centered on issues of linguistic discrimination. Such discussions were deliberately pursued in the design and facilitation of the workshop curriculum. To illustrate, in a session on the theme of language and identity, Victoria handed out a chapter from Momoye Sugimon's book, Jin Guo: Voices of Chinese Canadian Women, entitled "How Come You Don't Have an Accent?"1 18 Chinese Canadian women talk about their personal experiences with issues of language and identity. Victoria randomly divided the workshop participants into small groups and gave each group a different question to answer about a particular excerpt from the chapter. When the participants finished their work, they returned to the circle they usually sat in and reported on their small group work to the others. Some of the issues that arose in this discussion included, "Are Chinese people who are bora in Canada less Chinese than those who are not?" (this was an issue Evelyn Yeung struggled with in chap. 5); choosing to live in Toronto's Chinatown and Little India rather than choosing to live in a mixed or English-speaking community; and the difficulty of speaking Spanish with an English accent and English with a Cantonese accent. The issue of accent discrimination was raised and discussed in a direct way, and it was this kind of talk about "why we face obstacles" that gave Timothy the story line for his play, No Pain, No Gain.
Performing the play, with the assistance of his playwriting colleagues, gave Timothy Chiu an opportunity to dramatize the obstacles he faced and imagine a way of moving forward. As well, his own performance in the role of Timothy allowed him to begin moving forward by providing him with an opportunity to practice speaking English in front of an affirming audience. Both of these opportunities helped Timothy acquire the discourse competence and confidence he needed to make more effective classroom presentations.
Re-creating the opportunities that were made available for Timothy Chiu in the play writing workshop is difficult for teachers who work with groups of 30 to 40 students rather than 15 and who also have the responsibility of grading their students' work. However, knowing what kinds of opportunities are helpful to students struggling to acquire the discourse competence associated with public speaking at school may help teachers think of ways that they might be able to create such opportunities for students in their own schools.
1 See Sugiman (1992).
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