1. Language & Discourse in Contemporary Education
2. Poststructuralist and Postmodern Discourse Theory
3. Educational Applications of Discourse Analysis
4. Critical Discourse Analysis
5. Conclusion
1. Language and Discourse in Contemporary Education
In a context of unprecedented educational expansion and population growth, postwar sociology of education focused urgently on issues around institutional structure, the production of skilled workers, and increased educational access and participation. By the 1960s, attempts to explain and redress educational inequality for minority and lower socioeconomic groups generated major debates in sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication. Much of that work focussed on language development and literacy acquisition as key factors in differential student achievement and the intergenerational reproduction of educational inequality. Debates over the role of social class- specific "speech codes", "linguistic deficits", the educational consequences of multilingualism, and the institutional status of non-standard English are still not fully resolved.
Some fifty years later, educators face the challenges of "new times" (Hall 1996): new cultural practices and media texts, hybrid cultural identities, emergent social formations and institutions, and changing structures of work and economy. In postindustrial and newly industrialising nation states, the rapidity and depth of many of these changes have drawn anew many sociologists' attention to language, texts and discourses. There is an increasing recognition that these now form the central media of community life, education and work.
Large-scale immigration and the emergence of multicultural, multilingual nation states have marked the postwar era. In urban and suburban areas, schools and educators are facing new student bodies and rapidly changing community demographic profiles. These new conditions have called into question the relevance and efficacy of longstanding administrative, curriculum, instructional and evaluation practices, many of which were developed in early and mid-century secular school systems designed for monocultural, homogenous nation-states. The recognition and enfranchisement of linguistic and cultural minority students has generated a host of practical issues around new dynamics of ethnic, cultural and gender difference in communities, families and institutional life, differential power in pedagogic relations in classrooms, and the knowledge and epistemological claims of historically disenfranchised groups over what should count as curriculum knowledge (see Apple 1996).
At the same time, the commodification of Western popular culture and the multinational globalisation of economies have changed the patterns and practices of work and leisure in many communities. In an emergent "postfordist" economic and sociological context, new industrial conditions and information technologies have begun to alter the requisites and parameters of what might count as educationally produced skilled labour. In service, information and media sectors of the economy, the exchange of symbols, discourses and texts have become key modes of value and exchange. Current definitions of educationally produced skills, competences and knowledges appear to be in transition, with the emergent requisites of new technologies and reorganised labour practices and markets making new demands on academic and vocational education. In response, research and theory in many areas of the social sciences and applied human services have shifted from a focus on traditional labour markets to an analysis of the economic and cultural consequences of new modes of information.
These conditions raise questions about the relevance and value of the structures and practices of early and mid-twentieth century schooling. These include questions about apparent disjunctions between community and school cultures; the appropriateness of curricular, instructional models for new student populations; and the practical requirements and challenges of new workplaces and civic spheres where these students live and work. However, many prevailing social and cultural theories of education and their affiliated practices are based on historical critiques of the industrial-era school and work, and sociological analyses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century monocultural, monolingual nation state. The move towards discourse analytic approaches to education thus begins from the assumption that many of these challenges can only be addressed by a focus on how language, discourse and text figure in educational processes, practices and outcomes (New London Group 1996).
2. Poststructuralist and Postmodern Discourse Theory
The development of the "new" sociology of education in the early 1970s was a key moment in the application of Western social philosophy and sociology to educational theory and problems. Phenomenological, symbolic interactionist and neomarxian approaches to the study of identity, knowledge and institutional change in turn led to the development and application of various interpretive methods in educational research. These include action research, literary analysis, revisionist historiography and critical ethnography. Yet these various approaches are often conflated, erroneously, with later poststructuralist and postmodern social theory under the general category of "critical theory".
By this account, social institutions such as schools and universities are comprised by and through discourses. Discourses make up a dense fabric of spoken, written and symbolic texts of institutional bureaucracies (e.g., policies, curriculum documents, forms) and their ubiquitous face-to-face encounters (e.g., classroom interaction, informal talk). Within these institutions, human subjects are defined and constructed both in generic categories (e.g., as "children" and "teachers") and in more specialised and purposive historical categories (e.g., as "professionals", "adolescents", "linguistic deficit", "preoperational"). These discourse constructions act both as institutional "technologies of power", implemented and enforced by official authorisation, and they act as "technologies of the self" (Foucault 1980), internalised means for the self-discipline of action, practice and identity. According to Foucault, these technologies potentially have both productive and negative material, bodily and spatial consequences for human subjects and communities.
While Foucault's work shifts our attention to the regulatory nature of discourses, Derrida questioned whether any cultural texts can have intrinsic authority or canonical status as accounts of `truths' about the phenomenal world. That is, Derrida's approach to philosophic and literary "deconstruction" queries whether definitive or authoritative interpretations are possible in the first place. All texts are comprised by a dynamic play of "differance" which necessarily renders them polysemous: multiple and potentially quite idiosyncratic meanings can be generated by readers in particular social contexts. Each text's distinctive features and differences thus are reconstructed and reconstituted into distinctive "readings" in "local institutional sites" (Baker and Luke 1991).
Poststructuralist work thus forms a critique of ontology and epistemology in empirical approaches to social science. It makes the case that: (a) all inquiry is by definition a form of discourse analysis; and (b) all research consists of a `reading' and `rewriting' of a series of texts from a particular historical and epistemological standpoint. In so doing, it provides a radically different perspective on students and teachers, policy and curriculum, schools and classrooms. If we accept its premises, then an appropriate focus of sociological studies would be on how the texts of schooling construct such taken for granted phenomena as individuals, skills, knowledges and institutions. At the same time, it raises significant methodological questions about the status of data and the epistemological standpoint of the educational researcher. Given the primacy of discourse, the social facts studied by sociologists are constructed artefacts of researchers' own discourses and `namings', and any data collected in the field needs to be treated as a `readable' text, subject to interpretation.
This theoretical shift has the potential for destabilising dominant paradigms and theories. Prevailing models of educational research and practice comprise what Lyotard (1984) has called "grand narratives": stories about human progress and scientific development that prescribe, rather than describe in any empirical sense, what will count as individual and institutional development. Consequently, the very foundational theories that have been used to study the child, education, curriculum and instruction, may be viewed as discourses, taken-for-granted `truths' that "systematically form the objects about which they speak" (Foucault 1972 p. 49). Following a postmodern radical scepticism towards "metanarratives", no disciplinary or commonsense source of "truth claims" would be exempt.
Poststructuralist theory thereby encourages a counter-ontological critique of those broad theories of human development, social agency and social structure that have been used in the last century to analyse and develop educational interventions. In this way, it enables a self-reflexive critique of the modernist and industrial-era administrative and curricular models mentioned at the onset of this article. At the same time, it encourages the further development of experimental, interpretive modes of inquiry to examine new educational phenomena.
The insight of philosophic poststructuralism, then, is that there is no educational truth, practice or phenomena that can be studied outside of discourse. By such an account, educational institutions could be seen as complex sites constructed by and through discourses expressed in various texts: from policy statements and textbooks to face-to-face talk in classrooms. These texts are seen as "heteroglossic" articulations of various historical, class and cultural interests contending for social power and capital. The question of how to collect, read and interpret these texts and how to analyse and situate their "symbolic power" is complex. It requires the study of the diverse "linguistic markets" and "social fields" where educationally acquired competence is used. For while poststructuralism provides a wide-ranging epistemological critique of how discourse works, Foucault and Derrida assiduously avoided offering more than broad theoretical directions for the study of discourse in specific local institutions.
3. Educational Applications of Discourse Analysis
As noted at the onset of this article, the heralded "linguistic turn" in the social sciences had a significant impact on educational research in the postwar era. Discourse analysis describes an interdisciplinary family of methodologies and approaches to the study of language and text that draws variously upon linguistics, literary theory and cultural studies, philosophy of language, sociology and psychology. Initially, the term was used to in the 1950s to describe linguistic analysis of semantic structures above the level of the sentence. In the 1960s and 70s, it was applied by English teachers to the systematic analyses of the error patterns of second language learners' spoken and written texts and by educational psychologists to the development of cognitive text processing models.
Critical discourse analysis refers to the use of an ensemble of techniques for the study of textual practice and language use as social and cultural practices (Fairclough, 1992b). It builds from three broad theoretical orientations. First, it draws from poststructuralism the view that discourse operates laterally across local institutional sites, and that texts have a constructive function in forming up and shaping human identities and actions. Second, it draws from Bourdieu's sociology the assumption that actual textual practices and interactions with texts become "embodied" forms of "cultural capital" with exchange value in particular social fields. Third, it draws from neomarxist cultural theory the assumption that these discourses are produced and used within political economies, and that they thus produce and articulate broader ideological interests, social formations and movements within those fields (see Hall 1996).
The practical techniques of critical discourse analysis are derived from various disciplinary fields. Work in pragmatics, narratology and speech act theory argues that texts are forms of social action that occur in complex social contexts. Research and theory in systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1985) shows how linguistic forms can be systematically related to social and ideological functions. Critical discourse analysis uses analytic tools from these fields to address persistent questions about larger, systemic relations of class, gender and culture. In educational research, this work has been turned to the examination of how knowledge and identity are constructed across a range of texts in the institutional "site" of the school.
Critical discourse analysis begins from the assumption that systematic asymmetries of power and resources between speakers and listeners, readers and writers can be linked to their unequal access to linguistic and social resources. In this way, the presupposition of critical discourse analysis is that institutions like schools act as gatekeepers of mastery of discursive resources: the discourses, texts, genres, lexical and grammatical structures of everyday language use. What this suggests is a reframing of questions about educational equality in terms of how systematically distorted and ideological communication may set the conditions for differential institutional access to discursive resources, the very educational competences needed for social and economic relations in information-based economies.
4. Conclusion
Discourses constitute what Wittgenstein called "forms of life", ubiquitous ways of knowing, valuing and experiencing the world. They can be used for the assertion of power and knowledge and they can be used for purposes of resistance and critique. They are used in everyday local texts for building productive power and knowledge and for purposes of regulation and normalisation, for the development of new knowledge and power relati
ons, and for hegemony. If we accept the postructuralist view of primacy of discourse, than critical discourse analysis is necessary for describing and interpreting, analysing and critiquing social life.
Critical discourse analysis provides an interdisciplinary analytic approach and a flexible metalanguage for the sociological analysis of texts and discourses. The emergence of critical discourse analysis has at least three interrelated implications for educational studies and the sociology of education. First, it marks out a retheorisation of educational practice. Educational theory and practice historically has relied on foundational metaphors of the unfolding child, the industrial machine, the individual rationalist mind, and, most recently, the digital computer. The metaphor offered by poststructuralism is that of the text as an interpretable phenomena that is constitutive of all educational and intellectual endeavour.
Second, critical discourse analysis marks out a new set of methodological techniques and possibilities. The assumption shared by many quantitative and qualitative approaches to sociological research has been that observable realities, truths and social facts have an essential existence prior to discourse. Critical discourse analysis begins from a recognition of language and discourse as non-transparent, opaque ways of studying and representing the world. It recasts all data and research artefacts as discourse. It raises and addresses the question of self-reflexivity by making researchers' own uses of discourse a key problematic in design and inquiry.
Third, critical discourse analysis marks out the grounds for rethinking pedagogical practices and outcomes as discourse. The assumption underlying many postwar curriculum development and instructional models is that the purpose of education is to produce behaviours, skills and competences required for industrial-era workplaces and civic spheres. Critical discourse analysis suggests that mastery of discourse is the principle educational process and outcome, and that this mastery can be normatively reshaped to introduce teachers and students to critical analyses of text-based, postmodern cultures and economies.
This article began by describing the challenges posed by information-based, multicultural economies and nation states for the sociology of education. Critical discourse analysis provides a means for educational sociology to examine new phenomena, including:
(a) New workplaces, communities and civic spheres: Shifting population demographics, new social geographies, multiculturalism and new information technologies are altering social relations and how discourse is learned and used. There is a need for detailed study of new textual demands and practices in these institutions.
(b) New texts, genres and discourses: The conditions are encouraging the articulation and commodification of new, unprecedented modes of expression. There is a need for the study and critique of hybrid written forms (e.g., newspaper formats that emulate TV "soundbites"), new popular cultural forms of textual expression (e.g., rock videos, infomercials), electronic genres (e.g., email, home pages), and "creolised" intercultural and interlingual communications.
(c) New social identities: In these contexts, youth have access to unprecedented symbolic and material means for the construction of social values, beliefs and identities. From the discourse analytic perspective presented here, youth identities and affiliated phenomena as "class", "race" and "gender" can not be viewed as having prior essential characteristics independent of their formation and representation in discourse. There is a need for study of how and to what end youth are using texts and discourses to construct and reconstruct new identities and communities.
The application of critical discourse analysis to educational research will require nothing less than the development of a new sociology of educational discourse. Critical discourse analysis enables us to model of how language, text and discourse figure in the production and reproduction of educational outcomes. The focus of educational sociology historically has been on the structures, processes and consequences of educational institutions. A turn to the study of languages, discourses and texts will be needed if indeed we are to understand how educational institutions might make a difference in postmodern economies, nation states and cultures.
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