Developing an FPDA Approach: The Classroom Study

Abstract

In this and the following three chapters, I intend to move from the theory of feminist post-structuralism and the principles of FPDA, to consider how such insights apply in practice to the analysis of discourse within two very different research contexts. The first of the two research studies to which I shall be applying the FPDA approach is an ethnographic study of school students’ classroom talk and, in particular, their speaking and listening skills, which were being formally assessed for a public, oral examination. The second (introduced in Chapter 6) is a study of business managers’ talk within a series of management meetings. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to set the scene for the school-based research study, highlighting the particular process by which I came to identify three intersecting classroom discourses for further analysis. The discourse analysis itself is conducted in Chapter 5.