Contribution of the present study

of other subjects such as mathematics or science in the public schools.

Moore’s analysis is quite penetrating on questions of teacher authority, learning motivation, text treatment and pacing of the learning process, but she is less interested in the typical ways of talking in teaching and learning, especially outside language teaching, though her dissertation (Moore 2004) has more transcribed language material than the shorter article (Moore 2006). Her insights into the structure of lessons have been highly useful in the present work, see 8.1.1 on page 290.

Lack of studies

There are all in all comparatively few studies of schooling in the Camerooninan context, and even fewer focus on the use of language in school, with the exception of those who treat language in school from the medium of instruction point of view (Gfeller 1995, Tadadjeu, Sadembouo & Mba 2004). Very few, if any, treat schooling in the province of Adamoua from a language use perspective.

Studies addressing the use of oral literature in teaching children in Cameroon also seem to be rare; Nsamenang & Lamb (1994) and Argenti (2001) are the examples I have been able to find beyond Noye (1971) noted above. Some descriptions may also surface in general anthropological descriptions of ethnic groups. Those who do speak of children’s games in a learning context from Cameroon, tend to do so from an adult point of view, seeing the games only as a way of socialising children, as done in Nsamenang & Lamb (1994). However, the function of games and other plays as living tradition, recreated each time they are performed, is explored in Argenti’s (2001) very interesting study of how children act out their old games of masking with quite new themes of political violence.

2.8 Contribution of the present study

In the previous sections of the chapter, I have given an overview of the main theoretical frameworks informing the present study, and of some previous research more directly relevant for my study. I have noted the need to do more work on actual language use within the cognitive linguistics paradigm, and especially in the field of linguistic interaction. At the same time other frameworks already heavily involved with the analysis of social interaction, such as community of practice theory, can benefit from the view of language found in cognitive linguistics, without losing their ‘community’ approach to discourse.

The ethnography of speaking has a broad approach to language, and has during the years produced much work of great interest, not the least within the field of language in education. Still my research questions focusing on the

emergent character of linguistic structures needs another framework than the idea of communicative competence; it can too easily translate into a view of language with predefined and stable structures.

The language socialisation framework comes the closest to a theory of language as a cognitive and social resource in interaction. However, scholars working in this have concentrated mostly on the language learning processes of early childhood, and have showed less interest in older children and adults, though there has been a branching out of studies in this direction in recent years (Garrett

& Baquedano López 2002).

Of the three ‘social’ approaches I have considered here, the community of practice theory is by far the theory with the least interest in the question of the locus and nature of language. As a general theory of learning, rather than of language, it tends to look at language as a presupposed instrument of the community, though specific linguistic features may enter the shared repertoire of communication of a particular community. Other sociolinguists, (Eckert &

McConnell-Ginet 1992, Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1999) have, however, used the perspective with very interesting results.

Though there is a movement within cognitive linguistics to do more discourse analysis on actual language use data, the contribution of the present study is to take the integration with other theoretical frameworks further and to propose a new category of analysis for this kind of research. To the best of my knowledge, the Bakhtinian notion of speech genres has not been used in any of the studies I have discussed, though some draw on his ideas of ‘dialogue’ and ‘voices’. In the minutely transcribed interactions analysed in the following chapters of this dissertation, I look for recurrences of forms, for repetitions, which would be likely to imprint a schema in its users. Using Bakhtin’s terminology, I call these schemas speech genres to mark them as both pertaining to language and to the more context-related notion of genres. My approach in using speech genres as a tool for analysing interaction of teaching and learning, is, therefore, a new contribution to research. Speech genres are seen as salient entities arising from many usage event in interaction, creating orientational frameworks that interlocutors use as an interactional tool.

Chapter 3 Methodology

The methodology of the present study grows out of a functionalist approach to discourse, seeing discourse aslanguage in use. It is directly based on a cognitive linguistics view of language, discussed in 1.1.1 on page 2, where language is understood to have emergent linguistic structures immanent in actual linguistic utterances. This view prefers the use of data from actual language usage to describe linguistic structure, because this is where such structures arise and are immanent in usage events. Language use again is alwayssituatedin communities of interacting individuals. Communities, of any size, are seedbeds for the emergence of linguistic structures, each community shaping its own repertoire from the material coming out of the past, from earlier groups of interacting individuals. Individuals reproduce these structures, in this way making them accessible for the analyst as well as for the participants interacting in discourse.

Both using actual language data and the need to view these data in the light of a sociocultural context, has direct implications for the methodology of the study.

As noted in 2.6, Cognitive Linguistics have recently seen a turn to empirical data of actual language use, instead of the traditional methods of introspection and acceptability judgements. A recent paper (Waugh et al. 2006), which I treated in 2.6, specifically treats the need to integrate many different kinds of contextual knowledge to analyse discourse. The authors base their work on ideas which run quite parallel to the theoretical framework I presented in Chapter 2. The opening lines of their essay are worth quoting:

“Our purpose here is to exemplify the benefits of an integrated ap-proach to the study of discourse that examines culturally contextu-alized examples of authentic language use with a rich, fine-grained analysis derived from various empirical approaches. By discourse we mean the actual use of language for communication. . . . More-over, discourse and its communicative functions are intertwined with

linguistic, cognitive, social, cultural, historical, ideological and bio-logical patterns, and none of these exist separately from the others.”

—Waugh et al. (2006, 120)

The present study likewise aims to examine “culturally contextualized examples of language use,” in its many-faceted settings. As the paper cited above, I have found it necessary to use multiple approaches to be able to contextualize the linguistic phenomena I am describing. However, while having similar goals and theoretical frameworks as the work cited above, the present study differs from it by using data from a quite different setting with quite different possibilities and constraints influencing the process of gathering and analysing the data.

In looking back on this process I find that many decisions of methodological importance in my particular case was based on other concerns than strictly methodological considerations, or rather, other concerns had to be accommodated alongside the requirements of the methodological ideals. This is by no means an uncommon situation in many social science studies: the research questions and the specifications for informants have to be revised and adapted to practical concerns and to the data collection possibilities actually available to the researcher (Waugh et al. 2006, 135).

In my analysis I worked to identify forms of speech genres, a category of linguistic units that is dicsussed at length in Chapter 2. Unlike many other studies, these entities were not already defined, such as might be the case with a study of say, pronouns. I had to look for hitherto undescribed enitities in the data.

Furthermore, I understood each form to be locally occurring in communities of practice and not necessarily pervading the larger speech community. Culture and context were expected to have an impact on language use, but I could not know exactly how in advance. The collection of data at the outset of the study thus had to be fairly open to all sorts of available material which seemed relevant.

At first knowing that other researchers have found different patterns of language use in school and at home, I was curious as to what patterns might show up in this Cameroonian context. Would they be comparable to e.g. Heath’s (1983) study of different communities and schooling in the United States? How would they differ? I decided to let salient entities ‘emerge’ (see 1.1.1) by observing classes and village life, and filming and transcribing interaction in natural settings in these contexts. I needed to see what kind of relations the interacting participants had with each other, and to other actors, and so I needed to look into the socio-cultural environment generally. Hence use of controlled experimental settings was not relevant.