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COMPLETED RESEARCH

Overview of Research

Stanton Wortham Graduate School of Education

University of Pennsylvania

All speech serves multiple functions. As described by Austin (1956/1975),

Halliday (1978), Jakobson (1960) and others, any utterance functions at least to denote

actual or possible worlds, to position speaker and audience interactionally, and to cohere

with other utterances. In classroom discourse, for instance, teachers and students

simultaneously (and inevitably) denote things relevant to the curriculum, position

themselves as identifiable kinds of people, and contribute to larger discussions that

emerge over minutes, days and months in the classroom.

I study three aspects of the multifunctionality of language use, especially in

classroom discourse. First, I study how these functions, particularly the interactional

function, are accomplished in actual events of language use. Speech inevitably positions

both speaker and audience in recognizable ways—as valued or devalued types of people

engaged in some type of social activity. What types of linguistic and other semiotic cues

do speakers use to position themselves and others interactionally? This is also a

methodological question: what types of cues should analysts examine in order to study

interactional positioning empirically? Second, I study how the denotational, interactional

and textual functions of speech interrelate with each other. These functions do more than

occur simultaneously. They also sometimes depend on each other. For example, in order

to interpret the denotational value of “we,” hearers may need to know how this and

Wortham, Research Statement 2

surrounding utterances are positioning the speaker interactionally, in order to identify

relevant social groups that include the speaker. I study how the denotational and

interactional functions of speech depend on each other in more complex ways over

extended speech events. Third, I study how the functions accomplished by particular

events of language use partly constitute more enduring processes like social identification

and learning. The emergence of a recognizable social identity for a student, for instance,

depends ultimately on events in which teachers and students describe and/or position the

student in certain ways. But social identification takes place over longer timescales than

particular events, and it cannot be explained simply as a summation of micro-level events

(Dreier, 2003; Lemke, 2000). I study how actual events of language use both presuppose

and constitute longer timescale processes like social identification and learning.

By grounding my work on social identification and learning in systematic,

detailed analyses of language use in context, I have provided empirically rich

descriptions of these processes. But my focus on speech has also allowed me to explain,

in part, how social identification and learning work. I have isolated certain types of

speech events—like “participant examples,” as described below—in which the

interconnection of denotational and interactional functions plays an important role in

socially identifying students and in helping them learn. This work has helped to realize

the promise of discursive approaches to education, by explaining in detail where and how

social identification and learning actually happen.

My ongoing work on these issues has contributed to arts and sciences disciplines

such as linguistic anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychological anthropology, and

cultural psychology—as shown, e.g., by the range of journals I have published in and


reviewed for. I have been concerned both to use educational research to enrich these

disciplines and to use concepts from the disciplines to enrich educational research. My

work has implications for education in two ways. First, my work on the social

identification accomplished through classroom speech partly explains how social

reproduction and more unexpected types of educational socialization happen. I have

shown how students from underprivileged groups can get positioned in disempowering

ways, and I am continuing to study how such positioning might influence individual

students’ identity development and their educational careers. More recently I have been

studying nonnormative identification that happens in classrooms, to see how students get

identified in ways that diverge from social expectations. Second, my work on

interactional positioning helps explain how cognition and learning happen in classrooms.

I have shown how interactional positioning among teachers and students can facilitate

cognition, and I am continuing to study how more extended interrelations among the

denotational, interactional and textual functions of language can help students learn the

curriculum.

Theoretical Approach

In studying the multiple functions of speech and their interrelations, and how

particular speech events can partly constitute longer timescale processes like social

identification and learning, I draw on interactional theories of language use (e.g.,

Bakhtin, 1935/1981; Goffman, 1974; Gumperz, 1982; Silverstein, 1992), discursive

theories of culture (e.g., Agha, 2003; Parmentier, 1997; Silverstein & Urban, 1996;

Urban, 2001), sociocultural accounts of identity development (e.g., Dreier, 2003; Holland


& Lave, 2001; Lemke, 2000; Shweder, 1991) and cultural-historical accounts of learning

(e.g., Engeström, 1999; Lave, 1996; Rogoff, 2003; Wertsch, 1998). I have brought

together these various traditions in an approach to studying classroom discourse in social

context, an approach that I have called “the linguistic anthropology of education”

(Wortham & Berkley, 2001; Wortham & Rymes, 2003).

Earlier work on the interactional positioning accomplished through speech has led

to the discovery of a pervasive level of human phenomenawhat Goffman (1983) calls

“the interaction order.” Research on interaction has shown that speakers and audience

members respond systematically and quickly to the interactional positioning that is

signaled by speech, even though they are often unaware of doing so (e.g., Garfinkel,

1967; Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974; Silverstein, 1998). This interactional

positioning resembles bodily orientation in some ways. Just as people maneuver their

bodies around obstacles using complex coordinated movements, without being aware of

exactly what acts they are performing, people position themselves interactionally in

conversation. Just as a biologist or a coach could analyze coordinated motion by

studying videotapes, analysts can study people's coordinated interactional positioning

through taping and analysis of speech and gesture. In addition to drawing on earlier work

on the interaction order, I have contributed my own systematic approach to studying

interactional positioning in classroom, newscast and autobiographical discourse

(Wortham, 1996a, 2000, 2001a; Wortham & Gadsden, in press; Wortham & Locher,

1996).

Earlier work has also shown how the interactional functions of speech

interconnect with denotational and textual functions. Classic work was done on


“shifters”—denotational indexicals like personal pronouns which depend for their

denotational value on interactional aspects of the speech event (Hanks, 1990; Jakobson,

1957; Silverstein, 1976). I have studied more extended speech events in which the

denotational and interactional functions of language depend on each other. “Participant

examples,” for instance, include a participant in the speech event as a character in the

example (Wortham, 1994). I have shown how speakers can use the denoted content of

such examples to position themselves and others interactionally (Wortham, 1994, 1997a,

2001c, 2002), and how the interactional positioning accomplished through the examples

can contribute to the denotational content they communicate (Wortham, 1997a; 2001b).

Autobiographical narratives have a similar structure, as the narrator is both a participant

in the event of speaking and the central character in the denoted events, and I have also

described how the interactional and denotational functions of autobiographical narratives

can depend on each other (Wortham, 2001a, 2002).

Many anthropologists, sociologists and others who study the interactional

positioning accomplished through speech argue that such positioning partly constitutes

both cultural and social organization (e.g., Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970; Goffman, 1974;

Silverstein & Urban, 1996; Urban, 1996, 2001). According to such discursive theories of

society and culture, analysts can explain social and cultural patterns partly as a result of

widely circulating interactional positioning that comes to presuppose characteristic

patterns for the person and the setting in question. In other words, typical relationships

between occupants of recognizable social roles solidify and become presupposable within

a group as they get repeatedly enacted in discursive interactions.


Convergent work from other traditions has studied how events that occur at a

timescale of minutes and hours are both constrained by and partly constitute longer

timescale processes (e.g., Cole, 1996; Dreier, 2003; Engeström, 1999; Holland & Lave,

2001; Lemke, 2000). Social identification and learning, for instance, can take place

across minutes, hours, days, months and years, and we need both nuanced theoretical

accounts and detailed empirical work to understand the interdependencies across

timescales that constitute such processes. In earlier work, I contributed to this tradition

by analyzing in detail how social and cultural reproduction can happen in classroom

discourse, as students from underprivileged backgrounds are systematically positioned in

disempowering ways (Wortham, 1992, 1994, 1995, 1997b, 2001d). In more recent work

I have contributed by showing how students get socially identified and learn across

months-long, meso-level timescales, tracing how positioning across trajectories of events

partly constitute more enduring identities and understandings (Wortham, 2003; in press;

forthcoming a, b, c).

My work, then, starts with close attention to speech and systematic analyses of

how speech accomplishes its multiple functions. I use these detailed analyses to explore

larger stretches of naturally occurring speech, in order to show how the multiple

functions of speech can sometimes interrelate in complex ways. Then I study trajectories

of events in which multiple functions interrelate, to explore how longer timescale

processes like social identification and learning both emerge from and constrain

particular events. In this last area of work, I have been able to show in systematic

empirical detail how central processes like learning and social identification emerge in

and across actual events. By looking at the multiple functions of speech in such events,


across time, I have also been able to show how the apparently distinct processes of social

identification and learning can interconnect with and depend on each other.

Work to Date

I have worked on three broad research questions, (1) developing a method for

studying interactional positioning empirically, (2) identifying types of speech events in

which denotational and interactional functions systematically interrelate, and (3)

exploring how trajectories of such events across longer timescales can partly constitute

processes like social identification and learning. Together, these three lines of work have

allowed me to give detailed, systematic explanations of how the crucial processes of

social identification and learning are accomplished in practice. I have also used these

theoretical and analytic tools to describe student-centered discussions in high school

English and history classes and to explain how consistently negative interactional

positioning can marginalize some underprivileged high school students.

With respect to studying interactional positioning empirically, I have developed a

systematic approach to the interactional functions of language use (Wortham, 1996a,

2000, 2001a, 2001c; Wortham & Gadsden, in press; Wortham & Locher, 1996). My

approach builds on previous work in discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology and

microsociology (e.g., Gumperz, 1982; Jakobson, 1957/1971; Sacks, Schegloff &

Jefferson, 1974; Silverstein, 1985), but I have tailored it to suit my study of interactional

positioning in classroom, newscast and autobiographical speech. This approach extends

the scope of most research on the interactional functions of classroom and media

discourse, because it goes beyond isolated linguistic cues to study more complex

emergent patterns. Instead of focusing on themes, images or other representational


patterns that are more accessible to native-speaker awareness, this tradition of work

focuses on indexical cues (Peirce, 1897/1955; Silverstein, 1976)which are ubiquitous

in speech but not often studied systematically. My methodological approach also goes

beyond particular cues to study complex patterns of indexical cues that emerge across

longer segments of conversation.

Using this theoretical and methodological approach to the interactional functions

of speech, I have gone on to study the interrelations between the denotational and

interactional functions of language in apparently objective speech. In order to give an

example, for instance, a speaker must set up two denotational spacesthe topic being

discussed, which presupposes one or more generalizations, and the example which

illustrates or supports one of those generalizations. In my first book (Wortham, 1994) I

demonstrate that this denotational structure can serve interactional functions. When the

example contains participants themselves as characters (for example, “imagine that our

Maurice here were an informer…”), apparently neutral discussion of the example often

carries presuppositions about the participants' interactional positions. Discussion of the

hypothetical Maurice the informer, within the example, can covertly communicate things

about Maurice the actual student. In case studies of several such examples, I have

documented how elaborate interactional positioning can occur through apparently neutral

academic discussion of examples. I have analyzed cases in which particular students or

groups of students get teased or excluded based on their gender or ethnicity, in which

teachers engage in power struggles through apparently neutral discussion of an example

and in which teachers model particular ethical stances and students seem to adopt them

(Wortham, 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996b, 1997a, 2001b, 2001d).


While studying the interactional positioning that can go on through examples, I

discovered that the denotational content represented by the example and the interactional

positioning enacted while discussing that example can also sometimes run parallel. That

is, in discussing a particular set of events and relationships as the content of an example,

teachers and students sometimes enact analogous events and relationships in their own

classroom interaction. I argue that speech events involving such a parallel between

representation and enactment can make important contributions to learning, to

enculturation and to identity development (Wortham, 2001b, 2003, in press).

Consider the following example of this phenomenon—taken from a ninth-grade

history class in an urban US school. This class has read Cicero's letter to Atticus, which

concerns the plot to overthrow Caesar. Cicero feels caught in the middle, and he asks

Atticus whether he should warn Caesar, join the plotters or do nothing. The teacher puts

a student in a hypothetical situation analogous to Cicero's and asks what he would do.

Mr. Smith: Maurice let's give a good example. You'll love this. Suppose this dictator, me, there was a plot going on, and you found out about it. And you knew it was gonna- it's existing…among the people you knew. Would you tell me?

Maurice: You said they know about it. Mr. Smith: The plotters, against me. They're planning to push me down the

stairs, and you know about it. Students: Ha ha ha ha ha Mr. Smith: Now we all know Maurice and I have had arguments all year. Would

you tell me about it? Maurice: Well, I might, but what if they found out that I told you, then they want

to kill me…So I'm putting myself in trouble to save you, and I'm not going to do it.

This example doubles the roles played by Mr. Smith and Maurice: Mr. Smith speaks as a

hypothetical tyrant and as the teacher and Maurice speaks as a potential informer and as a

student. Each comment about the example might have implications both for the


hypothetical case and for Mr. Smith and Maurice’s own interactional positions in the

classroom.

As the discussion proceeds, comments about the example do in fact have both

denotational and interactional functions. The class describes Maurice's hypothetical

predicament and Cicero's analogous predicament. But comments about the example also

position Maurice interactionally. Maurice's choice between Mr. Smith and the student

"plotters"—though hypothetical as far as the denotational content is concerned—

becomes a real interactional choice about his identity in the classroom. Will he affiliate

with students who characteristically do the teacher's bidding or with students who resist

the teacher’s agenda? Maurice himself ends up in the same position as Cicero. He gets

caught in the middle between the teacher’s group and the "oppositional" students' group.

In this case the denotational content represented by the classroom speech and the

interactional positioning accomplished by that speech interrelate in a specific way: they

run parallel. Maurice and Mr. Smith enact roles in the classroom analogous to the roles

that they describe in their discussion of the subject matter. I have documented several

cases of such parallelism in classroom examples (Wortham, 1994, 1997a, in press,

forthcoming a), and I have argued that in such cases the denotational and interactional

functions of the classroom speech depend on each other (Wortham, 1997a, 2001b,

forthcoming a, b).

I have attended most closely to participant examples, as a type of speech event in

which the denotational and interactional functions interrelate, but I have studied other

types of utterance or speech event that have similar potential. In my work on media

discourse, for instance, I have studied quoted speech—following Bakhtin (1935/1981),


Vološinov (1929/1973) and many others—exploring how speakers position themselves

and others interactionally when they quote others’ speech (Locher & Wortham, 1994;

Wortham & Locher, 1996, 1999). I have also studied autobiographical narrative

discourse, in which (at least) the narrator appears both as a denoted character and as an

interactional participant (Wortham, 2000, 2001a; Wortham & Gadsden, in press). I have

shown that parallelism across denoted content and interactional positioning occurs in

autobiographical narrative discourse, just as in participant examples (Wortham, 2001a,

2002).

My discovery of parallelism across denoted content and enacted positioning

might be of limited consequence if such parallels occurred only rarely. But recent work

has begun to uncover such parallels in ritualized discourse around the world (Parmentier,

1997; Silverstein, 1998; Urban, 1996). These anthropologists argue that people often

represent and enact doubled or parallel patterns in ritualized events and that this sort of

parallel between denotation and interaction plays an important role in reproducing

culture. In other words, the practices and beliefs that characterize a cultural group often

get passed down through events in which people both describe and enact the same

characteristic patterns. I have shown that this sort of parallelism occurs more widely in

nonritual events than one might think, in certain types of classrooms and also in

autobiographical narrative discourse. I have argued that such parallelism plays an

important role in establishing both individual selves and cultural patterns (Wortham,

2001a, in press).

Having developed theoretical and methodological tools for studying the multiple

functions of classroom and other discourse, and having identified types of events in


which the denotational and interactional functions of speech systematically interconnect,

I have gone on to explore how such interconnections can facilitate longer timescale

processes like social identification and learning. My first efforts focused on individual

speech events.

I argue, for instance, that the interconnection between denotational and

interactional functions in participant examples can help students learn (Wortham, 2001b).

According to a situated view of cognition, learning does not involve simply a change in

mental representations. Instead, learning depends on a system of structures drawn from

various realms beyond the individual mind (Greeno, 1997; Kirshner & Whitson, 1997;

Wertsch, 1998). Hutchins (1995), for example, describes the cognitive accomplishment

of navigating a battleship. A team of six members performs tasks that together yield

knowledge of the ship's position. Successful navigation depends on a system of

interlocking structuressome in individual minds, some in the organization of nautical

tools and physical space and some in symbolic tools like maps and language. As

Engeström (1999), Greeno (1997), Lave (1996), Wertsch (1998) and others argue,

cognitive accomplishments result from "activity systems" that can include mental, social,

physical and symbolic structures. I have shown how interactional structures created by

classroom speech contribute to activity systems that facilitate learning in the classroom.

The analogy between Maurice and Cicero, for instance, has cognitive power not

only because of what gets represented but also because of what gets accomplished

through classroom discourse. The interactional positioning of Maurice, as a student

"opposed" to the teacher, involves social patterns relevant to the curricular topic of

political factionalization. Students tacitly know things about political and interactional


factions—things they can enact but might not be able to represent explicitly. When

Maurice, Mr. Smith and the other students enact Cicero's predicament they bring this

enactable knowledge into the classroom discussion, where it may contribute to their

understanding of the text. They might have denoted in exhaustive detail how political

systems often involve hierarchical relations among the powerful, the opposition and those

caught in between. But instead they enacted some aspects of these relations. I

hypothesize that such enactment is part of an activity system that can facilitate students’

learning.

In addition to arguing that interrelations between denotational and interactional

functions of participant examples can facilitate cognition in this way, I have also argued

that such interrelations in autobiographical narrative can contribute to individual’s

identity development. Wortham (2001a) shows how a narrator describes her past selves

in certain interactional positions andin the event of storytellingenacts analogous

relations with the audience. Many have argued that the self gets some of its structure

from stories people tell about themselves. Most analyses of such stories have ignored the

interactional positioning accomplished through narrative speech, however. I argue that

storytellers, just like students and teachers who discuss examples and newscasters who

present reports, position themselves and their audiences interactionally in the event of

storytelling. I show how, in the event of autobiographical storytelling, narrators can

position themselves, and how interrelations across denoted content and interactional

positioning in autobiographical narrative can partly constitute narrators’ selves. With

this work I have shown, in the details of actual discursive interaction, how individuals


can come to have particular situated identities in practice, and I have begun to sketch an

account of the self (Wortham, 2001a; Michel & Wortham, 2002).

My work so far has contributed methodologically and empirically, by describing

in detail how speech has multiple functions and how longer timescale processes emerge

out of actual events. It has contributed theoretically, by isolating a mechanism—

denotational/interactional parallelism—through which identity development and

cognition are established and maintained. I have shown how ritualized events that

involve parallelism between denotation and interactional positioning can partly constitute

social identification and learning. My work has also contributed to the description of

classrooms, showing how particular students’ identities emerge in practice and how these

identities are connected to the curriculum in unexpected ways. And it has contributed to

the description of how privilege can be preserved or denied to particular types of

students, showing how underprivileged students are consistently positioned in

disempowering ways.

In my work to date, however, I have focused on single participant examples and

autobiographical narratives, showing how these can contribute to identity development

and to cognition. But social identification and learning take place over longer timescales

than individual events, so a full account must go beyond single events to trajectories of

events across which learning and social identification happen.

I am currently finishing a book on my latest project (Wortham, forthcoming a), in

which I follow a high school class across an academic year. The data allow me to trace

trajectories of events across which particular students develop social identities and learn

about curricular themes. I have been able to identify participant examples and other key


events through which teachers and students identify individuals and overlapping series of

events through which students learn about the curriculum. I analyze these series of

events in detail to show how identities and learning emerge across time. By studying

trajectories, instead of isolated events, I am able to explore how micro-level events

contribute to and emerge from meso- and macro-level presuppositions about students’

identities and the curriculum.

I also show how the interconnections between denotational and interactional

functions of speech, across several events, create an interdependence between the longer

timescale processes of social identification and learning (Wortham, 2001b, 2003,

forthcoming a, b). It is not only that the denotational and interactional functions of

speech depend on each other in particular events, and not only that the processes of social

identification and learning depend on each other in particular events. Trajectories of

events, each of which involves these sorts of functional interdependencies, establish a

longer timescale interdependence between social identification and learning across the

academic year. The book’s distinctive contribution is to show how social identity

development and academic learning can mediate each other. I follow two students who

developed unexpected identities, in substantial part because discussions of curricular

themes provided opportunities for teachers and students to position them as certain kinds

of people. The curriculum provided categories of identity that were used to identify these

two students in the classroom. I also show how students came to recognize and make

arguments about those curricular themes in part because the two students got identified in

ways that illuminated those themes. The students’ identities, and the broader social

organization of the classroom, provided categories that were woven into students’


understandings of the curriculum. The book describes in detail how this deep

interdependence between social identification and academic learning happened, by

analyzing trajectories of participant examples which both reinforced these students’

emerging social identities and facilitated students’ learning of the curricular themes.

My ongoing work on the interdependence between social identification and

learning makes theoretical contributions to the study of these processes, in classrooms

and elsewhere. It might also push us to rethink venerable dichotomies between identity

and cognition, or more broadly between social belonging and reason. We should not

think of formal education, for instance, as primarily a matter of developing

representations, separate from the types of people students and teachers are becoming.

Nor should we think of educational institutions as managing or establishing social

statuses independent of the genuinely intellectual activities of schooling. Neither

cognitive nor sociological perspectives alone will be adequate to studying what actually

happens in school, because learning and social identification are deeply bound up with

each other.


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COMPLETED RESEARCH Overview of Research - Penn …scholar.gse.upenn.edu/stantonw/files/completed_research.pdf · COMPLETED RESEARCH Overview of Research ... “shifters”—denotational