Drawing comparisons between group texts

TEXT 2: Student - Teacher Discourse
and
Text 4: Parent - Child Discourse

I've chosen these two texts because both of them feature an adult in a position of authority sharing discourse with children, who have no authority whatsoever. Both texts can be found in an earlier blog post titled 'Language + Power texts for Monday'.

Text two features a teacher, teaching a lesson to a classroom full of young students. They seem to be discussing group projects that they are working on in pairs, as evidenced by STUDENT 5 saying "We're selecting the theme that Columbia is free and...", at which point STUDENT 6 continues "We are going to write about the Spanish conquest and the slaves."  though because the text is out of context it is hard to ascertain what the precise focus of the discussion is. If this is indeed a group task (that students 5 and 6 are co-operating on) it could explain why STUDENT 6 finishes STUDENT 5's sentence: To communicate that they can work together effectively by proving that they are 'on the same page' by working together to explain themselves to the teacher. If only one student had spoken, it may have given the impression that not everyone was carrying their weight, or that they are incompatible as a team, or that one student is overly eager when compared to their peers. STUDENT 5 remains silent afterwards, possibly because the teacher did not prompt them to speak. However, this is an interesting feature of language in itself: It would be chaos if every Student was expected to answer at the same time, so the Teacher is the only person in the room with complete authority to grant permission to speak out. In this case the teacher never verbally nominates anyone. It is possible that the teacher used body language to communicate this permission to students, and also possible that at the time when the teacher prompts an answer by asking a question (such as in 'They took away land and stole. What else?), the students can quickly figure out who would be the appropriate responding student by judging a number of factors, possibly including: Was the teacher talking to a specific person (looking at them while asking the question, etc), who has already recently answered a question, who feels confident to answer questions, who knows any possible answers to the question and other such contextual knowledge.


Text four is an extract from popular comedy TV series 'Outnumbered', which is a family sit-com in that it revolves around the life of one particular family. There are far less speakers in this text (MUM, BEN, and DAD).

28/02/14 TARGET WORK (also my homework)

The target I am setting myself is to revise and retain more varied terminology to be used in evaluations and other pieces of work.

To help me achieve this I will be leaving reminders of terminology in places I will see them regularly. For instance, a sticky note on the inside of my door that could say 'Modal Verb' and then the definition written underneath. Other examples are: leaving small notes on blank pages of my notebook to be viewed in the future, or drawing a memo on my phone screen that will be updated regularly.

The reason for this is that, simply put, when I see words I can't help but read them, and words that I read more often are of course more likely to stick in my long term memory. Derren Brown (TV 'magician') is known to do a similar thing, in which he incorporates things he needs to remember into his daily routine, for example an object or note on his bedside table as he wakes up, and another one on his door and another one stuck to the bathroom mirror, and other places where he will inevitably end up having his memory refreshed. Because most of what I know is something I read somewhere, and because Derren Brown seems to be very successful in matters of the mind I thought this would be a helpful experience for me.



Edit:
I placed some reminders on my phone which were very effective at drumming correct terminology definitions into my mind. I also placed some sticky notes but they would keep falling down or curling up and became mostly a waste of time.