Which tools to study how daily language turns into a specific school subject ?

Abstract

School practices often consider language to be transparent. Either they are only interested in the content, regardless of the language forms implemented, or they are only interested in the form, regardless of the content. But this dichotomy is detrimental to learning and particularly affects students who are furthest from the school culture and its language uses, including disciplinary uses. In order to reflect on actual student work with regard to the transformation of concepts and discourse, we focus on enunciative processes during rewriting and their relevance for disciplines. Our work explores the links between language and concepts in the frame of historical and cultural theory. and articulates the contributions of Vygotski (1934/1985) and Bakhtine (1984). In this article we introduce and test some of the tools we use to analyse the work of language and disciplinary enunciative position. To do so, we analyse writings of pupils (11 years old), in sciences and literature, collected in the frame of a research on writing skills. We are specifically looking at a case study of one student (out of 744 in the research) at a rate of four texts per student. These tools extend the notion of writing skills to enunciative position and its evolution during learning.