Courtney B Cazden

• Harvard University

Cazden reflects on theoretical and sociopolitical origins of Hymes's construct of communicative competence in events occurring just before and after 1960 in the U.S. She comments on Hymes's emphasis on competence not as abstract systemic potential of a language, but as capability located in individual persons; and she explores competence as both in...

This article is a slightly revised version of the Past President's Address delivered at the annual business meeting of the Council on Anthropology and Education, Washington, DC, 6 December 1982. ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH; PROGRAM DESIGN; SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT.

At Harvard in the early 1960s, when Ruth Wong received her doctorate in mathematics education, behaviourist B. F. Skinner and cognitivist Jerome Bruner were both teaching psychology, and their ideas continued to influence her work when she returned to educational research and administration in Malaysia and Singapore. Today, whereas exemplary models...

Last year at this conference, Allan Luke spoke about research he was then directing in Singapore. He mentioned one item in the Singapore coding scheme for classroom observations, an item given the metaphorical name of weaving (Luke et al, 2003). Weaving names the moments in classroom lessons when explicit connections are made, by teacher or student...

These comments—by a Singaporean and an American—-focus on four themes: roles of anthropologists; the pedagogy of culture; challenges in combining Indigenous and mainstream epistemologies; and reciprocal influences between social and political contexts, and struggles for Indigenous education and self-determination.

David Olson is deservedly well‐known as a developmental and cognitive psychologist with broad‐ranging historical and philosophical interests. Two of his previous books that anticipate aspects of Psychological Theory and Educational Reform (PTER) are The World on Paper [1994], which he authored, and The Handbook of Education and Human...

This article reports observational research in six High School Puente 9th and 10th grade classrooms in four schools in Northern and Southern California during fall, winter, and spring visits in 2000-2001. After two opening vignettes, observations are summarized in five categories: curriculum and teaching, socialization into habits of mind and habit...

Two meanings of the word "discourse" are distinguished. The first treats discourse as conversation (D1), and the other refers to different ways of understanding (D2). Rather than seeing the two kinds of discourse as different, they are seen as having an important connection, particularly in classroom communication. Examples are drawn from the liter...

Maintains that strengths of Olson and Torrance's work include its balanced focus on child and curriculum. Argues that the book neglects affective, social, and cultural aspects of development. Argues that the book's avoidance of ethnic categorization could encourage or justify avoiding issues of differences in human development and equity in educati...

An educator participating in a community college Puente class as both participant and observer analyzes the structure and experience of one writing assignment representative of the program's objectives. The Puente program combines teaching, counseling, and mentoring to California community college students as a means of promoting learning, academic...

In this article, the New London Group presents a theoretical overview of the connections between the changing social environment facing students and teachers and a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they call "multiliteracies." The authors argue that the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in...

BermanRuth A., SlobinDan Isaac, Relating events in narrative: A cross-linguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1994. Pp. xiv, 748. Hb $99.95. - Volume 25 Issue 1 - Courtney B. Cazden, Nell K. Duke

The evolution of the concept of communicative competence (CC) in language learning and teaching is traced since 1966, when D. H. Hymes first discussed it publicly. His concept of CC had its theoretical origins in the convergence of transformational generative grammar and the ethnography of communication, and was first discussed at a conference on l...

Courtney Cazden is Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research and teaching centers on the functions and forms of oral and written language in both L1 and L2 education. Her most recent book is Whole Language Plus: Essays on Literacy in the United States and New Zealand. Support from the Spencer Foundation is gratefully ackno...

Through focusing on the genre of informational reports, two dilemmas of genre teaching are explored: (1) a teaching dilemma about how to help students achieve flexible writing competencies through a combination of immersion in text exemplars and instruction in text features; and (2) a curriculum dilemma about how to combine the goals of socializati...

The workplace research of Sylvia Scribner provides a model with which to study relationships between socially and institutionally organized practices and individual cognitive processes as well as to explore relationships between practices and processes in writing and the teaching of writing. Observations and conversations in one inner-city, multi-e...

This paper describes similarities between the areas of second language (L2) teacher education and mother tongue (MT) literacy teacher education: similarity of definition, similarity of history, and similarity of a current pedagogical issue (immersion is necessary but not sufficient). Practitioners in both fields need to modulate the sharp polarity...

Considers the relationship between drama and writing. Presents a conversation between two scholars interested in this connection in which they describe various views of the relationship. Suggests classroom activities linking drama and writing. (HB)

Speaking with style: The sociolinguistic skills of children. AndersenElaine Slosberg. London: Routledge, 1990. Pp. 200. - Volume 13 Issue 2 - Courtney B. Cazden

Discourse - LemkeJay L., Talking science: Language, learning, and values. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1990. Pp. xiii + 261. - Volume 21 Issue 1 - Courtney B. Cazden

Contends that becoming literate involves the socialization of attention. The terms reveal and tell (M. Donaldson, 1978) name 2 strategies of assistance to such socialization. Revealing, as exemplified in one program, Reading Recovery, can be especially helpful for young learners. But for older students, conflicts between primary and secondary socia...

Nature of communication disorders in culturally and linguistically diverse populations. TaylorOrlando L. (Ed.). San Diego: College-Hill Press, 1986. Pp. xii + 309. - Volume 12 Issue 3 - Courtney B. Cazden

Traducción de: Classroom discourse : the language of teaching and learning Incluye bibliografía e índice

Differential treatment is one name for the unequal participation of children in classroom lessons. Existing New Zealand research documents the differential treatment of Maori children in the first year of school. An inservice intervention with New Zealand Junior Class teachers was carried out during 1987, involving changes in the setting events in...

Book reviewed in this article:Observation in the Language Classroom. Dick Allwright.Second Language Classrooms: Research on Teaching and Learning. Craig Chaudron.The Classroom and the Language Learner: Ethnography and Second-Language Classroom Research. Leo van Lier.

The special issue of the journal is devoted to a variety of historical, educational, and policy issues arising in the debate over establishing English as the single official language of the United States. Articles on this topic include: "Bilingual Education and English-Only: A Language Planning Framework" (Nancy H. Hornberger); "Historical Legacies...

Soviet scholar Mikhail Bakhtin's writings were not available in English in 1966, when Dell Hymes first wrote about communicative competence. Yet there are important similarities in their ideas: their explicit opposition to the Saussurian dichotomy between langue and parole; their belief that speech is both structured and emergent; their research on...

This is a case study of one contemporary inner‐city school told through interviews with teachers and other adults in the school community. Although the principal of 16 years had died 9 months before the interviews, the importance of the school is due to his work: how an educational leader communicated to the staff his vision of what a multiethnic s...

WillesM. J., Children into pupils: a study of language in early schooling. London: Routledge & Regan Paul, 1983. Pp. xi + 202. - Volume 13 Issue 2 - Courtney B. Cazden

This review discusses only research on the discourse structure of classroom activities—lessons and other activities in which the teacher is a participant— with special attention to assumptions underlying alternative models (in the non-technical sense of that word). Two other reviews (Cazden 1986a; in press) also discuss the register of teachers and...

Despite the questionable assumptions being made about why computers should be in schools there may well be considerable benefits to having them there. Computers can in principle be used to make educational resources more widely available (e.g., through network access to data bases and library resources), to facilitate more active student involvemen...

Descriptions of seven diverse bilingual education programs focus on instructional practices that have contributed to the programs' effectiveness as measured by exceptional student achievement, trained observers' perceptions of instructional quality, and the pride of professional staff and parents. The program settings and types include these: (1) a...

Vygotsky underlines the important role of the peer group in learning. A form of classroom interaction is to set up tutorials between fellow students, another is peer collaboration. Perret-Clermont considers that this type of peer interaction increases the development of reasoning through a process of cognitive reorganization induced by a sociocogni...

The social foundations of language and thought: Essays in honor of Jerome S. Bruner. OlsonDavid R. (Ed.). New York: W. W. Norton, 1980. Pp. xii + 386. - Volume 4 Issue 1 - Courtney B. Cazden

The acquisition of Spanish as a first language was investigated in a study of eight Puerto Rican children ranging in age from 17-39 months. The speech of the four children studied in Puerto Rico was analyzed in detail and compared with that of the four children taped in Boston. The children's speech was taped in natural situations and analyzed in t...

I have spent piy professional life going back and forth between the language worlds of the child at home and the child at school. For several years, I participated actively in research on early language acquisition. Recently, my work has returned to elementary school classrooms, where I started out. Questions about language in education were on my...

Examples of the differences between the oral language of Blacks and the standardized written language forced on them in English classrooms illustrate the need for teachers to appreciate language differences and to create a workable context for effective language instruction. (RL)

The comments focus on two topical themes and two aspects of research in the papers in this volume of the "Language and Ethnography" series dealing with ethnography and education. The first part deals with continuity and discontinuity in children's home and school lives. Borrowing from the field of second language learning, the point is made that po...

Reviews the book, Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition edited by Catherine E. Snow and Charles A. Ferguson (1977). This book began as a conference sponsored by the Social Science Research Council in September 1974. The conference brought together three groups of researchers: linguists interested in talk directed to young children ("b...

This paper reviews studies on classroom talk and on mother-child interaction; it compares the latter with classroom talk and speculates on what language in the classroom could be. The discussion of language in the classroom revolves around: (1) the speech situation, that is, a situation organized in terms of some nonverbal activity; (2) the speech...

Reviews the book, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America by Geneva Smitherman (1977). The book is is divided by two closely related but still separate purposes: first, a description of Black English-its history and present sounds, structure and style and second a discussion of “black-white language attitudes” and a strong argument for...

Too much attention is given to drill on the component skills of language and literacy and too little attention to their significant use. Component skills must be used in contexts that require their integration into some larger act that has a personal purpose that binds the parts into the whole. (Author/IRT)

van der GeestT., GerstelR., AppelR. & TervoortB., The child's communicative competence: language capacity in three groups of children from different social classes. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. - Volume 5 Issue 2 - Courtney B. Cazden

Reviews the book, Language Use and School Performance by Aaron V. Cicourel, Kenneth H. Jennings, Sybillyn H. M. Jennings, Kenneth C. W. Leiter, Robert MacKay, Hugh Mehan, and David R. Roth (1974). The book reports the first ethnomethodological analysis of educational processes. Ethnomethodologists study how people, through their social interactions...

Four recommendations for research and educational policy to achieve culturally responsive education are made and discussed: (l) because children differ in sensory modality strength, and the learning of all children in bilingual-bicultural education schools may be depressed in overly verbal environments, all such schools should plan more multisensor...

This chapter presents recent research on early stages of the child's acquisition of his first language, or mother tongue, in many countries. It presents evidence that the sentence construction process develops through some universal sequences, discusses possible determinants of this order of acquisition, and discusses speculations about what impels...

The purpose of this project was to make a preliminary investigation of the processes of second language acquisition by children, adolescents and adults, and to develop a methodology appropriate to the study of second language learning. In the development of the methodology, applicable techniques from first language acquisition research were incorpo...

The present study was designed to provide data on developmental and sociolinguistic patterns of interpersonal speech usage from ages 2 to 5 years which may have important implications for poverty school programs. The Ss included a longitudinal sample of four and a cross-sectional sample of 170 consisting of four groups-advantaged white, advantaged...

GahaganD.M. & GahaganG. A., Talk reform: explorations in language for infant school children. Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1970. - Volume 2 Issue 1 - Courtney B. Cazden, Elsa J. Bartlett

Presents a series of papers concerning sociological, psychological, linguistic, and anthropological perspectives of student-teacher communication. Nonverbal communication, bilingualism, black English, and the silence of Indian children are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

This paper considers language development among children and discusses the influence of the learning environment in the acquisition of language use as distinct from language structure. The results of the five studies reported here suggest that the child is aided by what he is encouraged to say, not simply by what he hears, and that adults seem to b...