Publications

Within the scholarly field of academically productive classroom dialogue, several elusive, yet rich and potent discourse moves have received special attention. However, their rarity and complexity also poses significant challenges to meeting interrater reliability thresholds, and they are often omitted from quantitative research efforts. We propose a different approach for coding that circumvents these issues, called DECCA. In this presentation, we showcase this methodology by focusing on teacher revoice. We demonstrate how it is possible to deconstruct this complex phenomenon into smaller and simpler elements. We then code each turn in the corpus for the existence or absence of each element (which we term Dialogue Elements, DEs). Adding a post-coding, pre-analysis stage allows us to extract turns which contain the specific combination of DEs relevant for revoice and distinguish it from similar teacher dialogue facilitation moves. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Focus group methods specialize in the analysis of interactive discourse, but are only rarely employed as a stand-alone method to study such phenomena, owing to inherent limitations concerning the comparability and generalizability of findings. In this paper, we argue that focus groups undergo three kinds of transformations, involving changes in participants’ cognitive states, social ties, and discursive behavior, which raise both analytic challenges and valuable opportunities for the study of shared meanings and interactive negotiation processes in society. Introducing Serial Focus Groups, we extend familiar focus group designs as a method for studying interactive discourse in a longitudinal perspective, capitalizing on the analytic potentials raised by these transformations. Reviewing the methodological literature and drawing upon two large-scale focus group studies of socially interactive sense-making, we argue that serial focus groups can help overcome some of the limitations of cross-sectional focus groups and offer valuable new opportunities for analysis and validation.

This article revisits claims made a decade ago about the importance of the word “sharing” in the context of social network sites (SNSs). Based on an analysis of the home pages of 61 SNSs between the years 2011 and 2020, the findings incontrovertibly show that “sharing” has lost its central place in the terminology employed by social media platforms in their self-presentation. Where in the mid-2000s SNSs relied heavily on a rhetoric of sharing to promote their services, by 2020, this rhetoric had been almost entirely dropped. The research reported here implies that social media platforms no longer feel a need or desire to be associated with these cultural beliefs. Given this, questions are raised as to whether “sharing” remains a keyword for social media.