Intertextual meanings between written and spoken ...

Citation: Tang, K.-S., & Tan, S.-C. (2017). Intertextuality and Multimodal Meanings in High School Physics: Written and Spoken Language in Computer-supported Collaborative Student Discourse. Classroom Discourse, 8(1), 19-35. doi:10.1080/19463014.2016.1263576

Intertextuality and multimodal meanings in high school physics: written and spoken language in computer-supported collaborative student discourse

Kok-Sing Tang School of Education Curtin University [email protected]

Seng-Chee Tan National Institute of Education Nanyang Technological University [email protected]

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Intertextuality and multimodal meanings in high school physics: written and spoken language in computer-supported collaborative student discourse Abstract The study in this article examines and illustrates the intertextual meanings made by a group of high school science students as they embarked on a knowledge building discourse to solve a physics problem. This study is situated in a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment designed to support student learning through a science inquiry curriculum enacted in a classroom. As the CSCL environment is intensively mediated by written texts and spoken dialogue, the environment presents a unique opportunity to investigate the relationship between intertextuality and collaborative knowledge building. Drawing from a dialogic and semiotic perspective of intertextuality, a framework based on systemic functional linguistics was used to analyze the intertextual and multimodal relations between the written and spoken forms of language used to solve the physics problem. Results indicate that in a CSCL environment, the thematic integration of the written and spoken forms of language is critical in the progress of the collaborative inquiry. In particular, written texts provide the contextual meanings to facilitate the students’ collaborative discourse, while spoken language creates new meanings by building bridges across the written texts. The implications of these analyses and findings for classroom discourse as well as potential for future research are discussed.

Keywords Intertextuality, multimodality, systemic functional linguistics, science inquiry, collaborative discourse, computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL)

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Intertextuality and Classroom Research Classroom discourse is mediated by an assemblage of texts comprising spoken utterances, written words, images, mathematical symbols, gestures, and other semiotic modes of representations (Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn, & Tsatsarelis, 2001; Lemke, 2000). An important concept that facilitates our understanding of how meanings are constructed through the juxtaposition and assemblage of texts is intertextuality (Shuart-Faris & Bloome, 2004). The initial theoretical basis of intertextuality can be traced back to Bakhtin’s dialogism (1986) which asserts that no utterance or written text can exist in isolation as its meaning only exists in continual dialogue with a chain of speech communication or historicity of texts. The term “intertextuality” was later coined by Kristeva (1980) in a literary context to denote authors’ borrowing and transformation as well as readers’ referencing of multiple texts. Kristeva also introduced a semiotic interpretation to intertextuality by relating texts to their underlying cultural and ideological structures. This expands the notion of intertextuality beyond the dialogic assemblage of individual texts to include the semiotic systems and social practices that shape and are shaped by the formation of texts. As such, intertextuality is not just about the juxtaposition between different texts, but also between different semiotic systems (Lemke, 1992). Education researchers have over the years applied intertextuality to understand how interactions and knowledge are socially constructed through classroom discourse. Early research examined the role of intertextuality in classroom events such as reading and writing (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993; Hartman, 1992; Kamberelis & Scott, 1992; Lemke, 1992) as well as the collaborative and dialogic processes in classroom talk (Pappas, Varelas, Barry, & Rife, 2004; Short, 1992; Wells, 1999). Much analysis has shown how teachers and students frequently use intertextuality to mediate their interactions, mutual identifications and knowledge construction 3


(Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993). By the turn of the century, when text analysis shifted from a logocentric emphasis towards multiple modes of representation, or multimodality, researchers began to see how new meanings could be created through the intertextual relationships across different semiotic modes, such as speech and written texts (Wells, 2000), images (Kress et al., 2001; Lemke, 1998b), and mathematical symbolism (O'Halloran, 2000). This has provided new insights into how disciplinary knowledge in content-area classrooms, such as science and mathematics are made through language and other semiotic systems (e.g., Lemke, 2000; O'Halloran, 2005; Tang, 2011, 2013). In the new digital age, intertextuality continues to be an important concept to aid our understanding of new ways of learning and meaning-making brought about through digital media and emerging technologies. However, few have explored the role of intertextuality in a computer-supported learning environment, particularly in high school physics. Thus, this paper aims to extend the concept of intertextuality into a new teaching and learning context that is increasingly mediated by technology. In particular, the study in this paper is situated in a science inquiry curriculum that was designed to guide a group of high school students in learning physics through a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment. Because the use of CSCL in a classroom is heavily mediated by written text and spoken dialogue, this environment presents a unique opportunity to investigate the intertextual meanings made by students in a collaborative environment as well as the simultaneous mutual contextualization between speech and writing during a physics inquiry lesson. Within this context, the research question that guided this study was: how are meanings made intertextually through the interplay of spoken and written language in a CSCL environment?

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Theoretical & Pedagogical Perspectives This study is informed and framed by two major perspectives of intertextuality. The first perspective focuses on the dialogic and interactional nature of intertextuality based on the theoretical works of Bakhtin (1981, 1986). This perspective is generally useful in examining the local events and processes of how students and teachers in the classroom act and react to each other through the use of language in their conversation (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993). The second perspective focuses on the semiotic systems and the broader language practices that shape and are shaped by the local events, and is informed by Halliday (1978) and Lemke (1990, 1995). A Dialogic Perspective of Intertextuality According to Bakhtin (1986), any utterance is a retrospective response to preceding utterances and is oriented prospectively to the anticipated utterances, thus forming “a link in the chain of speech communication” (p. 89). Within this dialogic perspective, Bloome and EganRobertson (1993) assert that the formation of an intertextual chain from texts is not a priori determined, but is a social construction through the contingent and sequential acts made by the participants. Particularly, they proposed several criteria for the formation of an intertextual relationship, namely the texts juxtaposed “must be proposed, be interactionally recognized, be acknowledged, and have social significance” (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993, p.308). In this social construction, various contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1982) are also employed by the participants, such as verbal and prosodic signals, gaze, gesture, and proxemics, to make known their proposal, recognition, and acknowledgement to one another. From an analytical viewpoint, these criteria and contextualization cues are useful in determining where and what the intertextual links are within classroom talk. 5


A Semiotic Perspective of Intertextuality The intellectual origin of social semiotics is based on Halliday’s (1978, 1994) meaningoriented model of language. Halliday views grammar as a resource for simultaneously making three kinds of meanings. The first, called the ideational metafunction, is for construing events of and experience about the world, and corresponds to the thematic content of what is said. The second, called the interpersonal metafunction, is for enacting our attitude towards and social relationships with our audience, as well as our stance towards the thematic content. Finally, textual metafunction is the third kind for organizing smaller meaning elements (e.g., words, clauses, sentences) together into a coherent text. From these 3 metafunctions, there exist what Lemke (1992, p. 258) calls patterns of intertextuality where “members of a particular community [are more likely to] make connections of some kinds and between some texts” that are being seen as on the same topic (ideational), same point of view (interpersonal), and same genre structure (textual; e.g., lab reports, narrative stories). These patterns form the intertexts (Lemke, 1992) for which we use to make meanings of any social circumstances. How exactly do people recognize what forms an intertext? This is explained by Halliday’s (1978) theory of register; the semantic varieties of language-in-use that are characteristic of particular activities. For different activities, there are a recognizable patterns defined by systematic differences in the frequencies of various grammatical and semantic features in the texts. For members within the science and science education communities (and likewise for other fields like mathematics and economics), the web of intertexts that constitute what members can recognize as talking about the same science topic is quite consistent and canonical. This accounts for why any science textbook can be seen as saying more or less the same thing as another textbook or a teacher’s lecture on a common topic (e.g., energy) even though the exact words 6


used are different. This is also the same reason how an experienced science teacher can judge whether a student succeeds or fails to learn the necessary scientific concepts as taught in the school curriculum. Lemke (1990) calls this pattern of semantic relationships that repeatedly constitutes the same recognizable content a “thematic pattern”. In addition, he develops a framework to analyze the thematic patterns that simultaneously shape and are shaped by the science conversation in a classroom (Lemke, 1990, 1998a). Intertextuality is also an important idea in multimodality. As we hardly make meaning with one semiotic mode alone, multimodality examines the combination of more than one semiotic mode in meaning making. According to Lemke’s (1998b) “multiplying meaning” principle, new sets of meanings that cannot be made with one semiotic mode can now be created by combining the meaning potential of a mode to cross-contextualize the meaning of another. As this crosscontextualization semiotic feature is commonly found in scientific texts, it presents a multiliteracy challenge for science students to simultaneously integrate these multiple modes in order for them to understand the scientific concept within the multimodal text (Lemke, 2000). From a social semiotic perspective, a scientific concept is a network of semantic relationships assembled across multiple modes of representation. As Tang (2011, p.116) argues, in the context of the science curriculum, “what makes a scientific concept correct or meaningful is the canonical and recognizable ways of assembling these relationships according to the discourse practices of a scientific community”. CSCL and Knowledge Building Computer-supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is a learning environment developed around the 1990s in an effort to transform traditional and behaviorist ways of teaching into a pupil-centered pedagogy supported by technology. Informed by a social-constructivist 7


view of learning, CSCL is characterized by the joint construction of knowledge among students using computers and the Internet, either synchronously or asynchronously in a classroom or online environment (Stahl, 2004). Generally speaking, the aims of CSCL are to foster deep learning, social collaboration and problem solving in education. CSCL is a broad area which encompasses several pedagogical approaches or models that share similar instructional characteristics. One popular model is Bereiter and Scardamalia’s Knowledge Building (1994) which was designed to foster a community of learners that is able to create public knowledge or cognitive artifacts as a result of collective goals, group discussions, and synthesis of ideas. In Knowledge Building, students are given authentic and real-world problems and guided to participate in progressive discourse to advance their knowledge in solving the problems. A notable feature of Knowledge Building is the use of information and communication technology to support a communal and proprietary database called Knowledge Forum for students to post their hypotheses, critique and improve on one another’s ideas, and synthesize ideas to build common knowledge. This database is needed in order to support two important pedagogical principles of Knowledge Building: community knowledge and idea improvement (Scardamalia, 2002). First, in order to make knowledge public and visible among the community of learners, students need to post their ideas on an online database that is accessible by every member in the classroom. Second, the database facilitates students’ posted ideas to be modified and tracked, thus supporting the second principle that every idea is a contribution that can be improved upon and developed into a collective knowledge. The CSCL environment, the enactment of the Knowledge Building pedagogy, and the use of a digital repository for students’ written notes in our research project provided a unique 8


opportunity to investigate the role of intertextuality and multimodal connections between written and spoken language in physics collaborative discourse. This research setting will be further elaborated in the next section. Method Research & Instructional Context The analysis presented in this paper was taken from a year-long research project situated in a ninth-grade physics classroom in Singapore. The aim of the project was to introduce Knowledge Building as an alternative pedagogical model to traditional behavorist methods of teaching science. Guided by the principles of Knowledge Building (notably community knowledge and improvable ideas), a curriculum was designed to let students from a physics classroom engage in an inquiry on solving real-world problems. Due to proprietary issues, a different CSCL platform called Knowledge Constructor was designed and used to facilitate the collaborative discourse among the students and teacher. In this curriculum which consisted of three face-to-face 2 hour lessons, the instructional objective was to apply the work-energy theorem to investigate the causes of a fictional rollercoaster accident as the rollercoaster fell under the influence of gravity from a certain height. The lessons were structured into different inquiry stages, such as experimenting with a miniature model, brainstorming questions to research, and discussing in small groups. To facilitate collaborative learning, the class was divided into groups of four to five students according to a mixed variation in ability and gender. Each student carried a tablet computer and used it to read on the Internet and post their findings and discussion on Knowledge Constructor. As the content of the curriculum was new to the students, the discussion (both online and face-to-face) presented the opportunity to examine the students’ ongoing understanding of the 9


topic as well as the difficulties they faced. The students’ conversation were video recorded and they were evaluated in conjunction with their written posts on Knowledge Constructor. Thus, both the spoken and written data allowed the analysis of the complementary roles and mutual coordination between the spoken and written modes of meaning in the students’ knowledge construction process. In Singapore, English is designated as the first language and the medium of instruction for all academic subjects, except for language classes. Although most students could speak a common second language, such as Mandarin, all recorded conversations were in English. Data Sources & Analysis In this study, we used a case study approach (Yin, 2013) to investigate the intertextual meanings made through the coordination between spoken and written language in the CSCL learning environment. Case study was utilized because it provided a holistic and in-depth examination of the meaning-making process within a bounded system consisting of a group of students collaborating together, as well as the larger context involving the instructional activities, classroom environment and physics curriculum. Aligned with a case study logic of inquiry, we examined the discussion from a selected group of five students over a three week period. This group was purposefully selected based on the teachers’ recommendation of their good teamwork, in order that the group would provide a revealing case (Mitchell, 1983) for our specific research question, which is: In terms of the dialogic and the semiotic perspectives on intertextuality, how did the group of students make ideational meanings on the work-energy theorem through the coordination between spoken and written language in the CSCL environment?

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The data in this study were taken from the postings from Knowledge Constructor and video records of the students’ conversation. The first phase of the analysis was to identify and categorize episodes within each instructional stage. Unlike stages which were often demarcated by instructional activities according to the teacher’s plan (e.g. teacher’s monologue, triadic dialogue, group discussion), episodes were smaller units of students’ discourse with a common theme or purpose. In this case, the interplay between the online postings and face-to-face conversations presented unique boundaries that identify episodes with particular functions and meanings made possible by the cross-contextualization (Lemke, 1998b) between the two different forms of language (i.e. spoken and written). The identification and summaries of the episodes provided a broad perspective of the major patterns of the discourse and were used as a context for the next phase of analysis. Episodes that illustrated this cross-contextualization and were instrumental for the knowledge construction process were then selected and the corresponding video transcribed (using Jefferson’s (2004) transcription notation) for a more detailed analysis. For the next phase of analysis, we used analytical methods informed by systemic functional linguistics. First, we used identification analysis (see Martin & Rose, 2007) to keep track of who said what at any point during the conversation. This includes the tracking of (i) pronouns to identify the students’ contribution of ideas in the collaborative discourse and (ii) scientific terms to identify the introduction and development of ideas in the discourse. Second, to understand the science content developed through the students’ discourse, we used Lemke’s thematic analysis (1990) to construct the semantic relationships of key words found in the students’ written notes and dialogue, and then to contrast the differences between the spoken and written modes of meaning. 11


Findings In this paper, we present in details an episode that is illustrative of the way spoken and written language were cross-contextualized to make meanings through the CSCL environment. This episode occurred during an early stage of the knowledge construction process where the students individually searched the Internet for information after they had identified their group research question, which was “how does friction affect the point at which the car stops?” The five students in this group were Daisy, Ida, Jack, Christine, and Alison. Two of them, Daisy and Ida, had separately posted their findings on Knowledge Constructor minutes apart from each other. At the incipient stage of the knowledge construction process, it was observed that students often copied the text verbatim from some websites they found in their Internet search. Despite the fact that the students merely copied the information obtained from the Internet at this point, this was an important stage for the subsequent knowledge construction. The importance of this phenomenon for the students’ subsequent knowledge construction can be explained by both the dialogic and semiotic perspectives of intertextuality. First, every member in the group tacitly selected texts from a labyrinth of related texts or hypertext (Lemke, 1992) based on their interpretation of the texts’ relevance and importance. Thus, the websites accessed by the students form an intertext which the students recognized from the semantic varieties of language as having the same ideational topic (e.g., energy of rollercoasters), interpersonal point of view (e.g., technicality) and textual structure (e.g., explanation genre). When the students subsequently juxtaposed these texts in their online interaction, they drew on this intertext to construct a chain of communication to recontextualize and reinterpret the meanings of the texts within the context of the present activity (i.e., solving the rollercoaster problem). In this process, the students began 12


to break away from this verbatim copying as they began to interpret the written texts posted by everyone in the group and incorporate relevant content from these texts into their subsequent dialogue – which will be shown later. This episode began with Daisy posting Note A and followed by Ida posting Note B on Knowledge Constructor. After Daisy finished reading Ida’s note on her tablet, she turned to talk to Ida and the following dialogue from line 1 – 16 ensued. After the dialogue, the episode ended with a summary posted by Daisy [See Note C]. In what follows, the written notes and oral excerpt are presented in its chronological order.

Note A – Daisy Title: Idea of Energy There is a change from potential energy to kinetic energy. In the absence of external forces such as air resistance and friction (two of many), the total amount of an object's energy remains constant. On a coaster ride, energy is rapidly transformed from potential energy to kinetic energy when falling and from kinetic energy to potential energy when rising. Yet the total amount of energy remains constant. (From Amusement Park Physics: http://www.learner.org/interactives/parkphysics/glossary.html)

Note B – Ida Title: Friction Friction plays a major role in actual roller coaster physics, where mechanical energy (the sum of potential and kinetic energy) is not constant. The frictional force itself is in direct opposition to the motion of the coaster. The friction of the wheels on the track, the wheel bearings in oil, and wind drag all contribute to the dissipation of mechanical energy throughout the ride, especially at

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the end of the ride, when the remaining kinetic energy is transferred out of the system by the application of the brakes. (From Friction – Britannica: http://kids.britannica.com/coasters/physics/Friction.html)

Excerpt 1. The following symbols from Jefferson’ notation as well as our identification analysis were used in the following transcript: =

"Latched" or nearly overlapping turns at talk

()

Transcription of questionable or inaudible talk

(.)

Very brief untimed intervals of silence

(2.)

Intervals between utterances, timed in seconds

(( ))

Transcriber’s description

Tracking of pronouns

Underline Tracking of scientific terms

1

Daisy: Ida, it’s not because I’m correct. different from , ‘cos says there’s amount of energy remains constant, ⋅ say doesn’t (18.) ((Ida finds and reads Daisy’s post – see Note A))

2

Ida: is what energy?..

3

Daisy: Hmm?

4

Ida: is what energy?..

5

Daisy: potential and kinetic..... which equals mechanical energy what (47.)

6

Daisy: I know why. Cos considers… like ⋅ the wheel bearings and the wind drag right? But is… don’t consider external factor (9.) 14


7

Ida: but must consider?... Or don’t need?

8

Jack: but it’s impossible to don’t ⋅ don’t ⋅ um ⋅ like = ignore

9

Daisy: = yah… so I think the whole point is that are supposed to think about the factors…

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Ida: but have air resistance also

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Daisy: ((reading out from text – Note A)) “in the absence of air resistance and friction” (15.) (( Daisy began typing her reply to Ida’s post))

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Ida: that means if there’s air resistance and friction, then ⋅ the amount of… it will not remain constant?

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Daisy: because the energy is used up for other

14

Jack: but air resistance ⋅ air resistance doesn’t mean there’s friction what

15

Daisy: nooo… as in… (8.) ((Daisy finds and read from Ida’s post – see Note B))

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Daisy: It says that (reading from text) the friction of the wheels ⋅ on the track, the wheel bearings in oil, and wind drag all contribute to the dis ⋅ sipation of ⋅ mechanical energy what ((Daisy copied this phrase from Ida’s note into the new note she had begun earlier. A moment later, she posted Note C))

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Note C - Daisy Title: More external factors in context to my post on "idea of energy", which explains that "In the absence of external forces such as air resistance and friction (two of many), the total amount of an object's energy remains constant.". Ida's post is stating that "mechanical energy (the sum of potential and kinetic energy) is not constant... The friction of the wheels on the track, the wheel bearings in oil, and wind drag all contribute to the dissipation of mechanical energy throughout the ride." What are some factors we can consider?

In the following analysis, we will first illustrate, through an identification analysis, how written texts provided the contextual meanings to facilitate the students’ collaborative discourse, followed by a thematic analysis to examine the reciprocal relationship of how the spoken dialogue created new meanings by building bridges across the students’ written texts. As intertextuality, according to the semiotic perspective, is a relation of the meanings from words and not the words themselves as signs, we carried out the thematic analysis first to see if the same words spoken by different interlocutors are consistent in meanings before we perform the identification analysis. For instance, while both Daisy and Ida used the same word “friction” in their conversation, we need to examine how this word was used by them in relation to other words (e.g., an external force, reduce energy) to find out if both utterances were consistent in meaning. Cross-contextualization for collaborative discourse. In excerpt 1, the use of demonstratives for text references (e.g., it) and pronouns for possessive references (e.g., yours, my one) are prominent within the first six lines of the spoken dialogue. For instance, Daisy

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began the spoken dialogue [turn 1] by using references like “yours” and “it” to refer to Ida’s note [note B], and “what I posted” and “my one” to refer to her own [note A]. Such references were important for the collaborative action for two reasons. First, they helped to establish the interactional and contingent construction of intertextuality as proposed by Bloome and EganRobertson (1993) in that Daisy’s proposal for the interactional connection was recognized and acknowledged as significant by Ida. Second, these references are used as markers for the dense information from each written note (e.g., yours  Note B, my one  Note A) and these markers were subsequently used to make further meanings as illustrated in turn 1 when Daisy made a contrast between the meanings of the two notes. The subsequent references to each other’s notes [turn 2, 4 and 6] further facilitated the exchanges of meanings between Daisy and Ida’s ideas as they talked to each other. Such uses of references are typical of spoken dialogue that is contextualized in some shared written text (Martin & Rose, 2007). By tracking the pronouns in the identification analysis, one can see there is a shift from individual to collective reference in line 7 when the pronoun “we” was used by Ida to signal the next step of action required to break the conundrum previously discussed in turn 1-6, namely whether they needed to consider the external factors. Ida’s question (“must we consider [the factors]?”) was instrumental for Daisy to follow up with her suggestion that “we are supposed to think about the factors” (line 9), thus defining a direction for future collaborative effort. This was also the first collaborative effort as prior to this, the students were mostly doing individual work. Daisy’s suggestion in line 9, together with the thematic contrast between note A and B that led to the question, was then summarized from the spoken dialogue and documented into a written text [note C]. By examining the group’s discussion threads in Knowledge Constructor following this episode, it was observed that the permanence of this question: “What are some factors we can 17


consider?” encoded in Note C was crucial for subsequent collaborative actions as the members began to search for more information regarding the “factors” the students were “supposed to think about” (line 9) and “can consider” (note C). Besides the participants and their notes, the thematic meanings of scientific terms that were introduced in either mode and carried across to the other are also identified and tracked. In this episode, the recurring ones are “external forces/factors” and “air resistance and friction” in note A and “friction of the wheels, wheel bearings and wind drag” in note B. These terms were taken up in the dialogue by Daisy in turn 6, developed further in turn 9-12 and 16, and finally encoded in the written text in note C. From the dialogic principle of intertextuality, what is critical here is that, as the terms were being carried into the dialogue, the meanings of these words no longer stood in isolation within the immediate context of the dialogue but were also interpreted in connection with the “historicity of texts” (Bakhtin, 1986) read and introduced earlier by Daisy and Ida. A good example can be seen in turn 6 when Daisy reintroduced in spoken form the terms “wheel bearing and wind drag” from note B and “external forces” from note A 1 within a single turn. Without understanding the intertextual meanings of these terms made with note A and note B, it would be difficult for other members to understand Daisy’s statement. However, by analyzing the thematic relationships of these terms (shown in left side of Figure 1), we see from Daisy’s note [note A] that air resistance and friction are sub-classes of external forces, and from Ida’s note [note B] that friction of the wheels, wheel bearings and wind drag are similar examples and so are members within the same class. As both notes include the term “friction”, this establishes a 1

In line 6, Daisy said “external factor” instead of “external forces” written in note A. This suggested that Daisy recognized that in the context of her conversation with Ida, the “external forces” from note A are equivalent to the external factors (e.g., air resistance, friction) that affect the rollercoaster’s mechanical energy.

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connection between the two notes which Daisy then used to draw the contrast between one that considers the factors (Note B) and the other that does not (Note A) in her utterance in turn 6. The subsequent follow-ups by Ida and Jack (right side of Figure 1) demonstrate that they not only recognized the underlying intertextual meanings made with note A and B behind Daisy’s utterance, but were able to pick up from her contrast between Note A and B the issue of whether to consider the factors or not.

Member/class

Daisy’s Note

I know why. Cos yours considers ⋅ like ⋅ the wheel bearings and the wind drag right? But mine is… don’t consider external factor

Air resistance External forces

co-hyponym

Friction part

Daisy must we consider?

Friction of wheels on track

Ida

co-hyponym

impossible to ignore

Friction of wheel bearings

Jack

co-hyponym

Wind drag

we are supposed to think about the factors

Ida’s Note

Daisy

What are some factors we can consider? Daisy’s Final Note

Figure 1. Intertextual meanings within and between modes and people.

Following the thread of their discussion, we see that the verb consider, first mentioned by Daisy in line 6, was subsequently foregrounded and serves as the word (with its synonyms and antonyms like think about and ignore) that carries the larger intertextual meanings made with both the written notes and spoken dialogue that just took place. The eventual encoding of the words consider and factors in the final written statement of this episode [note C] embodies the

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intertextual meanings made possible by the cross-contextualization of written notes and spoken dialogue as well as the collaborative turn-takings among the participants. Similar to the use of pronouns, the inscription of the last statement – “What are some factors we can consider?” – is an important step for further knowledge construction about the factors affecting the rollercoaster accident. Bridging meanings across written texts. From a thematic analysis, the thematic pattern (Lemke, 1990) of note A and B is shown in Figure 2. Semantically, the medium (a noun or noun phase in a clause without which the clause cannot exist; Halliday, 1994), attribute (a relational process type that specifies the quality of the medium; Halliday, 1994), and circumstance (prepositional phrases or adverbials signifying time, place, or manner) in each note are very similar, namely the content of the notes is about energy (medium) being constant/not constant (attribute) under different circumstance (influence of external forces consisting of friction, air resistance etc.) From a semiotic perspective of intertextuality, these two texts are almost talking about the same things and can be considered as intertexts of one another (Lemke, 1992). However, from a dialogic perspective, as each note came from different websites, there was no intertextual connection between them (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993) until they were being interactionally used by people to make sense of a situation, discourse, or another text. In this section, we will show that in the ensuing spoken dialogue, the students bridged the meanings of the two texts by creating an intertextual meaning between them and the material situation they were investigating.

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possess

object

[ energy

synonym

[ coaster

constant]

hyponym m/p

m/p

falls ] event/time [ PE

contrast

[ coaster

c/a

co-hyponym

rises ]

m/p

event/time

[ KE

m/p

remains p/b

change

cause

[ absent

a/c

external forces ] hyponym

air resistance

KE ]

co-hyponym m/p

p/b

change

friction

PE ]

Daisy’s Note

[

wind drag

m/p manner not mech c/a ] dissipates constant energy

hyponym

PE

co-hyponym ag/p

opposes

friction

hyponym

p/m

[ motion

a/c

coaster ]

friction of wheels on track

KE friction of wheel bearings Legend: a – attribute c – carrier

ag – agent m – medium

Ida’s Note

b – beneficiary p – process

Figure 2. Thematic formation of each written note in isolation.

[ coaster

m/p

falls ]

contrast

[ coaster

m/p

possess

change

[ PE

co-hyponym

[ KE

rises ]

synonym

object

event/time

m/p

KE ] p/b

change

Daisy’s Note

PE ]

hyponym

[ energy

c/a

constant]

m/p

remains

cause

[ absence

a/c

external forces ] hyponym

air resistance medium Equivalence [turn 5]

[

attribute

circumstances

Contrast [turn 1]

Contrast [turn 6]

m/p manner not mech c/a dissipates ] constant energy

hyponym

PE

co-hyponym

friction Bridging by Spoken Dialogue

wind drag co-hyponym ag/p

friction

hyponym

opposes

p/m

[ motion

a/c

coaster ]

friction of wheels on track

KE friction of wheel bearings

Figure 3. Combined thematic formation bridged by spoken dialogue.

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Ida’s Note


As the spoken dialogue frequently made references to several words used in the written notes (as shown earlier), new meanings were being created through an intertextual connection between the written texts and the spoken dialogue (see Figure 3). First, after Daisy highlighted the difference between Ida’s note and her own in turn 1, Ida asked a crucial question to clarify whether both notes were talking about the same kind of energy as they both understood it [turn 2 & 4]. Daisy’s reply in turn 5 which used the word “mechanical energy” – a term introduced in Ida’s note – explicitly forms an equivalent link between the medium (i.e. energy) of the two notes (the word ‘mechanical’ is not mentioned at all in Daisy’s note). Yet, by contrasting the different states of energy (constant vs. not constant) in turn 1, a contrasting relationship was also established between the attributes (i.e. constancy) of the two notes. Finally, as we saw earlier, the contrasting relationship between the ‘external factors’ and no ‘external factors’ in turn 6 also established another link between the circumstances (i.e. manner) of the notes. Thus, with the bridging constructed by the spoken dialogue, the meanings from each separate note were now combined and expanded to encompass a larger thematic pattern as shown in Figure 3. From factors to equation. Subsequently, the students continued to discuss what factors they needed to consider in the rollercoaster problem for another 30 odd minutes. The pattern of alternating between the written notes and oral communication continued in a similar way that was presented earlier. A notable development in the discussion was the emerging idea to express the factors into a mathematical equation. To sum up this development, Figure 4 shows several crucial notes within the intertextual chain of written texts. In note D, which occurred a few minutes after note C, Daisy reiterated several factors they had to consider such as friction, gravity, and speed. In note E, Jack added that the amount of friction will determine the stopping distance of the rollercoaster, in addition to other factors like the wheels and air resistance. This 22


was the first time the idea of a stopping distance was introduced. This idea was continued by Ida who related the shorter stopping distance in terms of friction reducing the potential energy and kinetic energy. Then, in note G, Jack added why they had to consider friction, otherwise the rollercoaster would never stop. Another student, Christine, then explained in note H the importance of friction in terms of energy conservation of potential and kinetic energy. In note I, the teacher directly referred to Christine’s note (by copying part of her text) and asked the group to “express this relation in some form of an equation”. This was taken up by Jack who suggested a formula to calculate the work done by friction. (The students knew that work done is a form of energy that affects the amount of mechanical energy in the rollercoaster). While Figure 4 shows the chain of written notes in the development of the students’ ideas, it is important to remember – just as we have seen earlier – that the intertextual construction was mediated by spoken dialogue (not shown here), which created new meanings by building bridges across the written texts. Eventually, after 2 more lessons, the group managed to solve the problem and wrote a final report to explain why the accident happened. Besides a group report, every student also wrote a reflection on what they had learned from the curriculum in terms of the content and learning environment. Figure 5 shows a part of the reflection written by Daisy, who was given a distinction from the teacher. From the ‘Concepts I learnt’ column, we can see the products of the ideas that were discussed earlier, notably “External factors formula: force x displacement x cosine (theta)” and “force – friction and air resistance”. From the “What else I want to know” column, we can see that the question she had raised during the discussion, “what factors to consider”, remained at the end of the curriculum. The students had already investigated the factors of friction and air resistance, but like most physics problems, they were also aware there might be other factors involved which they had not considered in their equation. Thus, she raised 23


this question as something she was still interested to know after the lessons were over. Most of her teammates, such as Jack and Ida, also had this question in their reflections.

Note D - Daisy Title: factors

Note H - Christine Title: Friction is more important

What are some factors we can consider?

without friction, the sum of potential and kinetic energy will remain constant after the train leaves the lift. Taking friction into account, this sum will continually decrease throughout the ride. So later in the ride, the train can't climb as high as it could in the beginning. To climb a high hill may require more energy than the train has left. Furthermore, at the bottom of hills, the train will tend to go slower at the end of the ride than it did at the beginning, because to go fast also means having a lot of energy.

we can consider gravity, friction and speed of the roller coaster.

Note E - Jack Title: factors in which affect motion the amount of friction will determine the distance in which the roller coaster comes to a halt// however other factors also contribute such as wheels, using magnetic forces, air resistance, steepness of the slope leading to the potential energy gain etc

Note I – Ms Tan Title: an equation? "without friction, the sum of potential and kinetic energy will remain constant after the train leaves the lift. Taking friction into account, this sum will continually decrease throughout the ride."

Note F - Ida Title: Friction friction would reduce the potential energy that the roller coaster has so the kinetic energy would thus be reduced and the car can thus travel a shorter distance. This covers the concept behind the roller coaster that it would stop before the barrier as potential energy is reduced by friction, causing the car to travel lesser distance

Can you express this relation in some form of an equation, so that there is some means by which we can quantitatively and convincingly propose a scientific solution to the crash accident, beyond mere description in words..

Note J – Jack Title: find stopping distance

Note G - Jack Title: impossible to elminate other factors iff u eliminate other factors like air resistance, friction etc, the roller coaster will never stopp in the first place since energy is neither gain nor lost..if, u concentrate on factors like mass, speed the result wil be completly different from the one which includes air resistance and friction

as friction exist to oppose motion thus coming to a stop, we need a formula to calculate friction Once the brakes are applied, the force of friction acts upon the car. The work done by friction on the skidding car is proportional to stopping distance according to the equation Work = Force * displacement * cosine(Theta)

Figure 4. Intertextual chain of written texts from “consideration of factors” to “expression of an equation”

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Figure 5. Reflection of learning submitted by Daisy

In sum, the analysis presented here shows how the written and spoken forms of language mutually contextualize the meanings across each mode. In particular, written texts provide the contextual meanings to facilitate the students’ collaborative discourse, while spoken language creates new meanings by building bridges across the written texts. The intertextual meanings formed by combining both modes (shown in the first episode) have not only helped the students construct their scientific understanding but also pushed their collaborative discourse forward, as seen from chain of written notes (Figure 4) and the students’ reflection (Figure 5).

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Discussion and Implications The findings from this study contribute to our understanding of how intertextual meanings are made in a CSCL environment and how the appropriate use of this intertextuality could create situations to help students overcome their difficulties in learning and collaboration. Due to the unique CSCL setting that facilitated the interchange between students’ written notes and their conversation, we were able to show how the intertextual and multimodal connections between the written and spoken modes contributed to the ongoing collaborative discourse among the group of students. Specifically, there were two factors crucial to the students’ collaboration and knowledge construction. The first factor was related to the dialogic aspect of intertextuality (illustrated from the identification analysis) where the negotiation of meanings of important words in a dialogue must be understood in the contexts of the written texts brought into the dialogue. The second factor was related to the semiotic aspect of intertextuality (illustrated from the thematic analysis) where new meanings were made by verbally making new semantic relationships among the words in the written texts. In addition to highlighting how the spoken and written modes complement each other via the dialogic and semiotic aspects of intertextuality, we also illustrated more specifically the linguistic mechanism of how the complementary roles of the spoken and written modes contributed to the student’s knowledge construction in physics. First, written texts with its rich semantic relationships as laid out in a systematic manner (exemplified in Figure 2) were used as shared contextual resources to facilitate the exchange of meanings in a spoken dialogue (exemplified in Figure 1). On the other hand, through the foregrounding of similarity and contrast in the students’ dialogue, we can see that dialogue can also help to build bridges and expand the meanings of the written texts (exemplified in Figure 3). 26


The findings from this case study have implications to the pedagogy and design of CSCL environments. As we have seen, the pattern of alternating between the written notes and oral communication supported the joint negotiation and progression of ideas. This highlights the affordances of a CSCL environment which need to be reinforced or encouraged in a technologyenhanced classroom or distance learning setting. For a classroom setting, which was the case in this study, this would imply giving time and structuring instruction for a cyclical process of reading on the Internet (or a selected set of readings), selecting information to post on the forum, discussing (face-to-face) the postings from the forum, and writing new notes from the discussion. For a distance learning setting, this process is quite similar with the exception of using video conferencing to substitute the face-to-face discussion. In sum, this case study demonstrates the potential of CSCL as well as provides a detailed look into its collaborative processes as mediated by the complementary roles of written notes and oral communication. Besides a CSCL environment, the same implications are also applicable in a more typical classroom setting where the use of dialogue together with textual materials such as textbooks, worksheets and overhead projections are pervasive. First, lesson activities should not be compartmentalized based on a linear sequence of clearly defined partitions of reading, discussion, writing, teacher’s exposition, small-group’s talk, and individual seatwork, where the focus is entirely on one mode of representation. Such instructional strategies fail to harness the powerful intertextual potential of combining multiple modes that are available in the classroom. Instead, as far as possible, different modes should be used simultaneously and judiciously by the class in every activity (Prain, Tytler, & Peterson, 2009; Tang, 2011). For instances, students should be given more opportunity to discuss in small groups about the text they are reading. This is because the familiar and dynamic aspect of dialogue can help them bridge and expand the 27


meaning of a densely and abstractly written text (c.f. unpacking; Martin, 2013). Conversely, the written text should also be used appropriately as contextual resources to mediate the exchange of meanings in the dialogue and systematically connect them into a coherent shared meaning. This can be facilitated with the use of a discussion worksheet or an overhead slide as a publicly visible resource for the groups to focus their attention on while making intertextual meanings between the text and their dialogue. Although we are aware that many teachers are already incorporating such instructional strategies, some may simply be following the pedagogical structure without understanding the linguistic rationale and the process of constructing intertextual meanings, both dialogically and semiotically, between text and speech. Thus, this case study provides an illustration of how the written and spoken form of language can be used in complementary ways to construct intertextual meanings and, in so doing, help teachers become better facilitators through harnessing this potential. Future research of teachers’ familiarity in facilitating intertextual meaning between various texts and dialogue in the classroom may reveal important lessons for designing teacher education and professional development programs that will advance their competency in this area. Acknowledgement The research reported in this paper is funded by a research grant, LSL 1/04 TSC, from the Learning Sciences Laboratory, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. We remain, nonetheless, solely responsible for the views and statements made herein.

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