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Chapter for K Tobin & B Fraser, (Eds). International Handbook of Science Education (Kluwer)

ANALYSING VERBAL DATA: PRINCIPLES, METHODS, AND PROBLEMS

J.L. LEMKE
Increasingly, the data of science education research are verbal data: transcripts of classroom
discourse and small group dialogues, talk-aloud protocols from reasoning and problem-solving
tasks, students' written work, textbook passages and test items, curriculum documents.
Researchers wish to use data of these kinds to describe patterns of classroom and small-group
interaction, development and change in students' use of technical language and concepts, and
similarites and differences between school and community cultures, school science and
professional science, the mandated curriculum and the delivered curriculum. In a short chapter is it
not possible to demonstrate actual state-of-the-art techniques of linguistic discourse analysis. My
purpose here will be to formulate the issues and choices of which researchers should be aware in
adopting and adapting any method of analysis of verbal data for their own work. Along the way I
will cite examples from my own published work and other sources which I personally find useful.
Discourse analysis is a very large subject; its principles embody a theory of meaning-making that
is nearly co-extensive with a theory of human behaviour and human culture (Lemke 1995a). (For
other useful introductions to discourse analysis and classroom discourse study, see Brown & Yule
1983; Cazden 1986, 1988; Coulthard 1977; Coulthard & Montgomery 1981; Edwards & Westgate
1994; Stubbs 1983; Widdowson 1979; Wilkinson 1982)

How Researchers Construct Verbal Data

The language people speak or write becomes research data only when we transpose it from the
activity in which it originally functioned to the activity in which we are analysing it. This
displacement depends on such processes as task-construction, interviewing, transcription, selection
of materials, etc., in which the researcher's efforts shape the data. Because linguistic and cultural
meaning, which is what we are ultimately trying to analyse, is always highly context-dependent,
researcher-controlled selection, presentation, and recontextualisation of verbal data is a critical
determinant of the information content of the data. Data is only analysable to the extent that we
have made it a part of our meaning-world, and to that extent it is therefore always also data about
us. Selection of discourse samples is not governed by random sampling. Discourse events do not
represent a homogeneous population of isolates which can be sampled in the statistical sense.
Every discourse event is unique. Discourse events are aggregated by the researcher for particular
purposes and by stated criteria. There are as many possible principles of aggregation as there are
culturally meaningful dimensions of meaning for the kind of discourse being studied.
The basis for aggregation, ultimately, is covariation: some change in the context or circumstances
is associated with a systematic change in discourse features of interest to the study. Normally this
cannot be known until the end of the study, so it is wise to collect a larger and more diverse corpus
of verbal data than will ultimately be used to support the analysis. The basis of discourse analysis
is comparison. If you are interested in covariation between text features and context features, you
should not collect data only for the cases of interest, but also for cases you believe will stand in
contrast with them. If, for example, you are interested in phenonema specific to women, to thirdgraders, to small-group discussions in lab settings, or to a particular curriculum topic, you should
also collect potential comparison or reference data, in small amounts, for other genders, grades,
settings, or topics.

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Discourse analysis is also contextual. If you are interested in the language of any particular kind of
event or text, you should also collect "around" it its probably relevant intertexts (see below). If you
are studying how students write up their lab work, in addition to the texts they write, you will also
need data on how the same topics have been discussed in whole class sessions, what the textbook
says on the topic, any relevant written handouts, and perhaps also interviews with the teacher and
the students. All analysis is reductive. Information from the original data is discarded in the
process of foregrounding the features of interest. Wise researchers preserve the original data in a
form that can be re-analysed or consulted again from a different viewpoint, posing different
questions.
Spoken language is never analysed directly. It is not even often analysed directly from audio or
video recordings, but from written transcriptions. The process of transcription creates a new text
whose relations to the original data are problematic. What is preserved? What is lost? What is
changed? Just the change of medium from speech to writing alters our expectations and
perceptions of language. What sounds perfectly sensible and coherent may look in transcription
(any transcription) confused and disorganised. What passes by in speech so quickly as not to be
noticed, or is replaced by the listener's expectations of what should have been said, is frozen and
magnified in transcription. Normal spoken language is full of hesitations, repetitions, false starts,
re-starts, changes of grammatical construction in mid-utterance, non-standard forms, compressions
and elisions, etc.
The tendency in transcription is to "clean it up", dismissing most of these features as irrelevant.
Very often some of them turn out not to be irrelevant at all. I recommend transcribing large
portions of the corpus at the "lexical" level (preserving the sequence of whole, meaningful words
and meaningful non-lexical vocalisations) for survey purposes, and smaller portions at more
detailed levels for more intensive analysis. The simplest transcriptions attempt to preserve
information at the level of the word, but language only occasionally constructs meaning with
single words. What matters is how the words are tied together, and that often includes intonation
contours. Whether two phrases represent self-paraphrase or contrasting meanings often can only
be determined from intonation. Transcription at the level of the word also erases information about
emphasis, value-orientation, degree of certainty or doubt, attitude of surprise or expectability,
irony, humor, emotional force, speaker identity, and speaker dialect or language background.
Many of these features are often redundantly coded in the words as well, but some may not be. In
addition, information about the timing of speech (length of pauses, simultaneous speech, sudden
breaking-off of fluency, overlaps, etc.) is often important.
Written texts carry considerable visual information: handwriting forms, page layout, typography,
accompanying drawings and illustrations, etc. This information, which can be very important for
interpreting the meaning of verbal text, should not be lost to the analysis. Videotapes obviously
contain a wealth of relevant visual information on gaze direction, facial expression, pointing and
other gestures, contextual artifacts referred to in the verbal text, positional grouping, relative
distances and directions, etc. Along with fieldnotes, they help us to reconstruct the social situation
or cultural activity type within which some meanings of the verbal language are very much more
likely than others. For useful discussions of transcription, see (Ochs 1979; Sacks et al. 1974). For
the role of intonation, see (Halliday 1967, Brazil et al. 1981). On visual information in text, see
(Bertin 1983, Kress & van Leeuwen 1990; Lemke in press-a; Tufte 1983).

The Contexts of Verbal Data

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Language is always used as part of a complex cultural activity. Verbal data make sense only in
relation to this activity context and to other social events and texts with which we normally
connect them, their intertexts. Meaning is not made with language alone. In speech it is
accompanied by gestural, postural, proxemic, situational and paralinguistic information; in writing
by choices in the visual coding of words and other graphical information. The meaning of any text
or discourse event always depends on how we connect it to some (and not other) texts and events
(on general intertextuality see Lemke 1985, 1988a, 1993). What the teacher is saying now makes
sense in part in relation to what she said ten minutes ago or yesterday, what we read in the book,
the question you missed on the last quiz, etc. It also makes sense differently depending on whether
she is reviewing or introducing new material, whether it is addressed to one student or to the
whole class, whether it relates to a diagram on the board or not. What a student says may make
meaning in relation to the past history of his dialogue with this teacher, the group dynamics of the
class, his boredom with the topic, his personal relations with other students.
There are many schemes for systematising the probably relevant contextual factors of a text or
discourse event (see for example Erickson & Shultz 1981; Hymes 1972). They all include: the
participants and their social and physical relationships, material objects and semiotic
representations in the immediate physical environment, the cultural definition of the activity type
or situation and its roles and expectations, and the channel or medium of communication. More
important than such lists are (1) the principle that the discourse itself can create a context, make a
part of the environment newly relevant, or even change its meaning; and (2) that the context is
itself a kind of text, it must be "read" from the viewpoint of the verbal discourse. Verbal data,
including particularly written or printed texts, always makes sense in relation to (1) a context of
production, the circumstances in which it was written or spoken, and (2) a context of use, those in
which it is read or heard. For written texts these two can be very different (see Lemke 1989a).
Texts and discourse data index or point to relevant contexts in a variety of ways (see Silverstein
1976; Wortham 1992, 1994). The simplest is through deictic forms such as this, that, the other,
over there, now, as we saw before, mine etc. These forms indicate to the listener that meaning
must be made jointly with the textual and the relevant contextual information. In addition to the
context of situation, there is also more generally the context of culture (see Firth 1957; Halliday &
Hasan 1989; Hasan 1985; Malinowski 1923, 1935) that is indexed by a text. Much of this is a
presupposition of familiarity with other texts, cultural norms, genre conventions (see below), etc.
in a particular community. Nonverbal signs which co-occur with spoken language, especially
"body language" signs form, with speech, a single integrated meaning-making and interpersonal
communication system. Very little is really known yet on how the different channels of this system
modulate each other's meaning effects, but see Kendon 1990; Lemke 1987; Scheflen 1975.

The Dimensions of Verbal Meaning

Language in use always creates three interdependent kinds of social and cultural meaning. It
constructs social relationships among participants and points-of-view; it creates verbal
presentations of events, activities, and relationships other than itself; it construes relations of parts
to wholes within its own text and between itself and its contexts.
Presentational meaning is the most familiar and most studied. This aspect of meaning is often
referred to as representational, propositional, ideational, experiential or thematic content. This is
the function of language for presenting states-of-affairs, for saying what is going on. It presents
processes, activities, and relationships; the participants in these processes, and attendant
circumstances of time, place, manner, means, etc. It defines entitites, classifies them, ascribes

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attributes to them, counts them. In relation to these semantic functions, its grammar has been
usefully described by Halliday (e.g. 1976, 1985; see also Martin 1992). My own work on thematic
patterns or formations (Lemke 1983, 1988a, 1990a, 1995b) applies Halliday's analysis to textual
and intertextual patterns in discourse (see below).
Orientational meaning may be even more fundamental developmentally. This aspect of meaning,
also called interpersonal or attitudinal, constructs our social, evaluative, and affective stance
towards the thematic content of our discourse, towards real and potential addressees and
interlocutors, and toward alternative viewpoints. It includes the language of formality/intimacy,
status and power relationships, role relationships; speech acts such as promising/threatening,
joking, insulting, pleading, requesting/demanding, offering, etc.; evaluative stances toward the
warrantability, normality, normativity, desirability, seriousness, etc. of thematic content;
construction of affective states; and construction of alliance, opposition, etc. between one theory
or viewpoint about a matter and others available in the community. Useful sources on these
aspects of orientational meaning include: Austin 1962; Bakhtin 1935, 1953; Halliday 1978, Hasan
1986, Hasan & Cloran 1990; Martin 1992; Lemke 1988a, 1989b, 1990b, 1992; Poynton 1989;
Thibault 1991.
Organisational meaning is not always perceived in our culture as meaning, but analysis shows that
it is an integral member of the team, functioning together with, and indeed enabling, the other two.
Organisational meaning includes the ways in which language creates wholes and parts, how it tells
us which words go with which other ones, which phrases and sentences with which others and
how, and generally how a coherent text distinguishes itself from a random sequence of sentences,
phrases, or words. Organisational meaning in language is generally created through simultaneous
use of two complementary principles: (1) constituency structure, in which a larger meaning unit is
directly made up of contiguous smaller units, and (2) cohesive structure, or "texture", in which
chains of semantic relationships unite units which may be scattered through the text. Constituency
structures may be interrupted and resume, and are at least in principle "completable". Cohesion
chains, which have neither of these properties, are built on a variety of chain-membership
principles, all of which specify a particular kind of relation of meaning among the items (e.g.
synonyms, members of a common class, contrast, agent-action, action-means, attribute-item, etc.).
Constituency structures (genres, genre stages, rhetorical formations, adjacency structures, clausecomplexes, clauses, phrases, groups, etc.) create local meaning relationships among items which
also generally belong to cohesion chains, and they provide one means for creating new bases for
cohesive relations. Real texts, especially extended complex discourses, often change genre types
or other constituency strategies many times, creating sub-units within a text. Cohesive
relationships provide a principal means of creating semantic continuity across these segmental
boundaries within a text. Note that some forms of meaning depend about equally on two of these
three semantic functions, so that, for example, logical relationships (because, if ... then) normally
function both presentationally and organisationally. For useful discussions of organisational
meaning, see: Halliday 1978; Halliday & Hasan 1976, 1989; Hasan 1984; Lemke 1988b, 1995b;
Martin 1992; Matthiessen 1992).

Semantic Content Analysis

How can we characterise what a text says about its topics, or even what its topics are, better or
more concisely than the text does itself? This is possible only to the extent that the text repeats the
same basic semantic patterns, makes the same basic kinds of connections among the same basic
processes and entitities again and again. It happens, in our culture, and probably in most, that not

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only do we repeat these thematic patterns, or formations, again and again in each text, merely
embroidering on the details, we also do so from one text or discourse event to another. This is
especially true in the sciences and other academic subjects where there are accepted, canonical
ways of talking about topics. Most textbooks will tell you pretty much the same thing about atoms,
or alternating current, or Mendelian inheritance. We expect that, however they present it, what
teachers say about these topics will contain this same information, and that when students reason,
talk, write, or take tests, that their discourse will fit these patterns, too (at least eventually).
The common techniques of concept mapping are based on our ability to consciously abstract the
essential meaning relations among key terms in scientific discourse. Discourse analysis, however,
can produce the same patterns, and be more semantically explicit about their content, from
free-form classroom or small-group talk, or from written materials of any kind. This means that
these direct uses of scientific concepts can be directly sampled, assessed, and compared. The basic
technique for doing this is described in Lemke (1990a) and its linguistic basis and extensions are
discussed more fully in Lemke (1983, 1988a, 1995b). Other forms of modern semantic content
analysis are statistical, corpus-based, and collocational (see e.g. Benson & Greaves 1992; Halliday
& James 1993; Sinclair 1991). Given the present limitations of computer analysis of natural
language texts, these analyses are based on forms rather than meanings. They can tell you the
frequency distributions, and more importantly the joint distributions for pairs (or n-tuples) of
words or fixed phrases, in a text. They cannot tell whether a given word is used with the relevant
meaning you are interested in in any particular instance. Thematic analysis, correspondingly, must
be done by hand, but it enables you to see that the same concept or relationship may be expressed
by many different verbal forms and grammatical constructions, and to exclude cases where the
form is right but the meaning in context is not. To do thematic analysis properly, you need to be
familiar with both the subject matter content of the discourse or text, and with the semantics of at
least basic lexical and grammatical relations at the level of Halliday (1985) and Hasan (1984).

Rhetorical Interaction Analysis

All language in use, whether spoken or written, is explicitly or implicity dialogical; that is, it is
addressed to someone, and addresses them and its own thematic content, from some point-of-view.
It does rhetorical and social work, producing role-relationships between author-speaker and
reader-hearer with degrees of formality and intimacy, authority and power, discourse rights and
obligations. It creates a world of value orientations, defining what is taken to be true or likely,
good or desirable, important or obligatory.
Some useful questions to guide rhetorical analysis include: What are these people trying to
accomplish here? What are they doing to or for one another? How is the talk ratifying or changing
their relationships? How is it moving the activity along? How is it telling me what the
speaker/writer's viewpoint is? What is it assuming about my viewpoint? other viewpoints? How
does it situate itself in relation to these other viewpoints? What is its stance toward its own
thematic content, regarding its truth or probability, its desirability, its frequency or usuality, its
importance, its surprisingness, its seriousness, its naturalness or necessity? Rhetorical analysis
needs to be done at each organisational level of the text. What is the function of the choice of
genre as a whole (see below)? of each stage in the unfolding of the genre? of the local rhetorical
formation and each move within it? of the sequencing of formations and topics? of various
interruptions, digressions, and the timing of returns? Of grammatical contructions? Of word
choices? Of pauses, intonations, marked pronunications?

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Given a particular thematic content, there are an endless variety of grammatical (including
non-standard) ways to word it. Each variation fits the need of some rhetorical situation, or helps us
to construct one. While genres or common rhetorical patterns provide a definite set of
expectations, they also allow or encourage considerable strategic and tactical manoevering (see
examples in Lemke 1990a, chapters 1 and 3). It is not always possible to say what a particular
choice or move means, but you can say what it might mean. And frequently it means more than
one thing, plays a role in more than one action or strategy, even in unconscious ones. Those
features of a rhetorical analysis which rely, as thematic analysis does, on patterns that are
commonly found in many texts, tend to be agreed on by different analysts. But rhetorical analysis
must deal with situations unique to the text at hand much more often, and these are more
ambiguous and subject to different interpretations. In these cases multiple forms of evidence need
to be used to support interpretations: word choice, intonation, grammatical choice, contextual
information about the situation or activity. Even the participants in a discourse may disagree about
the rhetorical meanings of particular features, or change their minds in retrospect or with
additional information. The "intention" of the speaker, revealed in a retrospective interview, is just
one more piece of data; it does not settle the question of what a feature meant for any participant at
the time. Evidence of how participants followed-up on the appearance of the feature may be more
persuasive.
Discourse forms do not, in and of themselves, "have" meanings; rather they have a range of
potential meanings. Words, phrases, sentences are tools that we deploy in complex contexts to
make more specific meanings, to narrow the potential range of possible meanings down to those
reasonably or typically consistent with the rest of the context. Even in context, at a moment, an
utterance or phrase may not have a completely definite meaning. It may still express a range of
possible meanings, differently interpretable by different participants or readers. This is very often
the case at the point where it occurs. The context needed to specify its meaning very often at least
partly follows its occurrence. So it may seem to have a more definite meaning retrospectively than
it has instantaneously. In fact, depending on what follows, its meaning, as participants react to it,
can be changed radically by what follows (retrospective recontextualisation). Analysing a text to
see what is happening to meanings moment-to-moment yields a dynamical analysis; the overall
net retrospective meaning when all is said and done, yields the synoptic analysis.
For a variety of good examples of rhetorical or speech act analysis, see Gee 1990 (esp. chaps 4 &
5); Green & Harker 1988; Grimshaw 1994; Lemke 1990a; Mann & Thompson 1988, 1992; Mehan
1979; Sinclair & Coulthard 1975. For discussions of evaluative and affective meaning, see Lemke
1988a, 1989b, 1990b; Martin 1992. For viewpoint analysis see discussions of heteroglossia in
Bakhtin 1935; Lemke 1988a, 1995a, 1995b; and of social voices in Wertsch 1991. For dynamic
and synoptic analysis see Lemke 1984, 1988b, 1991; Martin 1985, 1992; Ventola 1987.

Structural-Textural Analysis
Verbal data has social meaningfulness only as text, not as collections of isolated words or phrases
(except statistically). How does a coherent, cohesive text differ from a random collection of
grammatical sentences? How are texts and discourse events unified and subdivided into wholes
and parts? How can we define the boundaries of a unit or episode of a text or verbal interaction?
What binds the units of a text together?
Structural analysis of texts needs to be both "top-down" and "bottom-up", that is, it needs to
consistently reconcile analyses that begin from the smallest units of meaning (normally phrases

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and clauses) and look for how these aggregate together into larger units, with analyses that begin
from the largest units (normally activities and episodes or genres and their stages) and look for
how these are composed of functional constituents. The largest unit of analysis for a spoken
discourse text is the socially recognised activity-type in which the discourse is playing a functional
part, or the smallest episode or subunit of that activity which contains the entire discourse event. A
classroom Lesson is a typical activity-type of this kind. An episode of Going-Over-Homework or
Working-in-Groups may form the more immediate context. The largest unit for a written text is
normally the genre of which it is an instance, or the text itself (unless it is being analysed directly
in its context of production or use, in which case the activity type applies, e.g. Lemke 1989c).
A genre is a text-type specified by identifying a common structure of functional units (obligatory
and optional) that is repeated again and again from text to text. A speech genre is a generally a
highly-specific activity-type accomplished mainly by verbal means. The term genre is more often
used for types of written texts because they are more structurally standardised in our culture. A
genre has a constituency structure in which each constituent plays a functional role in the whole
and has specific functional meaning relations to the other constituents on its own level. The largest
units are often called stages, and they may be composed of smaller units, and these of still smaller
ones, etc. Each constituent at each level of analysis should be defined in a way which is unique to
the genre. A science lab report, as a written genre, might have major stages such as: Title, Author,
Class, Statement of Problem, Description of Apparatus, Description of Procedures, Record of
Observations, Analysis of Data, Conclusions, etc. The Description of Procedures might include a
series of Procedure Statements, each saying what was done, when, and how. Each of these might
not be composed of smaller genre-specific functional units, but only of grammatical units (i.e. the
relationship changes from "composed of" to "realised by").
Some constituents of some genres have an intermediate level of organisation between genrespecific units and grammatical ones. These are often called rhetorical structures or formations
(e.g. Lemke 1988b; Mann & Thompson 1988, 1992). They are found in essentially the same form
in many different genres, but they have an internal functional or rhetorical structure in addition to
the structure of their grammatical units. The most famous example in classroom discourse analysis
is the IRF structure, typically realised as Teacher Question, Student Answer, Teacher Evaluation
(see Lemke 1990a; Mehan 1979; Sinclair & Coulthard 1975). This could be considered genrespecific in classroom activity, but since it occurs in many different kinds of episodes (Lemke
1990a), it is more nearly a rhetorical formation. Something very similar occurs in courtroom
discourse as well. More common and widespread examples include the simple Question-Answer
pattern, or Examples-Generalisation, Event-Consequences, syllogisms, etc. They are, in effect,
portable mini-genres.
Conversation analysis techniques often refer to particular cases as "adjacency pairs" (e.g. Sacks et
al. 1974) Below the level of smallest genre-specific units and the moves within a rhetorical
formation, we find the level of grammatical structure. Analysts should be aware that there are
multiple simultaneous grammatical units structuring the same set of words, and that some of these
may depend on intonation as well as word sequence. In Halliday's analysis, for example, a clause
is simultaneously structured in terms of
Processes-Participants-Circumstances,
Subject-Finite-Predicator-Complements-Adjuncts,
Theme-Rheme, and
Given-New.

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Other models also have adopted the multi-structure approach (e.g. Chomsky analyses in terms of
thematic roles, X-bar structures, and Logical Form). The boundaries of these different units are not
necessarily the same. This brings us to the classic problem of textual structure: segmentation. Can
a text be definitively divided at word boundaries into its constituent units at any level of analysis?
The answer is: only sometimes. The same word can function as an element in different units, for
different functions, on different scales. The boundary, particularly of a large, high-ranking unit
(e.g. genre stage, rhetorical move) may be indeterminate in terms of lower level grammatical or
word units because it is defined by several simultaneous criteria, each of which results in drawing
the boundary in a slightly different place in the text.
As a general rule, units of meaning can have fuzzy boundaries in terms of units of form (or even in
terms of units of meaning at a different level of analysis). Some texts are more rigidly structured
than others. Some maintain, repeat, and complete particular genre patterns or rhetorical formations
more consistently than others. Many texts frequently shift genre pattern or rhetorical strategy, with
or without completion of those already started. Conversational discourse is notorious in this
respect, but so are written texts by young writers who have not yet learned the genre conventions
and borrow from the norms of conversational organisation. How do such texts maintain their
coherence? In large part by topic continuity. More generally, by maintaining cohesion chains,
whose members have no consistent structural-functional relations. If a structure looks like
A-B-C-D, a chain looks like A-A-A-A.
Chains may be of many kinds. Lexical chains consist of words each of which may be the same
word, have the same meaning in context, refer to the same referent, belong to the same semantic
domain, etc. A short lexical chain may be accidental; a long one rarely is. Larger units than words
may form chains, or strands. A structural pattern may be repeated (cf. rhetorical parallelism):
A-B-C-D, A-B-C-D, A-B-C-D, etc. More commonly, and very importantly, a thematic pattern may
be repeated, and varied, at different levels of abstraction (see Lemke 1995b for an extended
analysis); this is very common in classroom teaching, and indeed in any text that has a lot to say
about a small topic. Chains also normally interact with one another; that is, in each instance from
two different chains, there is the same structural relation each time between the member of one
chain and the corresponding member of the other. If we had a A-B structure, we could have an
A-chain through the text and a B-chain, united by the fact that each A and B (or even just some of
them) were connected in the A-B relation where they occurred in the running text (rather like a
ladder). Not just chains of individual lexical items, but chains of whole thematic formations, can
interact. It may take only a clause or nominal group (noun phrase) structure to tie members of two
lexical chains together, but it can take much larger and more complex grammatical or rhetorical
structures to do this between large thematic formations (see Lemke 1995b).
For further discussions of genre analysis see Bazerman 1988, 1994; Hasan 1984b, 1989; Martin
1989, 1992; Lemke 1988b, 1991; Propp 1928; Swales 1990; for activity-types see Lemke 1990a;
Phillips 1983 (on participant structures); for rhetorical formations Lemke 1988b; Mann &
Thompson 1988; for conversation analysis Sacks et al. 1974; for cohesive organisation, Halliday
& Hasan 1976; Hasan 1984; Lemke 1988b, 1995b.

Case Studies and the Problem of Generalisability

How can verbal data and discourse analysis be used in studies of individual episodes and lessons,
classrooms, and small groups? What is the value of such studies and how can we determine the
generalisability of their findings?

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Discourse analysis studies are often best when they examine a particular community in depth.
Discourse analysis produces its greatest insights when rich contextual information can be factored
into the analysis of each text or episode. For this reason, longitudinal designs or case studies are
well suited for discourse analysis methods. Here we learn a great deal about a particular class,
seeing repeated patterns within the data and a variety of strategies which create variations on those
patterns. It is even possible to proceed to the level of individual psychological analysis, but in a
larger sense all case studies are about "individuals", and to a much greater extent than is true for
other natural systems, human communities' individuality matters for the kinds of behaviors of the
system that interest us.
It is not true that science should be only about generalised properties of classes of phenomena and
not about unique properties of individual instances. The balance between these two approaches
must be struck differently depending on the nature of the phenomena. Electrons seem to have no
individuality that matters; biological systems do, but a great deal of their structure and behaviour
remains constant for a species or variety. Developmental phenomena show a wide range of
individual pathways, many of them approximately "equifinal", leading to the same end result (for
example, language acquisition). Human communities and cultures are often more interesting for
what is unique to them than for what they all have in common. Moreover, one of the important
properties of any class is precisely the specification of how the members of the class differ from
one another. Many sentences have a lot in common; that is the foundation of grammar. Many texts
have a little in common, hence the concept of genre. But while the resources and strategies by
which texts and discourse are constructed may be common to many texts, and help to specify how
they may differ from one another, what is ultimately of interest about any text is its meaning, and
that is its most unique feature. Discourse analysis will not tell us a lot about how all classrooms or
all science writing is alike (it will tell us a little), but it provides us with the tools to analyse and
understand what exactly is going on in any discourse or text we wish to analyse. That is as much
as any theory really does for us in practice.

Protocol Analysis and the Problem of Interpretation

When task activities differ significantly from normal cultural routines, how will cultural patterns
of language use be distinguishable from idiosyncratic constructions? What is the object of study
that we construct from such data?
One important form of verbal data is generated when researchers construct special task activities
that differ significantly from normal cultural routines. This follows the traditions of the natural
sciences in devising tasks meant to reveal particular aspects of phenomena, but it encounters the
risk (minimal for electrons and molecules, but already significant for organisms) that behavior
under task conditions differs in important, and unknown, ways from that in normal routines. The
essential context-sensitivity of meaning-based phenomena (meaning is selective contextualisation)
strongly suggests that if we are interested in, say, a classroom phenomenon, that we study it in
situ. If we supplement this with artificial tasks, it is then necessary to establish empirically that the
differences between the task context and the natural context do not alter the phenomena of interest,
or to identify in exactly what ways they do alter them.
Current models of situated cognition call into question the assumption that meaning-making
processes can be assumed independent of local contexts, or even that "cognition" is a process in a
system limited to the organism itself (as opposed to one that includes the organism's tools and the
elements of the environment with which it interacts; cf. Lave 1988; Lave & Wenger 1991;

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Kirshner in press; Lemke in press-b).

Discourse analysis assumes that the resources and strategies (lexis and grammar, rhetorical
formations, typical cultural narratives, genres, the principles of constructing thematic formations,
cohesion chains, etc.) used in producing discourse events and texts are characteristics of a
community, rather than unique to an event in that community. They are part of its general cultural
resources (and so differ from culture to culture and one community or subcommunity to another),
but what it means to have a culture is that we preferentially deploy some of these resources in
some contexts rather than others: that how we use the resources is essentially context-dependent.
The analysis of the covariation between situational features and which lexical and grammatical
resources are typically deployed in them is the subject of register theory (e.g. Gregory 1967;
Gregory & Carroll 1978; Halliday 1977, 1978, 1991), which can also be adapted to analyse the
clause-to-clause shifts in meaning that take place through a text (phasal analysis, e.g. Malcolm
1985). A similar theory for the deployment of the other resources does not yet exist (but see Kress
& Threadgold 1988; Hasan 1994; Lemke 1995a; Thibault 1991). We should also recognise that
while artificial activities may not be natural for the subjects asked to perform in them, they are in a
sense a natural part of the culture of the researchers, which is thus mixed with that of the subjects
by these procedures. There is perhaps a great deal to be learned about ourselves by analysing the
nature of these tasks and their role in our own professional practice.

Comparative Studies and Cultural Bias

When we use discourse analysis and verbal data to compare males and females, middle and lower
class subjects, widely differing age-groups, different cultural and linguistic groups, school
practices and home, community, or professional practices, we necessarily introduce our own
viewpoint, which is invariably closer to that of one of the categories compared than to the other's.
Discourse data is not just sensitive to the context of immediate task and situation; it is also
sensitive to the wider context of cultural norms and assumptions, knowledge, beliefs and values.
The analysis of discourse data, its interpretation, is itself just more discourse, and discourse now
from the point-of-view of the researcher's community.
Our research communities and their historical traditions are emphatically not equally balanced by
gender, age, social class, or ethnic culture. Even studies which strive mightily for even-handedness
and neutrality of description (e.g. Bernstein 1971, 1975; Hasan 1986; Heath 1983) are necessarily
read by other researchers who will project their own values regarding what is better and what
worse onto their descriptions of difference. In many other studies, even the questions which are
asked of the data are asked from a very narrow range of human viewpoints. Discourse analysis is
interpretation and it is viewpoint-dependent every bit as much as any other instance of discourse.
The canonical procedures of discourse analysis which I have briefly sketched here provide a
means for different analysts to systematically compare the many interdependent grounds of their
respective interpretations. Whether they reach consensus or not is probably less important than the
fact that the procedures be clear enough that others can enter into the discussion on common
ground. These procedures, of course, are themselves the product of a narrow range of human
viewpoints. We can hope that this range will widen as the field of discourse analysis, and our own
society, matures toward more inclusiveness and respect for the value of diversity of viewpoints.

Curriculum Analysis and Evaluative Assessments: Ethical Issues

The methods of discourse analysis of verbal data can be used to compare curriculum documents,

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textbooks, and tests with classroom dialogue, teacher discourse, student writing, etc. They make
possible rich descriptions of the lived curriculum, its relation to official curriculum plans, and the
web of intertextuality among all the spoken and written language in which education is framed.
They also make it possible to analyse how individual students use scientific language and concepts
in a variety of situations, and to make this a basis for evaluative assessments.
These facts raise serious ethical questions regarding the appropriate use of discourse analysis
methods in education. Our educational system operates within a larger social hierarchy of power
and control. Administrative authorities seek to impose specific curricula on students, using
teachers, textbooks, and the rest of the educational apparatus as the means. Their control is only as
good as their means of assessing whether or not teachers teach, textbooks print, and students
master what the curriculum mandates. From curriculum documents to test questions and
responses, nearly all of this is in the form of text and discourse. Discourse analysis methods in
principle allow far more precise ways of checking the match or mismatch of these elements than
any other form of assessment or accountability.
Hopefully new assessment schemes will place more weight on practical skills and graphical modes
of representation, but discourse forms will almost certainly still dominate (see Lemke in press for
initial work on the analysis of visual representations and the role of mathematics in scientific
discourse). For now, while automation of discourse analysis procedures remains thoroughly
primitive, students and teachers who believe they have a right to control the content and directions
of their own learning and teaching have little to fear from discourse analysis methods.
Meanwhile, the automation of new information technologies begins to offer at least more
privileged students the opportunity to explore the universe of knowledge guided by their own
evolving interests (cf. Lemke 1994, 1995c) rather than as prescribed by someone else's
curriculum. Discourse analysis methods are already important in computer-based natural language
systems for generating, analysing, and sorting texts. They will be even more important as
components of the intelligent tutoring systems of the future, which will enable students to explore
new information worlds more successfully with their help. Researchers of the next generation will
help determine whether discourse analysis methods will be used to empower students in the new
century, or more strictly control them.
References

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