Confusing Reading Pedagogy With Linguistic Theory

Martin & Rose (2007: 249):

In pedagogic terms what we are looking at here is scaffolding which has been carefully designed to ensure teachers support students as they move into academic discourse of this order. From the point of view of exchange structure what we are looking at is exchange complexing. Each exchange is designed to realise the goals of its Prepare, Focus, Identify, Highlight or Extend phase; and they are sequenced in relation to one another according to the Detailed Reading Cycle just outlined (see Figure 7.3).

Not all registers of dialogue have exchange complexing of this kind. But as a rule of thumb we can expect that the more institutionalised the discourse, the more likely it is to display exchange routines of this order. In some contexts these routines may be so conventionalised that we treat them as stages of a genre — as with Ventolas work on service encounters for example (or Sinclair and Coulthard’s 1975 work on classroom discourse for that matter).

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, the only registers of language "likely to display exchange routines of this order" are those that realise educational contexts in which this pedagogy is deployed.