3: Data Analysis
As Herring (2003) notes, forum posters often use communication strategies, such as typed laughter tokens, that result in “linguistic variety that despite being produced by written-like means, frequently contains features of orality” (p. 5; emphasis added). Thus, in addition to categorizing basic mathematical operations (algebra, arithmetic), we chose analytic approaches suitable to both oral and written communication: the discourse analysis methods of Gee (1996, 1999); and the narrative structure of Labov (1972).
Gee’s discourse analysis methods (1996, 1999) have been applied successfully to a wide range of practices including “sharing time” in early elementary classrooms (Gee 1996), the academic versus “street corner” discourses of adolescents (Knobel 1999), the workplace practices of “new capitalist” corporations (Gee, Hull, and Lankshear 1996), instant-messaging interactions in the context of online anime fandom (Lam 2000), and the in-game discourse of MMO game play (Steinkuehler 2006). Using this approach, we first segmented the lines of text from the original post into lines representing clauses (simple sentences) and stanzas representing topics. In the data (below), each line is numbered, and stanzas are grouped into paragraphs. Note that in this context a simple sentence is often a mathematical statement (usually a mathematical equation that includes an equal sign).
Labov’s (1972) general framework for narrative structure arose out of a study of the narratives told by street-gang youngsters (Labov and Waletzky 1967) and focuses on the role and function of evaluative statements in first-person narratives as a way to signal the social status of the narrator-protagonist. Labov’s general framework—abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, coda—is now considered a classic in sociolinguistics and has been used to make sense of both oral (e.g., Scollon and Scollon 1981; Atkinson 1995) and written (e.g., Bell 1991) communication. Here, we use its general outline to identify each part of the math story as it unfolds.
Below is an overview of the five narrative sections based on Labov’s (1972) framework.
Figure 2. Narrative structure analysis (Labov, 1972).
References
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