Atlas Ti

 

Using ATLAS ti5, the data has been coded according to two different, separate methodologies.  Firstly it has been coded for topic, ie the subject being discussed by the speaker(s); and secondly for Goal Driven Event (GDE) which is an attempt to characterise sections of discourse according to the goals of the participants involved.  The codified data is also available to download here but can only be accessed if you already have ATLAS installed on your computer. The ATLAS files are saved as a bundle so you will need to unbundle them once you have downloaded it.

 

Topic Codes

The list of topic codes was designed to give maximum access in terms of its searchability whilst ensuring that the categories remained reasonably broad. To code the text at a finer level of delicacy would have meant using a greater number of categories which would have been confusing both for research purposes and during the codification process. However the fact that these topics can overlap or combine means that by searching for several codes at once, the analyst is able to search for a relatively narrowly defined topic, such as ‘discipline' combined with ‘pedagogical guidance' which is likely to be the mentor/responsable advising the assistant on how to maintain discipline in class, whereas ‘discipline' combined with ‘roles and responsiblities' is likely to be a discussion about whose responsibility it is to discipline the students, or whether the assistant has the authority to give detention or other form of punishment.

View full list of topic codes

 

Goal Driven Event (GDE) Codes

Goal Driven Event (GDE) codes were based on the kind of behaviour/ action the talk was designed to produce. Again these were given broad and fuzzy definitions covering six areas of linguistic activity. GDEs were seen as interactively constructed ‘chunks' of talk, rather than individual moves or speaker turns. For example, ‘advising talk' may consist of one interlocutor asking for advice on a certain issue, followed by the advice being given, followed by an acceptance of the advice. Also the advising event may include other types of discourse too; there might be a discussion of the efficacy of the action advised, which might include some assessing talk. This will allow us to examine instances of embedding or overlapping between types of discourse, especially in the case of ‘supportive talk' which has a more interpersonal bias.

This type of coding was only applied to the live recordings of conversations. The témoignages, logbooks etc were difficult to codify using this method; codifiers struggled with the distinction between the goals of the interaction about which the témoignage was written, which could be very difficult to decipher at two removes (from the live interaction, to the témoignage, to the codifier) and the goals of the témoignage itself.

View GDE codes