Reevaluating the IRF sequence: A proposal for the articulation of theories of activity and discourse for the analysis of teaching and learning in the classroom

Noting the fundamental compatibility between activity, theory, as developed by Leontiev (1981) , and the theory of discourse developed in the Halliday, 1970 , Halliday, 1975 , Halliday, 1978 , Halliday, 1984 ; Halliday & Hasan, 1985 ) tradition, this article attempts to develop an integrated framework for the description and analysis of classroom discourse. Episodes of discourse, it is proposed, are best understood as occurring in the Operationalization of the Actions, and their constituent curricular activities and tasks, through which the participants engage in the Activity of Education. Which genre of discourse is coconstructed in any episode depends on the goal of the task in which it occurs and on choices of register with respect to its Operationalization in the situation. In the second part of this article, this framework is applied to a corpus of data videorecorded over the course of a unit of study on time in a Grade 3 classroom in order to gain a better understanding of the various functions performed by the discourse genre of triadic dialogue, recognized by its characteristic IRF (initiation-response-follow-up) structure.

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