Discursive approach for studying contexts in students' collaborative activity

The aim of this study was, by means of discourse analysis (Gee & Green, 1998), to explore what contexts were built and reflected in a student pair’s collaborative task which took place in a university course. The special focus was to develop methodological tools for studying the complex nature of learning embedded in a specific context. The study revealed three different context types that were built through the students’ discourse. The students’ prior knowledge (socio-cultural context) as well as local context, for example earlier discussion with the teacher, served as main resources which the students drew on in their immediate context. In the immediate context, a co-text, such as a written text or an earlier discussion, made up the complete shared context for reasoning and enabled collaborating in the task. The study demonstrated how the discourse both reflected and constructed the context in which it was used.