Virtual regulative discourse: moderator strategies in asynchronous online discussions in higher education

This paper takes as its starting point Bernstein’s (2000) concepts of regulative and instructional discourses. Bernstein describes the role of instructional discourse to create ‘specialized skills and their relationship to each other’ and regulative discourse to create ‘order, relations and identity’ and manage ‘attitudes, dispositions and performances’. These concepts from the sociology of education have been reinterpreted from within systemic functional linguistics to explore dual registers that function in the interaction of school classrooms (Christie 2002), such that an instructional register is projected through a regulatory one. This pilot study shifts the locus to higher education, and specifically to moderated and assessed asynchronous online discussions, which are becoming commonplace in tertiary settings in Australia. The focus is on the regulative register.