Summary:
This research aims to explore the practice of hermeneutic dialogue through the lens of specific dialogue instances taking place in literature teaching scenarios. More specifically, it explores the hermeneutic dialogue as a reading practice within this framework, focusing on the ways in which verbal interactions promote its various aspects. According to the methodological principles and processes of discourse analysis, sequential utterances between students and teacher from literature classes at the collaborating high school of Athens were collected into a database. The analysis of the data took place in two steps. In the first step, the main research goal was the recognition and categorization of the forms of the utterances and the exploration of their impact in future verbal interactions, highlighting motifs and strategies in the process of meaning construction. In the next step, the main goal was the exploration of the contexts in which the utterances take place, with a focus on the content of the utterances. More specifically, an effort was made to highlight the ways in which the content of the utterance interacts with the given context and with subsequent utterances, in line with the concept of the sequential organization of utterances. Data analysis suggests that, through the lens of hermeneutic dialogue principles, these dialogue interactions play a major role in meaning construction and interpretation of literary subjects. In conclusion, significant interdependence between utterances, especially student to student utterances, was observed; the students’ interpretive positions are co-constructed through dialogue.
Keywords:
hermeneutic dialogue, discourse analysis, literature education, dialogicality
