Understanding Learning for Work: Contributions from Discourse and Interaction Analysis

In recent years, interaction and discourse analytic methods have been applied extensively in various areas of educational research and have become an important theoretical perspective for those concerned with the study of learning in social settings. Following this innovative perspective, this chapter advances two main arguments. First, it stresses the idea that adopting a discursive and interactional approach on professional practice can contribute to the body of concepts and methods applied for understanding practice-based learning. And second, it considers that there exists a strong epistemological continuity between social theories of learning on the one hand, and research methods belonging to the field of discourse and interaction analysis on the second hand. From there, the aim of the chapter is to identify and specify an interdisciplinary field intersecting linguistics methods and professional education research. It is also to show what these methods consist of, how they may be enacted and applied and what are their potentialities and practical implications for researching the field of professional and practice-based learning.