Using sociocultural discourse analysis to analysis professional discourse

Sociocultural discourse analysis is a methodology for studying the use of language for collective thinking. It was specifically designed for studying the talk of children working together in a group in a classroom, but it has also been used for studying talk amongst adults. In this article we discuss its use, in an adapted form, for analysing the professional discussions of examiners who are involved in making assessments of the essays of school students. We explain how and why the methodology was chosen and adapted, and show what its use reveals about collective intellectual activity in this particular context. We conclude with some comments about the value of this methodological approach for examining professional discourse more widely.