Using legimation code theory to track pedagogic practice in a South African English home language poetry lesson

AbstractThis paper utilises two dimensions of Legitimation Code Theory, Specialisation andSemantics, to describe and analyse aspects of the poetry pedagogy of a South African homelanguage subject English teacher. The Specialisation analysis illuminates how, while thelesson is oriented towards social relations in its focus on cultivating learners’ literary gaze,the teacher’s pedagogy exhibits varying emphases on epistemic relations and socialrelations in different phases of the lesson. These concepts facilitate more precise descriptionof the pedagogy, which assists in clarifying and explicating the nature of the pedagogy of ateacher working with a cultural heritage orientation to literary instruction. Analysis withinthe Semantic dimension enables the tracking of pulses of shifts in abstraction andparticularity through the lesson. This highlights the ways in which the teacher movesbetween more and less abstract and concrete forms of knowledge, which implicitly modelsideational networks required for higher levels of close textual analysis