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Appendix
F. Transcription Conventions
The transcription system
developed for this study was intended to capture, as accurately as possible,
the discourse of mathematics classrooms in Germany, Japan, and the United
States. The system was designed to represent speech only, and not to capture
the actions and activities that take place around the speech. German and
Japanese data were translated into English. Our goal was to capture the
meaning of the original language without sacrificing readability.
1. Speaker Codes
T Teacher
S Single
student
Ss Multiple
students, but not the entire class
E Entire
class (or sounds like the entire class); used to indicate choral responses
O Other;
used to indicate when a non-member of the classroom speaks, such as school
personnel, office monitors, or talk from public address systems
B Blackboard;
used to indicate the translation of foreign words/phrases written on the
blackboard
2. Punctuation, Diacritical
Marks, and Other Conventions
Period . A
period marks the end of a turn at talk that is not to be understood as
being a question.
Question mark ? A
question mark indicates that the utterance is to be understood as a question
(usually determined through intonation).
Hyphen - A
hyphen indicates that a speaker has "cut-off" (or self-interrupted) his/her
speech.
Three dots .
. . A series of three dots, separated by a blank space before and
after, is used to indicate a pause.
Parentheses (
) Empty parentheses or single parentheses surrounding a word(s) indicate
that some interactant has spoken, but the exact utterance is unclear (hard
to hear).
Numerals Numbers
are always written out as words, in the way in which they are said.
CAPS Capital
letters are only used with proper nouns (names, cities, countries, languages,
etc.), at the beginning of a new turn at talk, or after a period or
question mark. When speakers refer to points, lines, angles, etc. by
their alphabetical label (e.g., angle ABC, line DE), the labels are
written in capital letters, even if in the notation system used in the
classroom it would otherwise appear as a lowercase letter.
C A P S When
speakers spell out words, each letter is placed in capital letters, with
a single space between each letter.
Overlap // When
one participant speaks over the talk of another participant, it is noted
in the transcript using a double backslash (//) to indicate where the
overlap begins. Overlap brackets are used in sets to indicate the lines
of talk which overlap.
3. Turns at Talk
Turns are separated when:
1) there is a change in speakership, and 2) there is a "gap" in the talk
such that it would be possible for someone else to speak in that silence.
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