ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors examine instructional discourse from the perspective of how it involves the creation and maintenance of intersubjectivity. They describe discourse from a Brazilian eighth-grade science classroom and explore some of the implications their analyses have for understanding the dynamics of intersubjectivity in general and for understanding intersubjectivity in pedagogical settings in particular. In order to explore states of intersubjectivity, Ragnar Rommetveit has outlined a three-dimensional system of coordinates within which one can locate the time of the communicative act, its location, and the identification of the listener by the speaker and vice versa. Coordinating the insights of M. M. Bakhtin with those of Rommetveit makes it possible to see how speech genres shape intersubjectivity. Just as it is difficult, if not impossible, to attain even partial intersubjectivity if a speaker and listener do not share a "national language" such as Thai or French, intersubjectivity is fundamentally shaped by the speech genres used.
