Towards Careful Practices for Automated Linguistic Analysis of Group Learning.

This paper reviews work in progress towards bridging the field of linguistics and its operationalizations of discourse, and that of frameworks for studying collaborative learning that are rooted directly in the learning sciences.  We begin with the vision of a multi-dimensional coding and counting analysis approach that might serve as a boundary object between the variety of methodological approaches to analysis of collaborative learning that exist within the Learning Sciences.  We outline what we have discovered from a combination of hand coding, comparison with alternative analytic approaches including network analytic and qualitative approaches, correlational analyses in connection with learning-relevant extralinguistic variables, and computational modeling.  We explore both the contribution of work to date as well as the many remaining challenges.