A transcript of part of an English lesson conducted in a Hong Kong secondary school by an ethnic Chinese bilingual Cantonese-English teacher and his students is expanded and elaborated in stages to illustrate issues involved in developing bilingual classroom discourse data. The different transcripts of the same segment of classroom discourse demonstrate how the focus, the form and the level of transcription help to determine the analysis of the discourse and the view of it that can be derived by means of the investigative process.

Through the elaboration of the transcript, it is shown how different interactants define their participation using the two available languages, English and Cantonese, within each of three frames of classroom interaction. In the segment of the lesson presented, which comprises a role-play activity, the teacher and two students participate in the lesson frame, where only English occurs. The teacher and other students participate in a lesson-support frame, where speech has a regulative function directed at keeping the lesson ‘on track’ and where English and Cantonese occur. These institutional frames may be exploited by speakers to convey implicit and explicit messages that encode different layers of meaning. Other students (but not the teacher) participate in a third, commentary frame, where they make evaluative comments in relation to the talk that is going on in the lesson frame and where most communication is in Cantonese.

It is maintained that for the bilingual classroom discourse presented (and, by implication, for the larger context of discourse of which that segment is a part) a representation in terms of discourse frames provides a view of language use and participant interaction that aids further analysis and helps not only the researcher but also those to whom the data is presented to build a rich schema for understanding and interpreting the dynamics of that context. In particular, it makes it possible to observe how the main participants, the students, bend the institutional context to their own purposes.