Discourse
Analysis for
Language
Teachers
Speech acts and discourse structures
They are "functions" of oral or written language
Speech acts
Acts that seek a specific meaning to convey the message to any kind of text.
Discourse structures
They are based on a dialogue and how the whole text is organized around a specific oral topic.
The scope of discourse analysis
The overall aim is to come to a much better understanding of exactly how natural spoken and written discourse looks and sounds.
Written analysis
newspaper articles
letters
comics
recipes
Spoken Analysis
Oral debate
Spoken discourse: models of analysis
The Birmingham model
It is a relatively simple and powerful model which has connections with the study of speech acts.
Sinclair and Coulthard found a rigid pattern in the language of traditional school classrooms.
Framing move is precisely what Sinclair and Coulthard call the function.
Transaction
The two framing moves, together with the question and answer sequence that falls between them.
However
Framing move and transaction are only labels to attach to certain structural features
Sinclair and
Brazil (1982: 49) prefer to talk of initiation, response and follow-up.
Conversation outside the classroom
The classroom was a convenient place to start, as Sinclair and Coulthard discovered, but it is not the 'real' world of conversation
Conversations outside classroom settings vary in their degree of structuredness
Mainly in the next areas, discourse analysts have found it necessary to expand and modify the Sinclair-Coulthard model.
Type of speech act labels needed to describe what is occurring.
The functions of the parts of individual moves.
Coulthard's model is very useful for analysing patterns of interaction where talk is relatively tightly structured.
Talk as a social activity
THE TALK
Between professors or between doctor and patient, it is relatively easy to predict who will open and close the talk.
But when the talk is informal and among peers, everyone will have a role to play in coordinating and controlling the discourse
What is discourse analysis
A brief historical overview
It deals with the study of the relationship between language and the contexts in which it is used.
Different disciplines emerged in the 60s and 70s, such as linguistics, semiotics, psychology, anthropology and sociology.
They study the language in use:
• written texts of all kinds
• spoken data
Harris in 1952 spoke of the distribution of linguistic elements in extended texts and the links between the text and its social situation.
Emergence of semiotics and the French structuralist approach to the study of narrative.
In 1960, Dell Hymes: sociological perspective with the study of speech in its social sense.
Linguistic philosophers influenced the study of language as social action, reflected in speech act theory and speech act theory.
The formulation of conversational maxims, along with the emergence of pragmatics, which is the study of meaning in context.
The form and funtion
Grammatical and phonological forms examined separately are unreliable indicators of function.
The communicative function cannot be solely the domain of grammar or phonology.
Discourse analysis is not entirely separate from the study of grammar and phonology.
spoken interaction
Different; ways of opening and closing the encounter, role relationships, purposes and environments.
In contrast, discourse analysis is a set of descriptive labels separate from those used by conventional grammarians.
Relationships between language forms (grammatical, lexical and phonological)
Discourse functions are the forms of language, language teaching.
The inversion of the verb and its subject occurs only under restricted conditions in English.
Non-inverted declarative form (subject before the verb).
Decisions about communicative function cannot be the exclusive domain of grammar or phonology.
The situations that we are going to follow will follow different conventions and the factors involved.
Fundamental distinction: forms of language and function of discourse.
Larger Patterns in Text
Clause-relational approach extends to larger patterns.
Problem-solution pattern analyzed by Hoey.
Signalling devices like subordination and parallelism used to interpret larger patterns.
Text and Interpretation
Textual Pattern Recognition
Reader recognizes patterns in text.
Segments can form patterns like phenomenon-reason, cause-consequence, and instrument-achievement.
Segments (phrases, clauses, sentences) have functional relationships.
Text Surface and Markers
Linguistic signals convey semantic and discourse functions.
Cohesive markers link sentences, pairing related items.
Reading involves the interpretation of ties for a coherent understanding.
• Cognitive links create coherence beyond semantic ties.
Example:
Python attacking a boy - reader activates knowledge to make sense.
Clause-Relational Approach
• Logical sequencing and matching are basic categories in this approach.
• Winter and Hoey's work focuses on interpretive acts between textual segments.
Procedural approaches emphasize the active role of the reader.
Interpretation depends on the reader and author.
Beaugrande and Dressler are central to reader-centered interpretation.
Written discourse
Written discourse can be specifically applied to language teaching.
It presents grammatical regularities how sentence structuring has implications for units such as sentences, paragraphs and for the progression of whole texts.
It is also possible to create superficial links between clauses and sentences in a text, known as cohesion.
Most texts show links from one sentence to another in terms of grammatical features such as pronominalization, ellipsis.
It is important to find these simple initiation, response and follow-up movements