Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of TESOL
Discourse Analysis
Spring 2006
Week 3 - Johnstone, Chapter 2, and PD, Chapters 1 & 2 - Answers
1. How does discourse work to link language and the world? (DA)
There's a symbiotic relationship between discourse and the world. Language, and remember were talking about language as a system inside the brain and not a particular piece of language, functions as a kind of link between these two concrete manifestations. The world affects the discourse which people produce because, as will find out by taking a look at pragmatics (context), discourse must suit the world (both the real world and the world created by language) into which it is thrust. Thus, discourse is only useful when it functions in the world and corresponds to the world. So, the world determines the type of discourse which a speaker or writer should produce. Now, the world affects this discourse in principally two different ways. Basically, there are two different types of context and remember it's important for us at this point to link context to the world. This should be old hat but I will repeat it anyway for repetition is a good thing as long as the context varies. One context is called linguistic context. This is basically the previous pieces of discourse or texts which have been produced. So a speaker, for example, needs to take into account what has previously been said in order to make a piece of new discourse fit the world of the previous discourse events. The other type of context is what is often called situational context and this involves context dealing with the physical world itself aside from the discourse, bit in which the discourse is embedded. So situational discourse includes things like where you are, who you were talking to, what the functions are which you are trying to use, and many other things. So it should at this point be obvious how the world affects discourse and how discourse affects the world. What I've introduced above is a very concrete way of talking about discourse and the world and it is a recontextualized repetition of what we also discussed last week.
There is, however, also a more abstract link between discourse and the world and it is in this abstract link that linguistic systems are actually built upon and also change. The world into which we are born affects the language system which we end up creating inside our head. As a simple example, someone who grows up in a desert is going to end up encapsulating the physical world in a different way than someone who grows up in a rainforest. This is simply because their physical worlds are somewhat different. In this way the language one learns in a way reflects both the world and the culture of the speakers. The structure of a person`s language (and they all differ to variant degrees) is what gives them options for creating discourse. In this abstract way, the world does affect discourse though language. We will go into more detail about this in the next question.
2. How is thought reflected in language? (DA)
The theory that thought is reflected in language is a highly contested one among linguists. Everyone agrees that language and thought at some point merge in the developmental process but it is not clear what the nature and extent of that merge may really be. For us here we are going to take a fairly standard, middle-of-the-road view of trying to briefly introduce some of the other views in how thought is reflected in language. In order to this we need to go back to the very beginning of language development. The earliest stage of language development which a child goes through is what I call phase 1. In phase 1 a child basically needs to make sense of the world in one very important way which is by identifying and naming the objects she or he encounters in the world. This practice of naming gives a child power over the objects in the world which they need in order to develop and use a linguistic system. What is interesting about this is that no two languages choose to notice and/or encapsulate/codify the physical world in the same way. Different languages in fact notice different things and the outward manifestation of this noticing it is lexicalization or naming. It is from this initial naming in phase 1 that language is first built. Language is built-up through a system of categorization. So, once lexical items have been created through the naming process they need to become part of the larger system through feature assignment and characterization. Categorization is basely the process of taking items and putting them into different groups which share features in some way, shape, or form. For us a professional teachers and users of English many of these categories which exist in English should be familiar; general grammatical categories such as the verb as well as lexical categories like food, animals, inanimate objects etc.. The linguistic system uses these categories to create acceptable utterances according to sum effect of an underlying grammatical system (which we are not going to talk about here). Once we understand this we can begin to deal with the concept of linguistic relativity.
Linguistic relativity is an idea which basically claims that thought and language affect each other profoundly. How this happens is simply through attention and noticing. Since languages do not equally or often even similarly codify the world we only notice the things that are part of our language. This is certainly true particularly when we know a little bit about how the brain works. As a person moves through the real world they're constantly bombarded by all sorts of perceptual information coming in from five different circuits gated through the hypothalamus, a part of the midbrain structure. Certainly there is way too much information coming in for all of it to be processed equally. The things that will be processed are the things that are either familiar or strikingly unfamiliar. Familiarity in the form of priming effects in the brain is an extremely important concept not only for how language works but also for how we think and perceive the world around us. Thus, the basic idea is best illustrated in our daily lives where we so are busy and constantly bombarded by all this perceptual information we actually can't notice things that are not somehow encoded in our language. By coding things in language we are preserving them and establishing a cycle which allows for a continuous cycle of strengthening their patterns of use. This is the main argument in linguistic relativity and according to what we understand of cognitive functioning it is a fact but the big question remaining is the degree to which this actually happens.
While it is certainly true that language and thought would affect each other, it is certainly not clear whether our language limits our thought all the time or how it does so. Certainly language will stop us from noticing things in the world which speakers of other languages might notice but it doesn't mean we won`t or can't notice them if our attention is drawn to them. So, for us as teachers an important lesson to be derived from this is that we have to somehow find ways to control or enhance our students attention. By actually controlling their attention then they can actually notice new things which will allow them to pick up elements of, for us, English. The basic idea is that English speakers think in a certain way because of the ay they code the world and the resulting structures of their language. In order for Koreans to speak English and understand spoken English they also need to share in English speaker's thought processes and/or view of the world. I could go on for ever about his but I hope it is clear enough at this point.
3. How do the choices a language user makes reflect their view of the world? (DA)
In this class we're going to take the view that speaking is much more than simply trying to use knowledge to put together grammatically acceptable utterances. In our view maybe the more important part of speaking revolves around making decisions about how to manipulate language in order to make the precise point which we want and which also happens to fit the situation in which the speaker finds herself or himself. Thus, language production is all about making complicated decisions. Like any decision-making process these decisions can only be made or certainly will be made more effectively if there is enough background knowledge. If you know absolutely nothing about the world it is going to be impossible to make any kind of decision. Ignorance limits us to inactivity. Thus, the discourse that a speaker produces is based on a complicated set of decisions which the speaker makes. The speaker needs to decide not only on the specific forms themselves but what they actually want to say with those forms. 'What they're trying to say' does not refer merely to the semantic content of the utterance but also be underlying pragmatic meaning. This pragmatic meaning is often hidden and exposed to the hearer through particular language uses. I think in the text we read this week (Johnstone, 2000) there was a pretty good example of a writer writing in what is clearly a child's style. A reader knows it's a child's style because they know how children speak. Thus, the way that we actually put together our pieces of discourse reveals our intent. Now, for the author of a book the intent is probably known and they spend a lot of time trying to code their intent. For us as speakers this often happens as an automatic process. We reflect our view of the world, for better for worse, often without really knowing that we are doing so.
4. How is silence an important element of texts and how does that relate to us? (DA)
In order to really understand silence and how it functions in discourse we need to take a very different approach to our analysis of discourse and how discourse works. Instead of thinking of silence as something which is interspersed between a flow of discourse, it is probably better to think of discourse as floating on a sea of silence. In this way silence is seen as being a natural and not entirely meaningless context. Discourse is created to alter and fine-tune the basic meaning of silence. Once we have embraced this idea then we can begin to think of the role silence plays in between some of the discourse which is created. Remember that in this the discourse is created to create much more specific patterns of meaning than silence would allow and therefore there's some sort of residual effect of the surrounding discourse and intruding on the silence. As with discourse itself different languages actually deal with silence in different ways. That is, the discourse which is created affects silence differently and in this effect silence actually comes to have different meanings in different languages. A simple example would be like the one I mentioned in class where if I ask a direct question in English silence as a response usually signifies noncompliance or hostility ( a strong challenge to the questioner`s authority) whereas in Korean in the same situation silence as a response to the same kind of direct question signifies compliance and a submission to the questioner`s authority. What this really means for us is that not only do we have to get our students to produce discourse by making a series of decisions about how to produce the discourse but they also have to think about the effects of discourse and how discourse affects the surrounding silence in that language. Basically at all revolves around building language but as we build language we also build a worldview that goes along with it.
5. What is pragmatics and why is it important? (PD1)
We will try to give a simple of definition of pragmatics as possible and also try to differentiate pragmatics from discourse analysis. Basically pragmatics is the study of meaning created in context. This is a large area of study and many linguists avoid pragmatics because they think of it as a kind of undefined dumping ground for everything that doesn't fit into standard linguistic study. For us, we are going to try to think about pragmatics as an active process. The pragmatics or knowledge of pragmatics is what allows a speaker to produce a piece of language which is appropriate to the context. This is important for the teaching of English particularly when speaking is a focus because contextual or situational appropriateness is often more important than creating grammatically acceptable utterances. The study of pragmatics incongruence with a discourse analysis approach should allow us to not only form a clear view of how acceptable utterances might actually be produced but hopefully will also allow us to teach our students how to do this in a somewhat effective way.
6. What are some of the questions that a study of pragmatics can help us answer as foreign language teachers? (PD1)
The book that we're studying in this class is a little bit different of many of the other books on pragmatics in that it focuses on how pragmatic skills develop. This is exactly what we want because this is our main concern. Simply thinking of these questions from a language teacher pointed to the main question we want to come up with it is how do I help my students to be better speakers. The simple answer is by familiarizing them with the processes and pragmatics and discourse analysis will help us do that. Only other questions and we can think of our probably in the list in the book and they referred to both developmental questions and teaching questions referring more specifically to how we actually need to go about doing this. It should be clear to everyone at this point that a pragmatic approach to language is relatively hard to do in a foreign language situation and particularly one in which the target language is not only physically faraway but psychologically and linguistically also quite distant. This makes our attempts that much harder at the same time although more important because without us our students would have no way of knowing these things. In the rest of the class will be slowly trying to answer these questions by thinking concretely about how to create mechanisms where the students can make decisions on their own about how to piece together effective utterances.
7. What are some of the major theories and constructs used to explain the development of pragmatic competence? Briefly introduce the important aspects of each. (PD2)
Kasper and Rose introduce five different theories which have been used of late to describe the development of pragmatic competence. They are:
Acculturation
The acculturation model, first proposed by Schumann, is one which basically links effective variables to development. In this model there are several different variables, most of which revolve around the relationship of the learner to the target language environment, and from these variables it was posited that the progress the learner would make in the target language environment could be estimated. Unfortunately, tests on this theory in the field have proven it wrong. This does not mean that the acculturation model does not offer is some valuable information or insight into the process. Quite the contrary. Certainly there are aspects of acculturation which cannot be ignored, but the acquisition process is something which is obviously much more complex than the acculturation model is able to deal with. In reality we might never be overcome up with the proper model for affective variables simply because they vary too much from person-to-person.
Cognitive processing
The cognitive processing model is one which revolves around a series of processes in the brain and how it is supposed to work. Considering the age of the model it's fairly impressive. In this model they're basically two different levels which interact with each other in more or less an unspecified way. The first of these levels is the level of noticing, what is generally called `attention focus` in more modern literature. The basic idea here is that the language input which we give our students is filled with different elements and even different trying to teach a certain point there's no guarantee that the students will ever even noticed the point that were trying to teach them amongst all the other different points embedded within the entire piece of input. Thus, noticing is an extremely important first step in the learning process. If students have not noticed the points we wish them to notice then there is simply no way they are ever going to be able to use those points and that brings us to the second level. The second level in this processing model is processing. This of course relates back to what we ever even saying about decision-making in language production. When a person goes to say something they need to process a tremendous amount of information in order to try to come up with an acceptable utterance in that context. The idea is that at some point what they have noticed needs to be part of that processing. But of course there is no way of actually predicting how or when it will become part of the processing. Only can say is that simply because people do not use certain bits of knowledge in their actual language does not mean they haven't noticed it and stored it in their brain. But the theory really tells us is that processing is something which needs to be practiced because the more the brain works a processing the battery will become and it and as it becomes better it will be able to process more and more information and faster.
Sociocultural theory
Sociocultural theory was developed in Russia in the 1920's primarily by Vygotsky. The basic idea behind sociocultural theory is that there is a fundamental link between society and language and somewhere in the middle of this link possibly as enhancer to the entire link would be pragmatics. Thus society determines what language will actually be the same time language also determines how our society will be. The major effect of this is that language can only be learned in a societal situation. This I mentioned in class even when were thinking about simple lexical items they must be learned in a societal situation in order to really glean the associations which go with them and which are necessary for actually use. So in this theory all language calls from society but pragmatics holds a special place because it is really the outward manifestation of language in its direct relation with society. This theory is quite specific and detailed and how it describes both the stages and possible procedures for development. Terms like zone of proximal development and scaffolding, mainstays of this theory from the procedural point of view, have become very common terms in education circles.
Language Socialization
The language socialization model a similar the sociocultural model in that both claim that language can only be learned through society. Thus, the language socialization model supports the idea that interaction in a classroom is really the only way for a student to actually learn how to speak or in fact properly/effectively use a language. Students don't necessarily learn in classrooms where the teacher talks to them they learned by interacting with each other and particularly in more mixed groups of students. This of course is not easy because students are not used to this type of situation. We need to create a society in the classroom that will allow the students to engage in interaction naturally. Of course this is somewhat idealized but is also something we need to think about. The main difference between the language socialization model and the sociocultural model is the language socialization model is not specifically coded as the sociocultural model. Language socialization focuses on what it is that this could and needs to become part of society. How do they learned to interact with society. Thus, in the language socialization model the focus is really for the most part on pragmatic norms and not language in general which is more the case in the sociocultural model.
Interactional Competence
Interactional competence takes the basic idea for the sociocultural model and language socialization model and simply uses it to focus quite specifically on how people learn to interact. Thus, it is model the really isn't very much talk about society and how society determines these things and the effects of these things on society. This model has a very narrow focus where it really just looks at how people interact which of course relates to what were doing by looking at discourse analysis. By the looking at things like to her and taking an information structure we are discovering what some of the norms are at how people interact. This model once this sea how this type of skill develops. The interactional competence model is really just a very small subset of communicative competence as defined by Canale and Swain.
8. Of these theories and constructs which two do you think most useful and why? (PD2)
If I had to pick two of these theories mentioned above, as I asked you to do, I would probably end up picking the sociocultural model and the language processing model. I think the two of them work well together in giving us very overview of both the issues which are at stake and more importantly what we can do to deal with those issues.
9. Do you think these theories provide accurate explanation for pragmatic development, why or why not? (PD2)
As we already discussed in class, each of these theories has something to offer but none of them alone really account for the entire process of pragmatic development. The only way we will ever account for pragmatic development is to look at all of these and see the contributions they make when brought together. Even when we do this we find that there are still pieces of the puzzle missing. One thing that we really need to try to find out our developmental steps, if there really are such things, in the acquisition process. Also would need to know a little bit more about language processing and what variables would seem to affect the along lines similar but better defined in the acculturation model. One other aspect which has really been missing from all of these is what kind of affect as the L-1 have on this process. How much might the L-1 interfere or aid in this process. Thus, despite all the claims made about all the advancements that have really been made there is still something which we need to find out more about a need to investigate further in order to really understand this process and use it to become better teachers.