Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Discourse Analysis

Spring 2006

Week 4 - Cornbleet, S. and Carter, R. (2001). Units 2 and 4 & PD, Chapter 3 - Answers

1. What is speaking and what are some of the major components of speaking we need to be aware of? (CC2)

In its most basic sense speaking is obviously the manipulation of sound for meaning purposes. It should be clear, however, that beneath this basic idea there is a slew of underlying skills which make up to our use of sound. Obviously things like pitch, intonation, stress, as well as speed and rhythm all have an effect on the actual meaning on the sounds we produce. Thus, sound itself and the way sound is produced is a very complicated issue and one which has its own field of study in the field of linguistics, namely phonetics and phonology. Apart from the sound itself there are other things that we need to be aware of in speaking. The first of these and probably the most important is simply the idea of context. Remember that context can be divided into two types: linguistic and situational. Is important to remember that we need to speak in a way which make sense compared to what was already said.. Context or linguistic context will also let us know when we are expected to take a turn or when we are able to grab/steal a turn. At the same time we need to make sure that what we say fits the situation that we are in. The code we chose must fit the place, and the purpose, and the audience. But this is all pretty much review. I hope by this point that you know all this stuff.

2. How is everyday speech different and what are some things we need to know about it? (CC2)

There are several things about everyday speech which we asked teachers need to be aware of an order to set up an environment conducive for actual speech practice in the classroom.

-Takes place in real time

The basic idea here is that since speech takes place in real time it needs to be unplanned and unrehearsed. At some point to students need to be able just to speak and at the drop of a hat. This of course is a challenge both for our students and for us because I`m sure we have all experienced a situation where in asking our students to actually produce language we wind up with a key which amount of silence. We need to prepare our students so that they can do this. One of the best ways is to of course meant the first language acquisition sequence and introduce our students to a vast array of different formulaic expressions and repertoires which they can use both quickly and effectively.

Teachers as well I students need to also be aware that because speaking does take place in real time it is often not very smooth. Teachers often penalize students for creating pauses or giving those classical types of `ums` or `ahs`. Showing our students that all speakers of English do speak somewhat haltingly at times will take some pressure off the learners. Because speaking is conducted in real time it cannot function the same way that planned speech does. Also it cannot be assessed in the same way that we would assess planned speech or writing.

-Is face to face

The idea here is that since everyday speech is face-to-face then we need to allow our students to practice in the same way. This is one of the beauties of actual classroom teaching as opposed to studying at home, students can actually interact with each other. In the same vein, because everyday speech is face to face then we need to actually train our students in how they can send the right signals. When one is engaged in conversation speakers actually looked each other and need to assess the reactions of the people they are talking to. In this sense as language teachers we need to train our students how not only to react effectively (following specific cultural norms) but also how to interpret such responses and in turn respond or react to a listener`s or speaker`s responses and reactions. This is extremely important and really is something that can only be done in the classroom.

-Has a purpose

This is not a new idea to us. We have are a discussed in this class about functions and how all speech events are composed out of a functional need. Of course we also know that is important for our students to understand this. It is, however, also true that language is sometimes more direct and sometimes less direct in how functional needs are expressed. Likewise, functional need might not just be to communicate a specific point. Sometimes people do just talk for the reason of talking, this is what we call phatic uses of language. It is important to realize that language is used for more than just exchanging ideas, it is a way of establishing social contact as well.

-Is interactive

Because everyday speech is interactive one very important thing we need to learn about such interactions as when we can and when we probably should not talk. More specifically, we need to know when it is our turn in a conversation to speak. This is not necessarily so easy. Different cultures have different cues which interlocutors will show as they speak. Again the cues relate to the person who speaking and their willingness to give up their turn as well as the person who is at the moment listening and is eager to jump in and say something. A violation of these types of turn taking norms can often results in a rather disastrous conversation. It’s important for us as teachers to teach our students when they can take turns and how they know that they are able to take their turn. Equally important as knowing how long to go in your turn and when to finish. Knowing this is an absolute necessity ain any kind of conversational endeavor. What the authors point out in relation to the gangs is actually an excellent way of training students for turn taking in English. Take the advice to heart.

-Holding the floor

If a speaker does not want to give up their role or their turn in speaking then there are certain devices for what is called `holding the floor.` Again, as a student learning to speak in English one must be aware of some of these different cues and signals otherwise conversations can go extremely wrong.

-Has patterns and routines

It should be clear at this point that speaking, more than writing perhaps, is made up of both patterns and routines. Some of these patterns and routines are highly formalized while others are little more open to interpretation and change. This is both good news and bad news for us as language teachers. If there are a such a thing as particular patterns and routines then should be possible to teach them. Since there are and we can teach them then this is indeed very good news for us. At the same time, however, all these routines and patterns are made to be altered, more or less depending on specific situations. This of course is the bad news because it makes using more authentic texts actually fairly difficult. An authentic text may or may not follow routines and norms closely. We as teachers, then, need not only to be aware of what the most common patterns and routines are, but we must also know how speakers of English go about altering these patterns and routines for their own specific uses in varying contexts. It should be noted though the in discussing this we have already come up with some sort of teaching/acquisitional sequence for our students.

-Follows certain principles

Nothing is more true than this very simple, very general statement. As we will discuss at length in our yellow book it should be clear that speaking does follow certain principles and that at least some of these principles do seem to be somewhat universal. As mentioned above though, it is just as important for us to acknowledge that all these principles are also subject to change and alteration. That is the nature of language and language use.

3. What are the three basic categories of speaking identified in unit 4 and how do they work in relation to speaking? (CC4)

According to Cornbleet Carter (2001) there are three different categories which affect speaking. They are grammar, lexis, and discourse. The important thing to remember about grammar is that the grammar of speaking is really quite different than the grammar of writing. The most basic difference is that speaking is much simpler grammatically than writing, and this occurs particularly when we're speaking in less formal situations. In fact, several the researchers say that speaking and writing actually are based on different linguistic systems. The grammar of speaking relies too a large extent on simple verb phrases along with deictic references. Cohesion is extremely important as well as ellipsis as a way of avoiding repetition. It is therefore hard to teach the grammar of speaking as a rule-based or generative system. The grammar rules we teach our students often have actually nothing to do with the way people actually speak in real conversations and are derived not from speaking but from writing. And as a teacher it is my feeling that is easier to build something up than to break something down. Thus, we might be better off teaching some of the basic ideas and formulas inherent in speaking and letting our students then build those up into larger ideas for writing. Taking the things we know for writing, these absolute truths about language, and making them untrue would seem to be a very strange way to go about teaching.

As for lexis, the most basic thing to remember is that the lexis of speaking is marked by a high level of repetition of basic words. One of the things that we often do wrong in teaching is laying a tremendous over emphasis on passive vocabulary. We spend so much time teaching our students obscure vocabulary which they may need to regurgitate or recognize for badly designed and implemented tests that we never actually teach the basics of active vocabulary use. Active vocabulary is different in that there is no fixed meaning for these items apart from the text in which they are in embedded. Many of them, like the word take for example, don't have a strong semantic meaning. Many uses of take are simply lexical. Take appears in many constructions simply due to collocational effects. This is one of the key elements of trying to teach speaking to our students. We must teach active and not passive vocabulary and teach active vocabulary requires a totally different teaching process than passive vocabulary. We have to deal with ambiguity, which is the very basis of language, another concept which is generally not dealt with in the classroom.

The last category for speaking is one that is most familiar to us at this point and that is discourse. By discourse we referred to the basic ideas of creating longer interwoven texts. This then entails such familiarities as turn taking, cohesion elements like discourse markers, and other aspects that we should all be very familiar with by now.

4. From what different perspectives can research on pragmatic development be conducted? (PD3)

There are several different perspectives from which one can actually engage in research on pragmatic development. For us this is important to know because pragmatic development is an extremely important underlying aspect of speaking. We can`t separate the development of speaking as a skill and the development of pragmatic awareness. In addition, by looking at some different ways in which one can conduct research on pragmatic development we are also looking for ways in which one might be able to teach (maybe we had rather say `enhanced`) pragmatic development. Really, for us, I think the best way of looking at this is to see how these research perspectives can be turned into teaching approaches.

Descriptive Linguistics - Comparative Pragmatics

In this descriptive linguistic method, which is really just an abstraction from the contrastive analysis hypothesis, what people often do is compare pragmatic structure between two different languages and for us who are concerned with the development of pragmatic skill in the target language we obviously want to see how the first language might interfere. In order to do this we need to first get an idea of how pragmatics works in the first language and compare that with how pragmatic would seem to work in the target language. The main problem with this approach is that pragmatics has not yet been very well-defined even in a highly study language like English and this makes it quite hard to follow this approach to closely.

Sociology - Conversation Analysis

In conversation analysis what the researcher basically does is analyze how conversations take place within a specific cultural group. They analyze things similar to the topics we talked about recently, such as turn taking, how topics are chosen, how people assume certain roles and issues like this. While such issues are important for us, they are also possibly somewhat vague in the second language teaching/learning process.

Linguistic Anthropology - Interactional Sociolinguistics, Ethnographic Microanalysis

An analysis from the perspective of linguistic anthropology is unfortunately probably not particularly useful for us as language teachers. What they usually do is a compare how people from different social groups interact. While this might seem interesting for us because obviously Koreans and English speakers are from different social groups they are both trying to speak the same language and Koreans are often trying to meet the English speaker`s norms. Certainly there are research questions which could be conducted here but any research in this area would need to be conducted in the target language environment and that simply not possible for most of us.

Language Socialization

Language socialization is the developmental counterpart of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory. What basically occurs here is a researcher tries to observe how people learn language through the socialization process and they do this by recording and analyzing communicative exchanges over a long period of time. This is certainly an interesting viewpoint for us as language teachers because it is developmental in its very focus. The only problem is the socialization aspect. Because we are not in a situation where English is learned in a natural social process it might be hard to do this. Obviously the classroom can be used as a social environment but to do so speaking must be done in the classroom in a somewhat social way.

Developmental Pragmatics

Developmental pragmatics basically focuses on how pragmatics skills develop. Instead of focusing on the social nature they simply focus on the skills themselves. Central to this focus would be a natural order for pragmatics skills development which would seem more important than the specific environment in which the skills were learned. For us as teachers of course this would be an important approach because we are interested in knowing if there really is a specific order because any order that we know can be used to sequence our goals and accompanying lessons and we know that sequencing is the very basis of setting up any kind of classroom program, in language teachers are nothing if not sequencers.

Cognitive Psychology - Discourse Comprehension

Cognitive psychology basically deals with processing load and how this relates to the comprehension of discourse. Remember how he said that when we go to produce discourse we have all this different knowledge which we need to be able to use when we make the discourse but of course this difficult because of processing limitations. Well, the same thing happens for comprehension. Sometimes people are simply not able to comprehend discourse because they're not able to process all the different subtleties which are inherent in the discourse. Cognitive psychology tries to find methods for how people can process discourse or, from a developmental point of view, how processing skills are related to how discourse skills develop. As teachers this obviously gives us important information about how we can best use input. Obviously we want to try to give input at a level where the students can actually notice different elements of discourse. This is an extremely important and potentially powerful point.

Social Psychology - Social Cognition

From a social psychology/social cognition point of view what researchers are really trying to do is to find out how people are able to process and organize facts about the social situation which are then used for communicative exchanges. Obviously this would also occur in some sort of developmental pattern or developmental cycle which we should know about as teachers.

Communication Research - Cross-cultural Communication, Intercultural Communication

Communication research should be somewhat familiar to you from your CC class in SMU-TESOL. Researchers working in this area tried to assess where communication breaks down as people from different cultural backgrounds endeavor to talk to each other. This again is of interest to us because we want to find out where our students may and actually do go wrong. Again, a possible problem with this is it would be very difficult to conduct outside of the target language environment. An alternative to cross-cultural communication is intercultural communication and this is how people communication within the target language group and this is useful in that it gives us norms for communication which we need to try to teach our students.

Cross-cultural Pragmatics

Finally, we have the similar but more focused area of cross-cultural pragmatics. Rather than just focusing on something general like communication this field does research focusing on how people from different cultures deal with each other pragmatically. Basically what it tries to do is develop an overview of the knowledge necessary for communication through cultures by viewing instances of communication among people and where they succeed and where they fail. They strive to look beneath surface level strata to find out how people's knowledge is affecting the communication in both positive and negative ways and whether people share or fail to share similar patterns.

5. What are some of the basic possibilities in research design for researching pragmatic development? (PD3)

The differences between these two main possibilities should be clear by now but I review them for you nonetheless.

Longitudinal

A longitudinal study is one which is obviously going to take place over a longer period of time. In this type of study generally the researcher works with a small group of people who she will observe fairly intimately for an extended period of time, generally for several moths or years as they mention in the text. The reason for this extended study is to try to show particularly how a certain skill will develop in the person or a small group of people. Small groups of people are used simply for practical reasons. It is hard to intimately observe hundreds of people. Thus longitudinal studies are good in determining the developmental patterns of particular aspects of speaking or language use/reception. They're good because we get to see the whole process of development. They might often lack validity though because as we know individual people do things in different ways resulting in somewhat different processes and actually different language systems in their head. This means that of an extended longitudinal study of one person which shows us how this one person learned but it might not tell us very much about how our students may end up learning. Everybody is little bit or a lot of bit different and that must be remembered when we are looking at these types of longitudinal studies of small groups of people.

Cross-sectional

The cross-sectional study is one which is carried out on a larger number of people at one particular time. As a result usually some sort of testing tool is applied to these people all at once. The testing tool must therefore be somewhat extensive and should be very carefully put together. The reason for this is that the researcher has no chance to go back and interview those same people one-by-one. Thus, everything needs to be planned very carefully. What happens in the cross-sectional study is that one group of people is compared with another group of people and the differences are analyzed usually using some to statistics program. The two groups compared could be second language learners at different stages of learning or a second language group could be compared with a native speaker group. Either way, because of the large number of subjects involved a researcher can find general patterns in the development of a group of people which will hopefully describe learning in a general way for everyone. The drawback is that the entire process cannot be viewed as in a longitudinal study. Researchers will need to try to guess the actual processes which may have occured between the different cross-sections that they take.

6. Of the research designs which ones do you think the most and the least useful? (PD3)

Probably the most important aspect of these research designs, and this is what I really want you to think about, is the way that we can use these to design actual activities in the classroom. By taking these designs for research and obviously adapting them slightly we can turn them into highly effective teaching tools for precisely the kind of speaking teaching that we need to do in order to allow our students actually function in a target language environment without being beaten to a pulp by angry listeners. So, that is really how I want you to think about these and that is really how they're useful for us. Any teaching tool needs to be theoretically valid. We need to use things that we know are or have been demonstrated to be useful to our students and we need to understand how and why they're useful. By taking what has been used as a research tool and turning it into teaching tool we have that validity.

There are three basic types of research tools which continues for eliciting knowledge about our students pragmatic/discourse competence. They are shown below.

Spoken Interaction

Spoken interaction tools imply that the students will actually speak. Thus, if your students cannot speak at all then it might be very hard to use spoken interaction tools. This, however, does not mean that spoken interaction tools are impossible to use with low level speakers. They can be made into more contrived and highly directed types of activities as we will se as we review these quickly. Another important point to mention before we go into our descriptions is that spoken interaction should be either tape-recorded or video taped. Simply taking notes in the spoken interaction situation will not allow the researcher to analyze the nuances of speech created by the students. Once recorded, these spoken attractions need to be transcribed for the purposes of analysis. These transcriptions, as was mentioned briefly in the book, are often very good tools for teaching. Bear this in mind.

            Authentic Discourse

Authentic discourse is when the students simply talk freely to probably a native speaker or someone of high speaking proficiency about any topic which they naturally happened to come across. What this means that is that authentic discourse will probably be hard to do in the classroom. It might not be impossible if you're running a conversation class for students to take their own topics and engage each other authentically, but this doesn't happen in most classrooms. Many of our students will need a little more structure and scaffolding to help them be able to talk more.

            Elicited Conversation

Elicited conversation might be something which would be more apt to happen in the classroom. Here the teacher suggests topics or even as specific questions to, as in an interview, upon which the students are supposed to speak. In this way the teacher can direct the students` speech and get them to focus on particular functions or structures which she or he wants the students to try to use. In this way it can be a little bit more useful in the classroom, and even if we could use authentic situations outside the classroom it makes it a little more efficient in that we don't have to wait for the right moment to occur for people to give us the type structure talk on the type of topic we want them to talk about. The downside is that it is not necessarily authentic or natural and of course this must be born in mind when someone is thinking of trying to use this type of elicitation technique.

Role Play

We all know what role-plays are. We know how to use them and we know how to set them up. Role-plays are good especially in assessing things like power relations and familiarity and how this affects other aspects of pragmatics/discourse. They are also good in that they can be done with all level students depending on how much information is given to the participants. Role-plays extend from very free role-plays were very little information is supplied to the participants to highly contrived and controlled role-plays which are run to a certain extent like information gaps where even some of what the students will say is actually written down on a highly specified role-play card. In this way role-plays can be the most effective type of tool for assessing real speech in the classroom.

Questionnaires

Questionnaires might be the most used tool for the elicitation of knowledge about pragmatics/discourse because they are easy to use. Researchers using questionnaires can use them to assess a very large group of participants in a very short amount of time. The trick, however, is that they must be put together very carefully and this makes them quite difficult to do. Another problem is that they give us a less direct representation of what students can actually do. They focus more on knowledge and less on action even in DCTs which use written language to try to glean information on spoken language forms. Thus, questionnaires have their purpose, but they also have their limitations.

            Discourse Completion Tasks

Discourse completion tasks or DCT's are a highly effective tool for trying to elicit knowledge of certain aspects of discourse/pragmatics. What generally happens is the researcher creates a situation and a dialogue which has parts missing. A subject needs to fill in the parts with what they feel to be appropriate language. This language is then of course analyzed against what are presumed to be proficient or even native speaker norms. The design is fairly straightforward and varies only in how many roles the participant will need to play and how long their responses are expected to be. Again, DCT's are generally written or designed around a particular point of pragmatics, such as requests, replies, apologies etc.

            Multiple-choice Questions

All of you are very familiar with multiple choice tests and multiple-choice questionnaires for elicitation of pragmatic/discourse knowledge should also not seen unfamiliar to you. Multiple-choice questionnaires can be used like DCT's, that is in the same basic format except the subject picks a particular answer as the most fitting. They can also be used as a way of getting information about feelings on completed discourse exchanges either successful or not successful. In any case they are a little bit easier for people to do because there simply relying on recognition as they are all closed ended. Respondents do not need to produce any actual language they simply need to try to think about what might be appropriate.

            Scaled-response Questionnaires

Scaled response questionnaires are simple. Researchers use them to try to glean information about how respondents feel about certain aspects of a piece of discourse. Following this basic design researchers create specific detailed questions about some aspect of a piece of discourse and have people rate their feelings in different categories possibly about that piece of discourse. Scaled response questionnaires are easy for respondents to deal with and relatively easy for researchers to create. The only problem is that they don't supply a tremendous amount of information which means they are usually used in coordination with some other elicitation technique and best complement some other information.

Oral and Written Self-report

Oral and written self-report is simply trying to ask people to tell us what they are feeling when they go to try to use language or we might try to get the inside track on how they actually approach a certain situation and what some of the variables are they use to determine how they approach a situation. As a result I think it's probably better to actually conduct these in Korean and not in English. It's also important that these are conducted as soon as possible after actual linguistic events because we know as soon as memories enter long-term memory they are reshaped and constantly reformed which means these oral and written self-reports might actually windup lacking any kind of validity if they're done too late.

            Interviews

Interviews are easy. They basically revolve around asking people questions about how they felt before during and after a certain speaking exchange. These are best recorded and the questions are best created before the actual interview to make sure that both the interviewer and interview we stay on topic and the interviewer can actually get the information they need.

            Think-aloud Protocols

Think aloud protocols simply encourage subjects to tell us in an unsolicited manner what they're doing as they go to speak. It is a simple kind of report which happens at the very moment of utterance creation. Again the key here is that they are unsolicited. In the interview the subject responds to solicited questions from the interviewer. In this way the interviewer decides what the important parts are. In the think aloud protocol it is the subject who decides what to say. They report at the moment of utterance creation and explain what they're doing as they go, determining themselves what they think is important and what is less important.

            Diaries

Diaries can be kept either by the learners themselves or by teachers in the classroom on learners. The difference between diaries and think aloud protocols is that diaries are not an immediate response there is always a delay in time which allows for both more introspection and interpretation. Unlike interviews, they too are unsolicited in that the respondents can decide themselves what they think is important in their exchanges. The diary usually works in that a student would be directed to simply write down what they think about how they are learning. It is not the content of what they're learning so much is how they are learning and what they're thinking as they learn which is important which is revealed in diaries.