Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Discourse Analysis

(Spring 2006)

Week 6 - McCarthy, Chapter 2 and PD, Chapter 5 and James (1998) Chapter 3 - Answers

1. What is reference, what are its types and what is its purpose in discourse? (McC2)

Reference is a type of linking between two things either within a text or in a text and the outside world. References sometimes linked to what is also called replacement because a referring word like `his` is not only linked to a particular referent like Bob`s, but also replaces it. This type of recurring and replacement occurs in what McCarthy calls anaphora. Sometimes a reference will link to a concept which exists outside the text in the world itself and this is called exophora.

References may be the one grammatical element of discourse which people actually study and they usually do so in relation to reading comprehension, not actual linguistic production. While introducing reference the reading is probably a good introductory step at some point we also need to get our students exposed actually using reference. Reference in speaking is going to often be more exophoric than merely anaphoric. This should not surprise us because we know that speaking occurs in the world and real contexts. What is also interesting is that reference isn`t something they can merely be described the reading but also has patterns of use which students are going to need to understand if they are going to use reference naturally in their speech.

What is also interesting about reference is that it relates to much more than to just what we normally think of as referring terms like pronouns. Articles, determiners, or noun markers are also referring expressions and this provides us with an important direction for how we might actually go about integrating grammar and discourse. The discourse approach to grammar that McCarthy is trying to introduce to us here basically claims that we can use discourse to enhance not only our students knowledge of grammar but our own ways of introducing and explaining grammar points. The bottom line is that very often we can`t possibly explain grammar usage without making reference to a larger patterns found in discourse.

2. What is ellipsis and how does it work? (McC2)

Ellipsis is when certain elements (structures, lexical units) of a piece of discourse are omitted. This is a particularly important aspect of speech because, as we know, speech occurs in real-time and needs to be somewhat more efficient. It goes faster and as a result things that don`t need to be repeated often are not. This is the basis of ellipsis. As McCarthy has accurately pointed out every language has something like ellipsis, it seems to be universal, but exactly how each language does this varies. He also discusses different levels of ellipsis in these generally come down to different size structural units. Nothing too surprising here. As teachers of language, and especially ones interested in developing speaking skill in our students, we need to focus some of their attention on how to actually go about this process of ellipsis. It is an important factor in speaking and obviously an important factor in listening to other people speak.

3. How do the concepts of theme and rheme work in structuring discourse? (McC2)

Theme and rheme basically work by interacting with each other. We can use the idea of theme to understand why certain elements are fronted in not only English but other languages as well. The theme basically sets the topic for a stretch of discourse. The rheme or comment basically says something or adds additional information about the topic. Theme and rheme taking together is often referred to as the information structure of an utterance. The grammar of an utterance needs to take into consideration the information structure of the utterance. On another level students need to learn how English speakers actually interchange things like theme and rheme in order to create longer pieces of discourse.

4. What support is there for the claim that pragmatics precedes grammar? (PD5)

For us as language teachers the integration between pragmatic knowledge and linguistic knowledge is extremely important. We've been talking in this class a lot about form to function mapping and without grammatical knowledge we don't really know how to deal with forms as far as being able to create new forms and understand new forms. At the same time the pragmatic side has to deal with use. Knowing the form does not mean you have a clue about how to use the form. In order to use the form we need to know the function that the form is intended to fill but also when this particular form is to be used. Each form has a limited frame of use. No form can be used everywhere. Also an important part of language is being able to develop new and sometimes idiosyncratic forms based on the ones that have been appropriated through exposure to real language input. So, an important idea for us is to try to figure out acquisitional sequences. The main idea behind this being, knowing the most common acquisitional sequences will allow us to devise more effective sequences for our teaching. And of course we would like to try to match acquisitional sequences and teaching sequences for maximal efficiency. The data that we find in this chapter help us in a general way. General because a lot of the studies that have been carried out to date have not been done in situations like this situation we're facing here in Korea. This means that we need to be of critical and adaptive of some of this data in trying to turn it into useful practices for our students here.

Most of the cases which have been documented that support the claim that pragmatics precedes grammar are based on for a few scattered studies in Europe of beginning or very low level untutored learners. While of course we have beginning and low-level learners in Korea the fact remains that no one here is untutored as regards English. Quite the contrary! It is very hard to be untutored as regards English in Korea because people here don't have a target language environment or any kind of usage environment to be exposed to. Even for young children the language learning is very much a tutoring experience. From the research we can draw the conclusion that when pragmatics does precedes grammar it occurs obviously and in low-level learners and occurs primarily because these adult low-level learners are able to use what Levinson calls pragmatic universals.

Adults engaging in and a new language learning process bring to that process a complete set of pragmatic behaviors from their first language or any previous language which they have learned. This is obviously a huge help to them. While languages are not identical in their pragmatic behavior there are more similarities and there are differences. This means that, particularly in the early stages of language learning, adult learners will be able to use a lot of their pragmatic knowledge to both successfully interpret it also successfully deliver very basic communicative messages despite lack of grammar and of course vocabulary which unfortunately is not mentioned at all in this chapter. What they do, in effect, is to fall back on pragmatic knowledge in the first language which hopefully will match that of the second language at least enough in the early stages for them to survive. For these low-level learners their minimal knowledge of grammar doesn't really impede them that much. They manage to get done what they need to do with low levels of grammatical/lexical knowledge on the basis that they can interpret what others are doing (they have knowledge of contexts and behaviors from their other languages and the more the merrier) and they know themselves what they should be doing although they might not be sure exactly how to do it.

5. What support is there for the claim that grammar precedes pragmatics? (PD5)

The claim that grammar precedes pragmatics is supported for the most part by higher level, more tutored learners. We can interpret their status simply by positing that these higher level learners have exhausted whatever universal pragmatic knowledge they might have because they can do more and are now falling back on particular L-1 strategies for more sophisticated pragmatic uses which do not match the second language patterns. Thus, it may seem that the pragmatic knowledge seems to lag behind their grammar knowledge. In reality it is actually hard to be sure. It is never really this simple. It should hopefully be clear to you by now that whenever we investigate something related to language and especially language learning there seem to be strong patterns of contradiction. It is hard to come up with universal tendencies for language learning. The fact that these grammar-first learners are tutored products tells us something about what they types of forms have been tutored in which certainly must be grammar and particular grammar rules and structures. This leads us to a very simple observation which we can make about teaching in general. When we teach, and in doing so focus a lot of our students' attention on one particular aspect of language, they may not be able to do other aspects or even notice other aspects. So if we are thinking of establishing a simple dichotomy between grammar and pragmatics (and this in and of itself is an extreme oversimplification of a linguistic system) and we focus too much attention on one then obviously the other one is going to suffer.

6. What does all this tell us about how we might go about teaching language (speaking)? (PD5)

To take the examples from the two questions above then the conclusion we need to draw is that we need to keep very close tabs on how we organize our lessons as teachers of speaking. We need to try to keep a balance between many different elements of language. Simply thinking about form to function mapping and the relationship between pragmatic knowledge and grammatical knowledge, which I guess would include lexical knowledge as well depending on your version of competence, we need to strike a balance allowing our students to learn them simultaneously. According to what we've been studying in this course we also realize that within pragmatic knowledge and grammatical knowledge there are many different aspects which must be considered and controlled in the learning process in the classroom. Some of these for the functional side would be things like the specific speech acts which we are going to try to get our students to learn. These course would need to be put inside specific situations. The situations would need to make use of different types of familiarity and power relations setups between the speakers. In short we need to fix a context and develop contexts in relation to our students. Certain situations are contexts are going to be linked and certainly with not only specific speech acts but also specific grammatical forms so we need to take care to try to match all these things up. Give students input and practice revolving around a very sophisticated interplay of different variables. Personally, I have not seen many materials which actually do this very well. Another thing you simply need to be careful of us a teacher is respecting students differences. If you get 10 students the same input and the same practice with those 10 students will windup learning ten different things. We cannot expect our students to all learn the same thing all of the same time. That's simply impossible. This simple fact of course, then, calls attention to our assessment system which assumes just that and wrongfully so.

7. What are some ways of defining error and which one do you pay most attention to? (Ja3)

James defines error as coming from ignorance. We can call it the lack of knowledge either of obviously linguistic forms or of their use, and even more different types of lacks. It is, however, difficult to judge errors because we are not aware of the internal processing of the speakers who committed the error and even that speaker is probably not aware of their own internal processing, at least not all the time. At the same time as teachers who are trying to work speaking into our teaching repertoire we need to come to terms with errors and how we might best deal with them. The first step in this process is of course being able to identify errors and maybe a few of the different types of error. James provides for different ways for us to look at different types of errors. They are:

Grammaticality

The best way looking grammaticality is to say that it is a very neutral way of assessing a particular usage. The basic idea, and I think this really helps, is to ask if this utterance would be acceptable in any context. If the answer is no than the utterance is clearly on grammatical. It is not important to try to understand the speaker`s intent when deciding grammaticality because the ungrammaticality will always be present regardless of the speaker`s intent.

Acceptability

In contrast to grammaticality, acceptability is reliant on speakers intent. Often an utterance may be grammatically acceptable without being acceptable in a particular context or based on the speakers intent. In addition to this we can think about acceptability also in relation to processability. An acceptable utterance is one which is able to be processed by a proficient speaker. An utterance is not able to be processed, again based on speakers intent, then it is simply not acceptable.

Correctness

Correctness is basically the idea prescriptive grammar where certain people are going to say that something is correct or incorrect based on specific beliefs but not actual use, either their own or anyone else`s.

Strangeness and infelicity

Strangeness has to do often with lexical problems. The order of the elements will be fine but there will be problems with how the elements actually relate to each other, and hear what we are really talking about is collocability. Strangeness and in felicity basically has to do with the idea that the speaker violates an excepted type of collocation.

8. How are errors different from mistakes? (Ja3)

Errors are everything that mistakes are not. They are mutually exclusive and through this very simple relationship by defining error we can also define mistake.

An error arises only when there was no intention to commit one.

Looking at the idea of corrigability we can say that for errors the important thing is not whether someone, maybe an outside listener, is able to correct the utterance but really whether the speaker of the utterance is able to correct it. If the speaker can correct the utterance then it is not an error. It is only an error if the speaker of the utterance is unable to correct it. This again makes reference to the basic idea that errors must be unintentional.