Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of TESOL
Discourse Analysis (Spring 2004)
Week 11 - Cornbleet and Carter Units 2 & 4, DAC Chapter 2 - Questions
1. What is speaking and what ae some of the major components of speaking we need to be aware of?
In its most basic sense speaking is obviously manipulation of sound for meaning purposes. It should be clear, however, that beneath this basic idea their 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 sound. Thus, sound itself and the way sound sound is produced is a very complicated issue and one which has its own field of study was in the field of linguistics, namely phonetics and phonology. Apart from the sound itself there 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. Cortex 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. What are the three basic categories of speaking identified in unit 4 and how do they work in relation to speaking?
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 be the dose of forests say that speaking in writing actually are based on different linguistic systems. The grammar of speaking relies too 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 speaking as a rule-based system. The grammar rules we teach our students often have actually nothing to do with the way people actually speak in real conversations. And as a teacher 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 inherent in speaking and letting our students then build those up in the 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 regurgitation or recognize for test that we never actually teach active vocabulary. Active vocabulary is different in that there is no fixed meaning for these items. Many of them, like the word take for example, we don't have a strong semantic meaning. Many uses of take are simply grammatical. 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. 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.
Some comments on Riggenbach:
1. A researcher in a qualitative research should be an observer as well as a participant. Why?
OK. The idea here is that in order to get the actual data the researcher has to either observe the subject producing the language or the researcher must be a participant, that is by interviewing. It is important that if the researcher is following the subject around and recording well they must have some way of analyzing the context. We already know how important contextual information can be. Therefore it would seem very strange to try to elicit data from real situations without actually observing and taking notes of some of the contextual variants which would certainly affect the language produced. On the other side the researcher as participant is necessitated by a direct interview format for elicitation. Even if somebody else is going to interview, the researcher should be an observer. The bottom line is, it is difficult for researchers to simply grabbed somebody else's interview or observation and make legitimate sense of it. The researcher herself must be involved in order to interpret, hopefully correctly, the data.
2. Why should a qualitative research be observed in a natural setting? If so, why interviews should be preplanned?
Observing language development in a natural setting is certainly the best way of gleaming the most meaningful information. Think about it this way, if you have a wild animal and you have the option of observing the behavior of that wild animal either in the zoo or in its natural environment, world which one will you choose? Obviously putting the animal into its own natural environment and observing it is the best way. Therefore, locating some language learners in a target language environment and studying them is often deemed the best way of collecting important data in this qualitative view of language research. It is however not the only way. Thinking about that wild animal again, we can also learn much about the animal itself by observing it in an unnatural setting. A tiger placed in Africa is going to seem munch him or like a tiger then if it is placed in Asia, where it fits. The other vantage of natural settings is that there is much more real context to observe. An interview, at least a good interview tries to mimic more natural types of settings. So, again thinking of our wild animal, if we are going to observe the wild animal in the zoo we are going to need to create a setting which is conducive to the animal actually doing things. If we take our animal and put it in an empty room we are not going to get very interesting data about the animal. We need to plan out what will be in the room. We do this is based on what we already know about the animal and its home environment. This is the way it also works with interviews. We can just start talking to someone. Language doesn't work that way. There has to be some sort of purpose or plan. Once more, this purpose of plan is probably going to be based on certain theories that the researcher has about of language in general and a specific behavioral patterns in the specific language which is being researched. Therefore interviews must be preplanned in order to hopefully get what is being sought after. This doesn't mean that you over plan your interview. Interview should be planned in a general sense. Making a list of questions and simply firing those questions at your subject is not going to make a very good interview because it is extremely unnatural. In interviewing when you to form a balance between a free natural setting and a certain amount of control on the point of the interviewer.
3. In a qualitative research, observing is really put a greater emphasis. If so, what kinds of roles do theories in a qualitative research? These theories may be repaired and reset through a long period of observation?
As in every other research endeavor the researcher always must start with some sort of theoretical underpinnings in order to plan out the research program. If I have no idea of what I'm going to do then there is no way I can design research. To a large extent determining what I'm going to do is going to be based on previous observations and my interpretation of these observations which whether I'm aware of it or not our going to be strongly molded by my theoretical beliefs. It is in this way that theory place an extremely important role in any kind of research paradigm and certainly qualitative research is no exception. One of the striking examples which is often been made between qualitative and quantitative research is that in qualitative research since the experiment unfolds over a very long period of time the researcher is given the opportunity to re-evaluate data and this might quite possibly lead to changes in the theoretical basis. Quantitative research happens at a pace which probably does not allow the researcher to go through the data and questioned the theoretical underpinnings until it is too late. So, often the end result of the quantitative analysis is that maybe the results were unexpected because of some effects outside the experiment. There is no opportunity to change the experiment as it is done so quickly. All of them be domiciled the experiment is replicated with certain changes based on theoretical differences. Qualitative research can recognize changes and reshape itself over time, which means the experiment will probably be more useful in the end and will not need to be replicated as often.
4. What relationship should be set between an interviewer and an interviewee?
Why is so important in rapport between them?
In an interview it is obviously extremely important that the interview he and the interviewer either already know each other or that a certain level of rapport is quickly established between them for the sole purpose that the interviewee will then speak more. Certainly we talk more and better with people we are comfortable with. Performance anxiety is a major stumbling block in many interview based studies. We know that performance changes dramatically depending on situations and unless for designing a study about how performance does change we want to create an environment for our interviews where the interviewee can give us their peak performance. An interview where we're sure the interviewee is not giving peak performance is probably not very valid. Thus, we need to do everything we can to ensure that we are getting the peak performance out of the interviewee and simply making sure that the interviewer is known to the interviewee is the simplest way of doing this. Short of this, the interviewer needs to accommodate strongly to the interviewee on an emotional level (not a linguistic one, dammit) so the interviewee feels comfortable and rapport can be very quickly established, again for the purpose of trying to generate the best possible sample.
5. Can you introduce a specific examples which a qualitative research is applied to?
I think that the discourse analysis activities seemed to be irrelevant to a qualitative research because they were not observed over a long time and otherwise they were an examples of a quantitative research where students choose a topic or function(s), collect data from native speakers, analyze them, generate linguistic forms in similar contexts, and compare them with those of native speakers.
In the PD book we were exposed to many different examples of qualitative research. Remember the study on Wes in Hawaii or the study by DuFon on her Australian students learning Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia. Both of those were qualitative studies, based on both self-report and interview (and maybe even some observation). You should go back and take a look at some of the references made to those very important studies. Remember also the discourse analysis is a huge field which incorporates all different aspects of pragmatic development, that would be both the micro and the macro. They don't seem to be, as far as I can see, any real limitations on what is possible to be studied within a qualitative format. It should also be mentioned that the best studies are ones which implement both qualitative and quantitative measures. In qualitative studies comparisons with native speakers and native speaker norms are generally not made. Therefore, to truly find out how skills developed both types of study mode would need to be employed either in tandem or a different periods of time.