Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of TESOL
Discourse Analysis (Spring 2004)
Week 12 - DAC Chapter 3 - Questions
1. There are four different kinds of discourse analysts mentioned in Heidi Riggenbach(1999).
Summarize the characteristics of each of these discourse analysts.
There are four types of discourse analysts mentioned in Riggenbach (1999); conversation analyst, sociolinguist, speech event analyst, and ethnographer. These discourse analysts are distinguished according to their belief, used data, goal, and interests.
First of all, conversational analyst deals with the interaction data which is usually video-taped and audio-taped. They assume that conversation can reveal truths about social contexts and that conversation invokes context. So, they are interested in the micro level of conversation elements such as sequencing, turn taking, repairs.
Secondly, sociolinguists like to get discourse data from real language use. To get the data, they observe or record real language interactions. They think that conventions, rules, and patterns for communication are different from culture to culture. They believe that every community or culture has their own way of speaking. They are concerned about the different rules and patterns that reflect the values or structures of the society.
Thirdly, speech event analyst discusses the utterances, usually elicited or observed, that together performs a communicative function. Thus, the research should result in a description of the speech setting, the participants, and the structure of the event, set in a template-like sequence. Also, they concern how the function and the form are mapped, how speech act functions are realized in larger text units.
Lastly, ethnographers collect data by interviewing or observing the interaction which occurs in natural setting in a longitudinal way. They believe that they can find how culture of each society or individual is reflected in people's interaction and behavior. Also, they are interested in understanding the culture and the belief system of people by developing description or interpretive accounts.
These analysts work in different ways to understand discourse and communication. According to their fields of interests, learners can choose the role of researchers and perform the research. This can be more motivated, manage their own learning process, which improves learners` language learning.
2. Choose one activity for each type of the discourse analysts and summarize the idea of the activity which you pick up.
(1) Conversation analysts - Fillers and repairs
The objective of this activity is to help the students to heighten their awareness about how a turn of talk can be maintained in a conversation and what are the techniques to buy time for self-correcting. The ultimate goal is to enable them to become competent communicator when it comes to keeping their turn while they are communicating in their second language. In this activity, the students are supposed to analyze natural, unplanned native speaker speech in order to observe the native speakers to search for words, hesitate, make vocabulary and grammar mistakes, and repeat themselves in their conversation. In the "predict" step, the teacher give the students some questions so that they can think about how native speakers correct their speech and what are the specific expressions to keep their turn in the conversation. In the second step, "plan", students observe native speakers in informal, unplanned contexts. They can find out some flaws in their speech, for example, vocabulary and grammar errors, repetitions, hesitations, fillers and repairs. Next, "collect data" step, students can audiotape or videotape their data, which is the ideal way to collect their data. to identify the kinds of things a speaker says. The aim of this step is to identify the native speaker's speech. In the "analyze" section, student compile their data on a list. They can add interesting or unusual examples of repairs, fillers or inaccuracies. Step 5 is "generate", in which the students present their reports in the form of group report. Finally, in the "review" step, if the studentss audiotaped their own speech in the previous section, they can analyze their speech. Employing an observer to give feedback to speakers is a good way to review their activity.
2) Sociolinguists - Openings
The objective of this activity is to to help students highlight their consciousness about how conversation are begun or "opened". Through this activity, they can know how to provide socially appropriate and linguistically accurate openings, and how to respond to the openings of native speakers naturally and straightforwardly. This activity is caused by the fact that different culture has different ways of greeting or opening their conversations. The social setting and the participants' relationship of conversation affects what are the appropriate greetings and openings a lot. In the first step of this activity is "predict", which has the students to think about the way to open a conversation in their native language. In this section, they predict what interaction is proper in their second language culture. It's important for the teacher to let them consider two factors of participants and settings. In the "plan" step, the student are supposed to plan what they will observe and where they will get data for discourse analysis. If they plan to do the task in group work, they can divide up the tasks with their group members. The third step is "collect data". This can be conducted as homework or classroom work, and it's proper for team work, because each group member can have different interest in their discourse analysis. If the students don't have enough knowledge or experience, the teacher can help the students to practice their data collection before the real work. After finishing collecting data, the students can "analyze" the data. They compile their findings and record the findings in a chart or notebook. Then they "generate" what they observed and analyze in the form of group reporting. If groups have different opinions about the same topic, they can discuss the topic after group report. Roleplay also can be a form of group report. In this section, the teacher can evaluate the students. They can give the test in the form of oral performace test, or they can give them group project with allowing the "audience" to evaluate the demonstration. In review step, if the students generated their own opening in the previous section, they can be evaluated by the other students and teacher wether their produced speech conforms to their generalizations about openings after analyzing their observed data
(3) Speech event analysts - Discussion
The objective of this activity is to help the students to aware of "what contributes to a successful, well-balanced discussion". The ultimate goal of this activity is to help them take part in discussion successfully with knowing the strategies to lead the discussion effectively. In this activity, students work as speech even analysts, and they need to think about how the participants accomplish their work successfully in discussion. They should try to define whether a discussion is good or bad. While they are trying to answer these questions, they can predict and realize what they focus on in their "discussion" discourse analysis activity. This is the "predict" step. In the second step, they "plan" what they will observe and how to collect data while they are observing the discussion. They prepare a data collection chart for effective data collecting, that is the next step. In the "collect data" section, they get information while observing discussion. In this case, video-tape discussion is preferred, because they can view and review the discussion to analyze the data, which is for the fourth step, "analyze". In this step, the students rate the discussion from 1 to 10, which means from "poor" to "excellent". They should find out what makes the discussion successful or poor. In the step 5, "Generate", they become discussion leaders and get opportunity to make sure what they analyzed through the discourse analysis. Finally, in "Review" step, they evaluate each other, which can be called "peer-evaluation". Video-taped discussion can be a good material for self-analysis.
(4) Ethnographers - Attitude and Assumptions
The objective of this activity is "to heighten awareness about what is happening "below the surface" in typical day-to-day interaction". As we try to figure out the meaning that the written text has behind, we also should try to get the meaning below the surface in oral text. Actually, analyzing spoken text and bring out the hidden meaning is not so simple, and even more complex than written text. It's because the two factors in spoken text: time and nonlinguistic information. In the first step, "predict", teacher has the students think about their interaction with native speaker outside of the classroom. "What encounter will you have outside of the classroom?" "What is your experience speaking English?" "After an interaction in English, do you usually feel a particular way?" These questions are the ones the teacher gives the students for their prediction. In the step of "plan", the students need to think about the situation of their interaction. Keeping their research notebook handy and recording the following interaction for observation is a good plan to collect their data. The next step, "collect data", the ideal way to collect data is to write down what they observed right after encounter. They can write the words as much as possible. The distance between participants or some physical things that they observed also deserves to be noted down. In the step 4, "analyze", the students read again and again what they wrote down during their observation. They should think about what the speaker means to say, what they cannot understand in the data, what the speaker's position or role is in the situation, and so on. Their feeling before/ after/ during the encounter, and the effect of the feeling are also needed to be answered in this step. In the "generate" section, the students have a short report about what they analyzed. If the teacher and the students have the same native language, this step may be conducted in their native language. In the final, "review" step, they discuss their experiences, about what are the similarities and differences in their conclusion after this analysis.