Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Discourse Analysis (Spring 2004)

Week 1 - DA Chapter 1 - Answers

1. What is discourse analysis?

As the name implies discourse analysis involves working with texts in a systematic way for a variety of analytic purposes. It is generally taught as a sub-discipline of linguistics, but it is also used by people working in other fields for many different purposes. While there is no overt mention of second language acquisition or instruction in this first chapter of the book, there are a lot of possible applications of a discourse analysis approach to the education field. Since discourse analysis is in essence a systematic study of texts it is easy to see immediate applications for us. We, as language teachers, and more specifically the teachers of a foreign language, use texts as our main tools of instruction. We use them, believe them, and trust them to work in providing models for our students which they can take with them into the real world. Unfortunately we do this often without a clear and scientifically based view of their actual usefulness. For us, discourse analysis can be used for the evaluation of textbook materials. Through that evaluation we can then alter texts or write new ones which serve our students as better models and examples of how language work.

Discourse analysis is of central importance for us for a couple of reasons. The first of these is because of the importance that texts play or should play in the teaching methods generally employed in Korea. Texts should be expected to teach the language. In effect, it is not the teacher who bears the main responsibility of teaching language. Language is the only thing that can teach language, and this is achieved in our Korean situation through texts. This is not to say that teachers have a diminished role. On the contrary, the role of the teacher shifts from providing information about language to trying to make the language presented in the texts comprehensible to the students as well as creating and gauging. Teachers need to know how to make such texts comprehensible and this may mean dissecting them into pieces and tying them to things bigger than themselves, for texts are generated from the brain and for the world. In such an approach it is imperative that the texts chosen are useful for the students. The only way of determining how to do all these things is to analyse the text, hence the importance of discourse analysis. The second rea of importance related to a discourse analysis approach is the way in which discourse analysis goes beyond the mere (and vacuous in my opinion) analysis of forms. The discourse analysis approach is particularly valuable because it goes beyond forms and delves into meaning and purpose, which are central for both us and our students to understand if the texts are to generate language production of any kind beyond repetition.

2. What is it that those engaged in discourse analysis focus on?

The scope of discourse analysis is extremely wide. Researchers working in a variety of fields from teaching and politics to business and advertising all find it useful to employ a discourse analysis approach in their respective fields. Obviously each of them have different purposes for their analysis and as a result each of them will have a different focus. Bearing this in mind it is also true that there are things which link all these people and this is their effort to go below the surface level of the text. All discourse approaches, even ones focussing on forms, are similar in that the one and ultimate goal is to try to figure out why a text was created and way it was. The approach entails a deeper search. In this way language is tied to the internal structure of the system creating it as well as the creator`s expectations about those who will get the text. In this way a researcher can focus on the speaker of the text and use their analysis as a kind of comprehensive evaluation of proficiency or they can focus on the text itself and see how it really does relate to the world at a variety of levels. The diversity and unity of the discourse analysis approach serve to make it extremely powerful as well as useful.

3. How do they carry out their work?

There are several steps for carrying out an analysis of discourse. The first step is simply marking off the piece of discourse. This is easier for written discourse which is usually chunked and separated physically by the author. For spoken texts this often as to be done by the researcher. Also, for spoken texts because they occur too quickly to ever analyse them in their wind form, they will need to be transcribed into written form. This is harder that it seems, especially if the speaker is not using standard forms or has particular problems with the language. Decisions have to be made early about what is to focussed on and these must be made part of the transcription. Exactly how the work is to be carried out pretty much depends on the exact focus, but it is safe to say that it will probably need to occur in stages where each stage has a different and highly specific focus.