Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of TESOL
Discourse Analysis (Spring 2004)
Week 3 - DA Chapter 3; PD Chapter 2 - Answers
1. How is discourse structured in a general sense and why is this important? (DA)
This is a general question and we therefore expect a general answer in response to this question. There are two important aspects of this question. The first of these is the idea that despite how it may seem, spoken discourse is actually highly structured. The tricky part is that the actual structure depends not only on the culture from which the speaker columns or culture that speakers talking in but also the type of discourse if they are engaged in. Therefore, it is hard to actually define that type of structure exactly without knowing about a lot of different variables. The second general aspect of discourse is the idea that discourse must be composed of something. The components of discourse her little that different than the units in that components are used to create the discourse where is units are sections of discourse which form of a cohesive unit based on the principles which we will discuss below. The components of discourse, and remember here we are focusing on spoken discourse, seem to be that words but rather chunks. Support remember that not all languages have words the way Korean and English do. Even Korean verbs are more like chunks than words. What a chunky is is basically a conglomeration of words in a fixed or semi fixed order which serve a single semantic function. Therefore, a chunk behaves linguistically like a word that is actually composed of many words. The reasons to believe that chunks are actually universal and languages, even more so than words, or any other type of structural unit we could think of it is for this reason that we can think of chunks is being the basic components of spoken discourse.
This chunking idea has important repercussions how we might actually go about teaching language. The idea is, in its simplest form, that student should learn more formulaic expressions. Obviously this is not the time replaced talk about this yet but we will be coming back to this idea.
2. What are some of the units created in discourse and how can we identify them? (DA)
Units of discourse are created by those speakers engaged in discourse in order to raise the level of comprehensibility of what they're saying or what they're writing. Thus, units have a very important role in the actual world. For people conducting a scientific analysis of discourse it is important to be able to identify units in discourse so that they too can analyze the discourse correctly and find out the speakers intended meaning. For teachers of language understanding units in discourse is an important part of speaking behavior and something which should be taught to the students if there is any kind of speaking focus in the language classroom. Having said that, however, we can see from the list below that units of discourse are various both in number and size as well as intent. This makes it actually quite difficult to overtly teach all the units of discourse for students. In fact it would be quite foolish to try to do so. Part of the difficulty is that different cultures mark discourse units in different ways and even have different size discourse units. This basically leaves us, the teacher of speaking, with just a few possibilities in how to deal with this. First of all, we have to have some understanding of what these discourse units are or can be so that we can identify the end pieces of spoken discourse which we are using with our students. From this basic base of knowledge we can decide whether a piece of discourse is actually useful/authentic in relation to how units are created. We also need to be able to try to get our students to also create units and understand units which correspond to target language norms and not first language norms. In this way units are quite important, but again, we as language teachers, do not need to the experts in discourse analysis and know every different type of unit. It is probably enough to know the main distinctions between structural units, semantic units, and functional units and some of the major groupings within and especially how they are used by the target language community. As with our students the best way of actually learning this is by going out and finding pieces of authentic discourse and analyzing them.
Structural - Written
sentence
clause
t-unit
paragraph
Structural -Spoken
intonation unit
tone group
turn
Semantic
line
center of interest
utterance
episode
Functional
move
schemata
turn
3. How is information structured in pieces of discourse and why is this important to us as language teachers? (DA)
The discovery of information structure and how it was organized in discourse was a very important discovery in the field of discourse analysis. In fact it could even be said the discourse analysis as a subject was created at this very basic discovery. Information structure is important to us because it shows basic patterns of how discourse is created. Although there are many terms for different types of information we are going to stick with this simple terms of old information and new information. Old information is information which has previously been discussed and which the speakers assume is already known, again either because a previous discourse or because of integrating cultural knowledge. New information is as the name claims information which the speaker does not expect a listener to know about either from the previous discourse or from a basic cultural knowledge. What is interesting is that these two are both sequenced and syntactically coded in different ways in discourse. This important to remember that this is not universal that it is done in different ways in different cultures and what we're talking about here is how this is done in English language culture. Basically old information proceeds new information in patterns in discourse. Was also interesting is that old information is embedded in smaller syntactic clauses where is new information is embedded in larger syntactic clauses and often those which include adjuncts. This is not particularly difficult for us to learn or to teach for that matter, but it is immensely important because it does underscore basic patterning and syntactic principles which are apparent in discourse and which our students will need to know in order both to understand discourse coming from higher level speakers and also create discourse as a higher level speaker. If students do not know this they might not really understand discourse that higher level speakers are creating or the discourse they create will be marked as being at best awkward. One simple way of teaching something like this would simply to be to have the students go through a text and marked a text up underlining new information, circling old information. Getting them to do things like that will allow them to see how these patterns emerge in text it will get them to notice.
4. What is cohesion and what are some ways of creating it ? (DA)
Cohesion is basically a device which allows a speaker or writer to link to text that they are creating with the co-text, or the text which has already been produced either by that speaker or by someone else within that conversation. The purpose of cohesion is obviously comprehensibility but also efficiency. Main ideas and concepts from a conversation, main topics need to be repeated in order to keep those parties involved in the conversation cognizant of what is going on, but at the same time it is extremely boring to repeat the same phrase over and over again. Thus, cohesion serves as a way of making repetition more efficient. They're basically five different types of cohesion described in our text. They are:
Reference
Substitution
Ellipsis
Conjunction
Lexical
Reference refers to how pronouns are used to replace nouns and/or noun phrses. This is an important and tricky means of showing coherence simply because Korean and English very quite a bit on how references handled in a syntactic nature. Green students will need to learn the patterns of reference in English texts in order to understand and more importantly to compose English texts. Substitution is when a structural unit, be at a word, phrase, clause, or even a sentence is replaced by some other unit and usually a smaller unit. Ellipsis is similar to substitution except in this case a clause or some kind of structural unit is replaced by null or nothing. Conjunction is the one area that Korean students can actually handle to a certain extent. The only problem with Korean students and conjunction is that they have too few of them. Thus, more conjunctions and more various kind of conjunctions need to be taught and practiced both for speaking and writing. Lastly, there is lexical cohesion and lexical cohesion relates to substitution in a way because often lexical cohesion involves replacing certain lexical items with other lexical items, usually synonyms or even possibly accidents along with a native particle.
Cohesion is very important not only for making texts comprehensible but for understanding texts. Any type spoken discourse is going to be littered with cohesive devices which need to be understood for their purpose and intent. They're important part of this decision-making process which we've talked about in relation to how people actually put together discourse. What's promising but also frustrating about cohesion is that it is easy to teach but it is not done right now. Thus, for us his line which teachers we need to start to teach these times of things ever going to have any kind of focus on speaking.
5. What are some of the major theories and constructs used to explain the development of pragmatic competence? Briefly introduce the important aspects of each. (PD)
Kasper and Rose introduce five different theories which have been used of late to describe the development of pragmatic competence. They are:
Acculturation
The acculturation model, first proposed by Schumann, is one which basically links effective variables to development. In this model there are several different variables, most of which revolve around the relationship of the learner to the target language environment, and from these variables it was posited that the progress learner would make in the target language environment could be estimated. Unfortunately, tests on this theory in the field have proven it wrong. This does not mean that the acculturation model does not offer is some valuable information or insight into the process. Quite the contrary. Certainly there are aspects of acculturation which cannot be ignored, but did acquisition process is something which is obviously much more complex than the acculturation model is able to deal with. In reality we might never be overcome up with the proper model for affective variables simply because they vary too much from person-to-person.
Cognitive processing
The cognitive processing model is one which revolves around a series of the brain and how it is supposed to work. Considering the age of the model it's fairly impressive. In this model they're basically two different levels which interact with each other in more or less an unspecified way. The first of these levels is the level of noticing, what is generally called attention focused in more modern literature. The basic idea here is that the language input which we give our students is filled with different elements and even different trying to teach a certain point there's no guarantee that the students will ever even noticed the point that were trying to teach them amongst all the other different points embedded within the entire piece of input. Thus, noticing is an extremely important first step in the learning process. If students have not noticed the points we wish them to notice then there is simply no waiter ever going to be able to use those points and that brings us to the second level. The second level in this processing model is processing. This of course relates back to what we ever even saying about decision-making in language production. When a person goes to say something they need to process a tremendous amount of information in order to try to come up with an acceptable utterance in that context. The idea is that at some point what they have noticed needs to be part of that processing. But of course there is no way of actually predicting how or when it will become part of the processing. Only can say is that simply because people do not use certain bits of knowledge in their actual language does not mean they haven't noticed it and stored it in their brain. But the theory really tells us is that processing is something which needs to be practiced because the more the brain works a processing the battery will become and it and as it becomes better it will be able to process more and more information and faster.
Sociocultural theory
Sociocultural theory was developed in Russia in the 1920's primarily by Vygotsky. The basic idea behind sociocultural theory is that there is a fundamental link between society and language and somewhere in the middle of this link possibly as enhancer to the entire link would be pragmatics. Thus society determines what language will actually be the same time language also determines how our society will be. The major effect of this is that language can only be learned in a societal situation. This I mentioned in class even when were thinking about simple lexical items they must be learned in a societal situation in order to really glean the associations which go with them and which are necessary for actually use. So in this theory all language calls from society but pragmatics holds a special place because it is really the outward manifestation of language in its direct relation with society. This theory is quite specific and detailed and how it describes both the stages and possible procedures for development. Terms like zone of proximal development and scaffolding, mainstays of this theory from the procedural point of view, have become very common terms in education circles.
Language Socialization
The language socialization model a similar the sociocultural model in that both claim that language can only be learned through society. Thus, the language socialization model supports the idea that interaction in a classroom is really the only way for a student can actually learned how to speak or in fact properly use a language. Students don't necessarily learn in classrooms where the teacher talks to them they learned by interacting with each other and particularly in more mixed groups of students. This of course is not easy because students are not used to this type of situation. We need to create a society in the classroom that will allow the students to engage in interaction naturally. Of course this is somewhat idealized but is something we need to think about. The main difference between the language socialization model and the sociocultural model is the language socialization model is not specifically coded as the sociocultural model. Language socialization focuses on what it is that this cute and needs to become part of society. How do they learned to interact with society. Thus, in the language socialization model to focus is really for the most part on pragmatic norms and not language in general which is more the case in the sociocultural model.
Interactional Competence
Interactional competence takes the basic idea for the sociocultural model and language socialization model and simply uses it to focus quite specifically on how people learn to interact. Thus, it is model the really isn't very much talk about society and how society determines these things and the effects of these things on society. This model has a very narrow focus where it really just looks at how people interact which of course relates to what were doing by looking at discourse analysis. By the looking at things like to her and taking an information structure we are discovering what some of the norms are at how people interact. This model once this sea how this type of skill develops. The interactional competence model is really just a very small subset of communicative competence as defined by Canale and Swain.
6. Of these theories and constructs which two do you think most useful and why? (PD)
If I had to pick two of these theories mentioned above, as I asked you to do, I would probably in the picking the sociocultural model and the language processing model. I think the two of them work well together in giving us very overview of both the issues which are at stake and more importantly what we can do to deal with those issues.
7. Do you think these theories provide accurate explanation for pragmatic development, why or why not? (PD)
As we already discussed in class, each of these theories has something to offer but none of them alone really account for the entire process of pragmatic development. The only way we will ever account for pragmatic development is to look at all of these and see the contributions they make when brought together. Even when we do this we find that there are still pieces of the puzzle missing. One thing that we really need to try to find out our developmental steps, if there really are such things, in the acquisition process. Also would need to know a little bit more about language processing and what variables would seem to affect the along lines similar but better defined in the acculturation model. One other aspect which has really been missing from all of these is what kind of affect as the L-1 have on this process. How much like the L-1 interfere or aid in this process. Thus, despite all the bread about an all the advancements a really been made their still somethings which we need to find out more about a need to investigate further in order to really understand this process and use it to become better teachers.