Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Discourse Analysis (Spring 2004)

Week 4 - DA Chapter 4; PD Chapter 3 - Answers

1. How does power affect discourse forms and structures? (DA)

Obviously the forms and structures one uses in any instance of communication will be determined by their power in relation to the other parties involved in the discourse. This is clear and something which cannot be avoided. Power and familiarity are part of every single type of exchange that people engage in. Whenever we engage in an communicative event with someone we have to immediately assess power relations and the familiarity situation and speak appropriately in relation to that. Important to note of course is that the forms people use strongly show how they feel in relation to their own power in a situation. In a conversational setting with someone shows power is often to the listener to either accept the power or reject a power by planning their response. Following this week and see that the forms people use are pivotal in establishing power relations. People use forms to show their power and also reject the power of other people. Thus, two people in a different power situation will approach a problem in two very different ways both cognitively and linguistically. This ties into the whole idea that language use a specific type a problem solving. Following this, the way we relate to people in communication, solve problems with them, will certainly be determined by our power in relation to, tempered of course by the level of familiarity habitat person. Powerful people tend to you shorter much more direct types of discourse. They make statements which put ideas into the heads of their listeners or certainly they make it sound like they know what listeners are thinking. They know better and they have the right to express their opinions. They can make suggestions directly as well as swiftly and quickly the game and terminate conversation sessions. Less powerful people need to be more indirect and approach all these different conversational aspects of a different perspective from a different point of view than powerful people. Powerful people have the right, by virtue of their power, to be harsh, rude, and direct. Less powerful people get a punch in the face when they do this.

2. How are roles marked in discourse? (DA)

Roles are marching discourse in very much the same way that powers marked. It is simply a more specific type of situation as power but similar at the same time. Following is, people marked roles through the language they use and probably more specifically through the types of titles which they give to others and which they allow to be given to them. This of course ties into power because powerful people can choose not only their own title but also the titles that they're going to use with others, while less powerful people have to simply follow. Roles are indicated through naming. So, in Korean students are called students in the classroom as a general type of title. While such overt role marking is not the general practice in English, it does occur all the time but in a more subtle manner. As English teachers is very important for us to first identify how different roles are marked in English, because it is subtle, but also need to make sure that our students understand how these roles of marked so that they can actually play roles related to specific functions when they go to use English. They need to know what the role of the students like, or the role of brother, or a father or friend or anything and how this relates the type of language which people expect them to use is an indicator of their role. We want to make sure that there is no overt mismatch between the role that they're playing at the moment and the language they used to support that role in interactions.

3. How does the audience affect the forms present in the discourse? (DA)

In any kind of verbal exchange obviously the audience is going to be an extremely important factor in not only what people say but how they're going to say it. As soon as we enter into an exchange we need to get a fix on who our audience is so we can make some informed decisions about what and how we are going to be saying. The big distinction here is based on how well the speaker knows the audience, that is the degree of familiarity. The more familiar we are with a specific audience, and this could be on a personal (as with a friend) or an intellectual level (as with a group who share the same interests but the individuals are unknown), the more knowledge we share. Shared knowledge is key to efficient communication and speaking in particular. By knowing what and how much knowledge we share with our audience we know both what topics top choose to talk about and even how to talk about those topics. How much detail, what should and need not be explained and mentioned, is an important issue. Taking this a little further when you're talking to other people you need to always bear in mind the level of common knowledge that you (the speaker) has with other people. This is the first major aspect of audience-related principals in linguistic communication. Again we need to think of the audience and to find out what would be comprehensible to the audience as far as topic and the content of our conversation.

The next basic principle revolves around how were are going to say things when the audience is less known or unknown to us. How we're going to say things will often be determined by who the audience as determined by physically observable facts about her/him/them which includes things like gender, age, perceived socioeconomic status, or any other things which we can tell from their appearance like wickedly nasty, ugly clothes or high sense of action thus indicating their membership in a specific group. Speakers use this information to stereotype people and form what they believed to be appropriate discourse patterns in relation to what they think they now know about these people. Of course is important for us is language teachers to try to teach our students how society stereotypes people and how the stereotypes affect the language that we use in relation to these people.

4. How is the way things are identified and self expression linked in discourse? (DA)

This relates to the very last part of the previous question wherein people are identified as belonging to certain groups based not only on outward appearance but also by the language that they use. Certainly regional accents identify people as belonging to certain groups and group membership is always evaluated on a power/familiarity basis. The way we speak always reveals membership in one or many different groups and this membership gives information to others about how they can or should speak with us. This means that as speakers we need to be careful about the language we use because we may not want to indicate a certain membership patterns to people we don't know or in certain situations. Thus, we need to regulate our speech patterns appropriately depending on the situation so as not to reveal too much information about ourselves or reveal information about ourselves which we want people to know. In addition, as language learners we also need to know when people are signaling this type of information so we can respond appropriately. We also need to know what information is being signaled and how this relates. All this information is embedded within the culture of the target language community which, therefore, implies that a certain level of knowledge about the target line which community is necessary for people speak effectively in that community.

5. From what different perspectives can research on pragmatic development be conducted? (PD)

Descriptive Linguistics - Comparative Pragmatics

In this descriptive linguistic method, which is really just an abstraction from the contrast analysis hypothesis, what people often do is compare pragmatic structure between two different languages and for us who are concerned with the development of pragmatic skill in target language we obviously want to see how the first language might interfere. More to do this we need to first get an idea of how pragmatics works in the first language and compare that tell pragmatic would seem to work in the target language. The main problem with this is that pragmatics has not yet been very well-defined even in a highly study language like English bus it makes it quite hard to do.

Sociology - Conversation Analysis

n conversation analysis what the researcher basely does is analyze how conversations take place within a cultural group. They analyze things similar to the topics we talked about last week, such as turn taking, how topics are chosen, how people assume certain roles and issues like this. Wall such issues are important for us they are also possibly somewhat vague in secondary in the teaching/learning process.

Linguistic Anthropology - Interactional Sociolinguistics, Ethnographic Microanalysis

An analysis from the perspective linguistic anthropology is for a probably not particularly useful for us as language teachers. What they've usually do is a compare how people from different social groups interact. While this might seem interesting for us because obviously Koreans and in the speakers are from different social groups they're both trying to speak the same language and Koreans are often trying to meet the speaker norms. Certainly there are research questions which could be conducted here but any research in this area would need to be conducted in the target language environment and that simply not possible for most of us.

Language Socialization

Language socialization is the developmental counterpart of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory. What basically occurs here is a researcher tries to observe how people learn language through the socialization process and they do this by recording and analyzing communicative exchanges. This is certainly an interesting viewpoint for us as language teachers because it is developmental in its very focus. The only problem is the socialization aspect. Because we are not in a situation where English is learned in a natural social process it might be hard to do this. Obviously the classroom can be used as a social environment but to do so speaking must be done in the classroom in a somewhat social way.

Developmental Pragmatics

Developmental pragmatics basically focuses on how pragmatics skills develop. Instead of focusing on the social nature they simply focus on the skills themselves. Central to this focus would be a natural order for pragmatics skills development which would see me more important than the specific environment in which the skials were learned. For us as teachers of course this would be an important approach because we are interested in in knowing an order because any order that we know can be used to sequence and we know that sequencing is the very basis of setting up any kind of classroom program.

Cognitive Psychology - Discourse Comprehension

Cognitive psychology basically deals with processing load and how this relates to the comprehension of discourse. Remember how he said that when we go to produce discourse we have all this different knowledge which we need to be able to use when we make the discourse but of course this difficult because of processing limitations. Well, the same thing happens for comprehension. Sometimes people of Arnott able to comprehend discourse simply because they're not able to process all the different subtleties which are inherent in the discourse. Cognitive psychology tries to find methods for how people can process discourse or from a developmental point of you how processing skills related to discourse develops. As teachers this obviously gives us important information about how we can best use input. Obviously we want to try to give input at a level where the students can actually notice different elements of discourse.

Social Psychology - Social Cognition

From a social psychology/social cognition point of view what researchers are really trying to do is to find out how people are able to process and organize facts about the social situation which are then used for communicative exchanges. Obviously this would also occur in some southern developmental pattern or developmental cycle which we should know about as teachers.

Communication Research - Cross-cultural Communication, Intercultural Communication

Communication research and be somewhat familiar to you from your CC class in SMU-TESOL. Researchers working in this area tried to assess where communication breaks down as people from different cultural backgrounds endeavor to talk to each other. This again is of interest to us because we wanted to find out where our students may go wrong. Again, possible problem with this is it would be very difficult to conduct outside of the target language environment. An alternative to cross-cultural communication is intercultural communication and this is how people communication within the target language group and this is useful in that it gives us norms for communication which we need to try to teach our students.

Cross-cultural Pragmatics

Finally, we have the similar but more focused area of cross-cultural pragmatics. Rather than just focusing on the something general like communication this field does research focusing on how people from different cultures deal with each other pragmatically. Basically what it tries to do is develop an overview of the knowledge necessary for communication through cultures by viewing instances of communication among people and where they succeed and where they fail. They sleeve beneath strata find out how people's knowledge is affecting the communication of a positive and negative ways and whether people share or fail to share similar patterns.

6. What are some of the basic possibilities in research design for researching pragmatic development? (PD)

The differences between these two main possibilities should be clear by now but I review them for you nonetheless.

Longitudinal

A longitudinal study is one which is obviously going to take place over a longer period of time. In this type study generally the researcher works with a small group of people who she will observe fairly intimately for an extended period of time, generally for several moths or years as they mention in the text. The reason for this extended study is to try to show particularly how a certain skill will develop in the person or a small group of people. Small groups of people are used simply for practical reason. It is hard to intimately observe hundreds of people. Thus longitudinal studies are good in determining for particular aspects of developmental patterns. They're good because we get to see the whole process of development. They might often lack validate the because as we know individual people do things in different ways resulting in somewhat different processes and actually different language systems in their head. This means that of an extended longitudinal study of one person shows us how this person learned that it might not tell us very much about how our students may end up learning.

Cross-sectional

The cross-sectional study is one which is carried out on a larger number of people at one particular time. As a result usually some sort of testing tool is applied to these people all at once. The testing tool must therefore be somewhat extensive and should be very carefully put together. The reason for this is that the researcher has no chance to go back an interview those same people. Thus, everything needs to be planned very carefully. What happens in the cross-sectional study is that one group of people is compared with another group of people and the differences are analyzed usually using some to statistics program. The two groups compared could be second language learners at different stages of learning or a second language group could be compared with a native speaker group. Either way because all the large numbers we can find general patterns in the development of a group of people which will hopefully described learning in the general way for everyone. The drawback is that the entire process cannot be viewed as in a longitudinal study. Researchers will need to try to guess the actual processes occur between the different cross-sections that they take.

7. Of the research designs which ones do you think the most and the least useful? (PD)

Probably the most important aspect of these research designs, and this is what I really want you to think about, is the way that we can use these to design actual activities in the classroom. By taking these designs for research and obviously adapting them slightly we can turn them into highly effective teaching tools for precisely the kind of speaking teaching that we need to do in order to allow our students actually function in a target language environment without being beaten to a pulpit by angry listeners. So, that is really how I want you to think about these and that is really how they're useful for us. Any teaching tool needs to be theoretically valid. We need to use things that we know are useful to our students and we need to understand how and why they're useful. By taking what has been used as a research tool and turning it into teaching tool we have that validity.

There are three basic types of research tools which continues for eliciting knowledge about our students pragmatic/discourse competence. They are shown below.

Spoken Interaction

Spoken interaction tools imply that the students will actually speak. Thus, if your students can speak at all then it might be very hard to use spoken interaction tools. This, however, does not mean that spoken interaction tools are impossible to use with low level speakers. They can be made into more contrived and highly directed types of activities as we will seize the review these quickly. Another important point to mention before we go into our descriptions is that spoken interaction should be either tape-recorded or video taped. Simply taking notes in the spoken interaction situation will not allow the researcher to analyze the nuances of speech. Once recorded these spoken attractions need to be transcribed for the purposes of analysis. These transcriptions, as was mention briefly in the book, are often very good tools for teaching. Bear this in mind.

Authentic Discourse

Authentic discourse is when the students simply talk freely to probably in native speaker or someone of high speaking proficiency about any topic which they naturally happened to come across. What this means that is that authentic discourse is probably be hard to do in the classroom. It might not be in possible if you're running a conversation class for students take their own topics and engage each other authentically, but this doesn't have the most classrooms.

Elicited Conversation

Elicited conversation might be something which would be more apt to happen in the classroom. Here the teacher suggest topics or even as specific questions to, as in an interview, upon which the students are supposed to speak. In this way the teacher can direct the student speech and get them to focus on particular functions or structures which we want them to try to use. In this way it can be a little bit more useful in the classroom, and even if we could use authentic situations outside the classroom it makes a little more efficient in that we don't have to wait for the right moment occur for people to give us the type structure talk on the type of topic we want them to talk about. The downside is that it is not necessarily authentic or natural and of course this must be born in mind when someone is thinking of trying to use this type of elicitation technique.

Role Play

We all know what role-plays are. We know how to use them and we know how to set them up. Role-plays are good especially in assessing things like power relations and familiarity and how this affects other aspects of pragmatics/discourse. They are also good in that they can be done with all level students depending on how much information is given to the participants. Role-plays extend from very free role-plays were very little information is supplied to the participants to highly contrived and control role-plays which are run for certain extent like information gaps where even some of all people say is actually written down on a highly specified role-plays card. In this way role-plays can be the most effective type of tool for assessing real speech in the classroom.

Questionnaires

Questionnaires might be the most used tool for the elicitation of knowledge about pragmatics/discourse because they are easy to use. Researchers using questionnaires can use them to assess a very large group participants in a very short amount of time. The trick, however, is that they must be put together very carefully and this makes them quite difficult to do. Another problem is that they give us a less direct representation of what students can actually do. They focus more on knowledge and less on action even in DCTs which use written language to try to clean information on spoken language forms. Thus, questionnaires have their purpose, but they also have their limitations.

Discourse Completion Tasks

Discourse completion tasks or DCT's are a highly effective tool for trying to elicit knowledge of certain aspects of discourse/pragmatics. With generally happens is the researcher creates a situation and a dialogue which has parts missing. A subject needs to fail in the parts with what they feel to be appropriate language. This language that of course analyzed against what are presumed to be be native speaker norms. The design is fairly straightforward and varies only in how many roles the participant will need to play and how long their responses are expected to be. Again, DCT's are generally written on a tour off around a particular point of pragmatics, such as requests, replies, apologies etc.

Multiple-choice Questions

All of you are very familiar with multiple choice tests and multiple-choice questionnaires for elicitation of pragmatic/discourse knowledge should also not seen unfamiliar to you. Multiple-choice questionnaires can be used like DCT's, that is in the same basic format except the subject picks a particular answer as the most fitting. They can also be used as a way of getting information about feelings on completed discourse exchanges either successful or not successful. In any case they are a little bit easier for people to do because there simply relying on recognition as they are all closed ended. Respondents do not need to produce any actual language they simply need to try to think about what might be appropriate.

Scaled-response Questionnaires

Scaled response questionnaires are simple. Researchers use them to try to glean information about how respondents feel about certain aspects of a piece of discourse. Following this basic design researchers create specific detailed questions about some aspect of a piece of discourse and have people rate their feelings in different categories possibly about that piece of discourse. Scaled response questionnaires are easy for respondents to deal with and relatively easy for researchers to create. The only problem is that they don't supply a tremendous amount of information which means they are usually used in coordination with some other elicitation technique and best complement some other information.

Oral and Written Self-report

Oral and written self-report is simply trying to ask people to tell us what they are feeling when they go to try to use language. Or try to get the inside track on how they actually approach a certain situation and what some of the variables are they use to determine how they approach a situation. As results I think it's probably better to actually conduct these in Korean and not in English. It's also important that these are conducted as soon as possible after actual linguistic events because we know as soon as memories enter long-term memory they are reshaped and constantly reformed which means these oral and written self-reports might actually windup lacking any kind of validity if they're done too late.

Interviews

Interviews are easy. Recently asked people questions about how they felt before during and after a certain speaking exchange. These are best recorded and the questions are best created before the actual interview to make sure that both the interviewer and interview we stay on topic and the interviewer can actually get the information they need.

Think-aloud Protocols

Think aloud protocols simply encourage subjects to tell us in an unsolicited manner but they're doing as they go to speak. It is a simple kind of report which happens at the very moment of utterance creation. Again the key here is unsolicited. In the interview the subject response to solicited questions from the interviewer. In this way the interviewer decides what the important parts are. In the think aloud protocol it is the subject who decides what to say, they report at the moment of utterance creation and explain what they're doing as they go determining themselves what they think it's important and what is less important.

Diaries

Diaries can be kept either by the learners themselves or by teachers in the classroom on learners. The difference between diaries and Fink allowed protocols is that they are not an immediate response there's always a delay and a time for interpretation. Unlike interviews, they too are unsolicited in that the respondents can decide themselves what they think it's important in their exchanges. The diary usually works in that a student would be directed to simply write down what they think about how they are learning. It is not the content of what they're learning so much is how they are learning and what they're thinking as they learn.