Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Discourse Analysis (Spring 2004)

Week 6 - DA Chapter 6; PD Chapter 5 - Answers

1.How do orality and literacy differ and how does this ply out in western cultures as well as others? (DA)

Orality and literacy differ in fairly large ways and this obviously has a large impact on not only how people use language but how people view the language that other people use. It's important to remember that all children start off as oral. Literacy develops overtime and requires further and actually quite different instruction or learning than orality. Simply looking from a timeline prospective orality would seem to be primary while literacy would seem to be somewhat secondary. Researchers such as Ong have made some pretty strong claims about differences between primarily oral people and their cultures and primarily literate people and their literate cultures. This information is interesting and important from a couple of different perspectives. The first of which has already been mentioned in class is, namely, that all children start as oral beings and literacy develops later. The second prospective which will talk about more in the next question has to do with how orality and literacy are divided into different types of mediums through technology. For the moment will think a little bit about some of the differences between orality and literacy as they have been expounded on by such researchers as Ong, Havelock, and Illich.

The main claims these above-mentioned researchers have made are that oral culture is significantly different than literate culture. Oral people see the world differently and as we would probably expect from this they have also been claimed to use and have control over language in a different way. Other sets of researchers working more from a linguistic point of view have actually claimed that written language and spoken language are two different types of language systems at least for languages like English. The supports the view taken by researchers like Ong, Havelock, and Illich. Memory systems work differently in oral beings as opposed to literate beings. The number of units in the language work differently, and how language, and thought for that matter, are going to be organized is also very different. All these differences, of course play out in the type of discourse which is created, or which can be created by oral as opposed to literate cultures. It should be mentioned, however that not all cultures think similarly about the role of spoken and written forms of language. For us, though, Korean and Western cultures do seem to have similar views on their power and uses.

Now for us the most important thing is to think about this in relation to language learning and language teaching. From a basic point of view we would need to understand the difference ourselves between speaking in writing, both in their function and form, in order to be able to teach them effectively to our students. The other thing we need to understand is that Ong, for one, has claim that orality must be learned before literacy can be learned. This is supported by the claim that cognitive functions, such as the ones necessary for reading and writing, are created based on extension and abstraction from communicative functions, which are principally used in speaking. So we are back to the same old problem. Here in Korea we might be making the mistake of jumping into reading and writing too fast for our students in English. If orality is primary and forms the simple basis of all further language development then even beginning adult learners need to be taken through a period of orality which will allow them to make the right form function mappings based on simpler and more direct functions related to communication alone and not cognition. This is certainly worth thinking about.

2. How does technology affect communication? (DA)

Technology obviously has a very large effect on the way we communicate simply because it is technology which allows new mediums of communication to develop and within these mediums specific communication strategies, new foam to function mappings, must be developed. If we think historically we soon realize that speech itself was the initial grand technological development. For a long time speech was our basic communicative technology, until about 6000 years ago when writing first developed. Writing developed as a new technology for making speech permanent. In doing so the nature of language was changed and new specific types of order function mapping had to develop in order to support this new technology which allowed new and sometimes better options. With new technologies new difference linguistic mechanisms are mediums have arrived. For example e-mail is a specific type of new medium based on, but not the same as, writing. Speaking has developed also as new technologies are developed. A few simple is the examples of this would be telephones, walkie-talkies, and now computer-based Internet chatting. This last example is an interesting one because although it occurs through a written medium it has characteristics and more like speaking.

Some of the main differences between speaking in writing as the two superordinate communication mediums are reflected in certain criteria. These criteria include time, context, planning, and theme. Speaking occurs in real time which means there is no time lag between what is said it and what is understood. Speaking generally occurs in a face-to-face interaction but now with new technologies mediums of speaking have developed which allow people to talk synchronically to each other without actually seeing each other. Another major factor in speaking is that in speaking the parties involved share a large amount of context. Usually people can see what the other person is talking about. More linguistic clues are supplied by extralinguistic factors like nonverbal communication and linguistic factors like stress, intonation, prosody, and other elements of pronunciation. Subject matters are also generally more familiar in speaking. Thus the themes that are chosen for speaking are generally less heady or more personal. Of course this varies from culture culture. Speaking is also generally less planned than writing, although we know if there are more planned types of speaking but is important to note that planned speaking is usually planned through writing so it might actually not be true that there are more planned forms of speaking. In effect, it is only through writing that we can plan much of anything so there might not actually be any type of planned form of speaking. Again, it is important to understand really how speaking works. Possibly some of the examples that we have been seen over and over again in our discourse analysis book are shocking to you in the simplistic way in which native speakers actually go about communicating ideas to each other through speech. Ideas about the grammaticality of utterances and turn taking and vocabulary uses are all probably very different than what you yourself as book educated learners for the most part have actually been exposed to in relation to English. We somehow need to expose our students to this type of input at least some of the time.

3. What effect does planning have on discourse structure? (DA)

As I mentioned above us think that there really is no such thing as planned spoken language. Any kind of highly planned spoken language in a literate culture would necessarily be a hybrid between written forms and spoken forms. This means that in that planning is really the difference between spoken and written forms of language. And of course is hard to say now but certainly one of the greatest advantages of writing is that it allows the writer to plan what they are going to do. In this way writing can be, should be, and must be much more precise and efficient than speaking. And in fact it might actually be shocking how inefficient speaking actually can be when we transcribe it. The discourse analysis text gives a nice collection of the differences between planned and unplanned discourse on page 184. I would suggest that each of you familiarize yourself with that list because that might very well be the key to you trying to teach your students some of the main differences between speaking and writing. We can also use this list as a way of evaluating some of what has been falsely termed spoken language in the books which you use. The list also reminds us that we can be very careful about giving feedback to our students. Much of what your students produce in the form of unplanned language is going to be ungrammatical from a written point of view but it might be perfectly acceptable from spoken point of view. The need to be careful about when we correct and when we don't correct our students particularly in relation to speaking. In order to do this we need to know about what speaking is really like. Hopefully by examining some of the differences between planned and unplanned discourse we're beginning to figure out a little bit more about how speaking does actually work.

4. How do ideas of fixity relate to medium and interpersonal relations? (DA)

The idea of fixity relates basically to how formulaic a particular medium of language might be or what those particular formulas could be for a particular medium. The basic ideas at all mediums are formulaic in different ways. So, for example in spoken face-to-face interaction in English we have particular formulas for greeting people. To use a different formula, perhaps from a first language, would seem very strange and would generally be unacceptable speakers of a different language. In the speakers, for example, to migrate each other by asking if they had eaten, or make inquiries as to where someone is going. These would be considered strange and even alarming ways of greeting someone. These formulas occur within each medium because of the different technologies available in the medium on a microlevel. So for example, when typewriters were replaced by word processing programs in computers this opened new formulas, like bold, italics, and font changes that were available to writers. These technologies soon became fixed into writing practices both in a formal sense (think about APA format) and in a less formal sentence (think about the emoticons of e-mail and chatting). Of course teachers we need to be able to identify some of these fixed formulas related to each medium and make sure students know how they apply within the medium and how they do not apply outside that medium. Often learners, as we talked about last week, overgeneralize certain features of language and doing so violate acceptabilities.

5. What support is there for the claim that pragmatics precedes grammar? (PD)

For us as language teachers the integration between pragmatic knowledge and linguistic knowledge is extremely important. We've been talking in this class a lot about form to function mapping and without grammatical knowledge we don't really know how to deal with forms as far as being able to create new forms and understand new forms. At the same time to pragmatic side has to deal with use. Knowing the form does not mean you have a clue about how to use the form. In order to use the form we need to know to function that the form is intended to fill but also when this particular form is to be used. Each form has a limited frame of use. No form can be used everywhere. Also an important part of language is being able to develop new and sometimes idiosyncratic forms based on the ones that have been appropriated through exposure to real language input. So, an important idea for us is to try to figure out acquisitional sequences. The main idea behind this being the acquisitional sequences will allow us to devise sequences for our teaching. And of course we would like to try to match acquisitional sequences and teaching sequences for maximal efficiency. The data that we find in this chapter help us ina general way. General because a lot of the study sipping carrying out have not been done in situations like this situation we're facing here in Korea. This means that we need to be of critical and adaptive of some of this data in trying to turn it into useful practices.

Most of the cases which have been documented that support the claim that pragmatics precedes grammar are based on for a few scattered studies to Europe of beginning or very low level untutored learners. While of course we have beginning and low-level learners in Korea and no one here is untutored. It is very hard to be untutored because people here don't have a target language environment to be exposed to. Even for young children the language learning is very much a tutoring experience. From the research weekend draw the conclusion that when pragmatics does precedes grammar it occurs obviously and low-level learners and occurs primarily because these adult low-level learners are able to use what Levinson calls pragmatic universals.

Adults engaging in and a new language learning process bring to that process a complete set of pragmatic behaviors from their first language or any previous language which they have learned. This is obviously a huge help to them. While languages are not identical in their pragmatic behavior there are more similarities and there are differences. This means that, particularly the early stages of language learning, adult learners will be able to use a lot of their pragmatic knowledge to both successfully interpret it also successfully deliver very basic communicative messages despite lack of grammar and of course vocabulary which unfortunately is not mentioned at all in this chapter. What they do, in effect, is to fall back on pragmatic knowledge in the first language which hopefully will match that of the second language at least enough in the early stages for them to survive. For these low-level learners their knowledge of grammar doesn't really impede them that much. They managed to get done what they need to do with low levels of grammatical/lexical knowledge.

6. What support is there for the claim that grammar precedes pragmatics? (PD)

The claim that grammar precedes pragmatics is supported for the most part by a higher level, more tutored learners. We can interpret the status simply by saying that these higher level learners have exhausted whenever universal pragmatic knowledge they have and are now falling back on particular L-1 strategies for pragmatic use which do not match the second language patterns. Thus, it may seem that the pragmatic knowledge seems to lag behind their grammar knowledge. In reality it is actually hard to say. It is never really this simple. It should hopefully be clear to you by now that whenever we investigate something related to language there seem to be strong patterns of contradiction. It is hard to come up with universal tendencies for language. The fact that these grammar have been learners are tutored tells us something about what they obsolete have been tutored in which certainly must be grammar and particular grammar rules and structures. This leads us to a very simple observation which we can make about teaching in general. When we teach and in doing so focused a lot of our students' attention on one particular aspect of language they are not going to be able to do other aspects or even notice other aspects. So if ever thinking of a simple dichotomy between grammar and pragmatics (and listen itself as an extreme oversimplification of a linguistic system) and we focus too much attention on one then obviously the other one is going to suffer.

7. What does all this tell us about how we might go about teaching language (speaking)? (PD)

To take the examples from the two questions above then the conclusion we need to draw is that we need to keep very close tabs on how we organize our lessons as teachers of speaking. We need to try to keep a balance between many different elements of language. Simply thinking about form to function mapping and the relationship between pragmatic knowledge and grammatical knowledge, which I guess would include lexical as well depending on your version of competence, we need to strike a balance allowing our students to learn them simultaneously. According to what we've been studying this course we also realize that within pragmatic knowledge and grammatical knowledge there are many different aspects which must be considered and controlled in the learning process in the classroom. Some of these for the functional side would be things like the specific speech acts which we are going to try to get our students to learn. These course would need to be put inside specific situations. The situations would need to make use of different types of familiarity and power relations setups between the speakers. In short we need to fix a context and developing contexts in relation to our students. Certain situations are contexts are going to be linked and Hartley with not only specific speech acts but also specific grammatical forms so we need to take care to try to match all these things up. Give students input and practice revolving around a very sophisticated interplay of different variables. And not seen many materials which actually do this very well. Another thing you simply need to be careful of us a teacher is respecting students differences. If you get 10 students the same input and the same practice those 10 students will windup learning ten different things. We can expect our students to all learn the same thing all of the same time. That's simply impossible. This simple fact of course then calls attention to our assessment system which assumes just that and wrongfully so.