Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Discourse Analysis (Spring 2004)

Week 8 - DA Chapter 8; PD Chapter 7 - Answers

Some interesting quotes for the last chapter of DA (pp.227-229).

We explored how people imagine language works and what they imagine it is for, and saw how those elements of ideology shape what people do with talk, what they do not do, how they interpret discourse.

Structure, in the sense of fixed rules or templates for the arrangement elements, is always an abstraction: what people do as they produce and interpret discourse may or may not be to attempt to reproduce a template or follow a set of rules.

Discourse is fundamentally the result of flexible strategies, not fixed rules: no interaction is exactly like any other, there's always another way of doing things, idiosyncracy and novelty are always possible and usually interpretable. But people need and use fixity.

Consciously or not, discourse is always designed with an eye to details of social relatedness such as power and solidarity and peoples need to save face.

We looked at how speakers build new utterances out of pieces of things other people are saying now and a have said in the past, and we looked at how we repeat and very styles of speaking and writing, situations for speaking and writing, formal discourse structures and ways of learning and using them, stories and even lives.

Since we do not share minds or bodies, human interactions are always mediated: there are always layers of talk and ideas between individuals.

We looked at how speakers tell each other what they mean to be doing, through the sentence forms they choose, the words they use, their discourse marketing strategies.

We looked at the variation in the rhetorical strategies speakers have for invoking or creating shared understandings.

1. Where does meaning come from in a text? (DA)

Everywhere - the author, the test itself and the audience.

Traditionally there are three different places where meaning has been said to come from in a text. The first of these is the author itself. When people speak obviously they put together text based on their own internal system which is afraid to their own personal situation. As we studied earlier in this course much of what we actually use to create a text is first gleaned from other people. Since everybody actually is exposed to different language than they won't use different language to put things together. Every for use as their own strategies and their own specific forms and certainly it is from then that the meaning in text is going to be derived. The second source of meaning is text is of course the text itself. But the argument for this is the fact that much of what authors do in creating texts occurs at a deeply subconscious level. Yes, people plan when they put together language, but much of what they do is also not planned. When we are speaking their tremendous time constraints which means most of the time we need to fall back automatic processes to form the basis of our speech or text. For most of us we don't have a conscious control over these automatic processes is simply occur which means the meaning doesn't necessarily come from the author in any kind of planned way it comes from the text itself from how the forms are put together in the text itself. Thus the text has some soda meaning outside of what the author attributed to it for the most part because so much of language use is subconscious. The third place for the meaning is set to come from in the text or in a text is the audience. Obviously this is the bottom line. He doesn't really matter what the author intended or what the text itself means. What really matters is what the audience thinks the text means. What matters is the affect the text has on that audience. Certainly when authors go to create texts they think about the audience and they plan their text so that the text will have the intended effect on the audience that they wanted. As the text itself to form that has our created to have a certain effect on the audience. Despite all this planning and expectation, however, the audience really takes in the text what they want to.

In reality the meaning in the text comes from all three of these different areas. When we as teachers want to teach speaking, that is putting together texts, we need to make sure that our students understand these three different aspects of meaning in the text. They need to understand that authors must put together text that show their intention that show their background and reveal themselves and their motives to the world. Our students need to know that the forms in the text itself are responsible for meaning contained in the text and they need to know how to create this. Lastly as listeners our students need to know that they have to interpret texts and hopefully in the way that the author intended.

2. What does a study of discourse tell us about the nature of language itself? (DA)

Language is not just about producing forms as a way of creating meaning and purpose, it is about interpreting and reacting to linguistic forms as well as extra-linguistic contextual cues.

The study of discourse reveals some very important aspects of language itself which not only help us in teaching language to others but help us understand the basic nature of language. What we find in studying discourse first of all is that language cannot ever be separated from context. When we are creating language we have to create language based on the context around us or (as in writing) we have to create context within the text. When we are interpreting language we have to interpret the language based on the context. This means and teaching forms alone is less than optimal and may not help your students learn to use language at all. Extending discourse we see that language is not really creative in its very nature. What we find is that language is expansive and changeable. Part of the problem with an idea about language based on creativity as the basis of language is that to be created their have to be fixed rules. Language simply does not have fixed rules. Language is constantly changing. It should be obvious to us who have actually practiced this type of learning and teaching that fixed rules really don't apply to language and I don't believe that they necessarily help people learn language as well. In fact, I would argue that fixed rules stop people from learning language. What we find in studying discourse is that people learn language based on meaningful formulas and the same time they need to learn how to extend and personalize those formulas in ways that other people will understand. So obviously there is some grammatical system but grammar might not be the basis or the nature of language as it is often presupposed to be. How we teach language needs to vary also from language to language. English has an extremely tight work or system. Since word order in English is quite fixed in relation to work order in other languages. Word are certainly one important way of showing different meanings. Since English can not use word order the same way that Russian or Finnish can then English test have different mechanisms. For English meaning mechanisms this is certainly vocabulary. English has a huge and diverse vocabulary and as teachers we have to let our students know that English is a large extent a vocabulary based coding system.

3. How and why do we study discourse and what can it tell us? (DA)

time, space = context controls

norms = no set rules

grammar = for meaning

culture = mediates and allows for interpretation

roles = are everywhere and constantly changing

Some of the major ideas that we can glean from a careful study of discourse as prescribed in the field of discourse analysis are shown briefly above as well as in the specific quotes I have chosen to include form the final chapter of the DA textbook. As I have already gone over many of the main points shown above I will restrict my comments to those areas not yet covered, which generally includes the last two; culture and roles.

Culture (and here remember we are talking about big C and not little c) is a necessary mediator of meaning in a text, or a piece of discourse. The both the creation and interpretation of a text is going to be based on cultural norms. A text reflects either directly or indirectly both the beliefs of the speaker and the norms of he society. A text has to make use of all these ideas. The basic idea is that many of the norms which are presented in the texts, albeit in a somewhat indirect way, are direct representatives of the norms of culture. They represent cultural knowledge and cultural understanding which the speaker presumes the listener is going to share.

Another aspect of text which often is forgotten is the idea of roles. Any time anyone goes to produce a text they are adopting a certain role. This role does not have to be something that isn't them, but the bottom line is that as we move through our daily routine we adapt to the situation often by creating or choosing a different role. Every time we speak we're playing some sort of role. Students need to understand that they can't always be the same person in many different situations. With a flexible in the speak, knowing when to be assertive and went to be passive. This all involves adopting different roles. And of course roles that we use a speech need to be based on cultural norms of what is allowed and what is not allowed. Children free sample are somewhat limited in the roles they are expected to adopt. In the past the same held true for women but thankfully this is no longer true in many cultures.

4.What are some of the most important variables in teaching pragmatics ion the classroom? (PD)

Most important variables that we need to think about when teaching pragmatics are really no difference in the variables in general language teaching. In factory to go so far as to say that teaching pragmatics really is the basis of general language teaching or at least it should be. So obviously we have learner variables which involve age, proficiency, learning history, the goals of the learner's, and of course effective variables that each learner has in relation to the target language. We also have of course situational variables which relate to how many people we have in the class, how many hours each week we have with him and how those hours of setup, and of course the class from setup itself. In designing our course we need to try to think about aspects of discourse (texts), pragmatics, and of course how people are supposed to learn pragmatics. This last element is what is often called into language pragmatics. So we need to have a fixed idea for all of these different sides. We need to have a good idea about what texts are how they're produced blah blah blah as well as underlying pragmatics skills or pragmatic competence and how this is supposed to develop within an individual. This knowledge must be tempered with classroom knowledge.

5. What are the basic research findings of classroom pragmatics instruction? (PD)

Pure and simple, the main research findings on pragmatic construction in the classroom, and remember this means particular pragmatic instruction in a foreign language classroom, is that over instruction seems to be more effective then call for instruction. The idea being over instruction will encourage or hopefully lead to explicit learning. A covert instruction, the other hand, is generally thought to lead to more implicit types of learning. It seems to us and possibly like a bit of a contradiction to try to encourage more explicit learning. Certainly we are told in teaching programs that implicit learning is often better and more effective, particularly when we think about performance. Strictly speaking and based on the research evidence this is not seem to be absolutely true. One wave explaining this is through the noticing hypothesis. Whenever he talked about this class and to most part under the name of attention focus which sees a more to me than just noticing. The idea being while we need implicit learning to fire up certain types of neural mechanisms and we also need to notice certain elements of our own speech in relation to the speech we are hearing. We need to notice patterns and gaps between our own patterns and patterns that others produce. A tremendous amount of covert instruction will provide people with patterns and put the all patterns they will need, but there's no guarantee that they'll actually focus their attention on the patterns that we want them to. For this reason a certain of overt teaching would seem to be beneficial, and this is certainly supported by the results of these studies.

Based on all this week and now not only say that it is better, potentially anyway, to learn something's in the classroom as opposed to going to the target language environment, but within the classroom itself a certain amount of overt teaching is also beneficial. Of course there are serious age-related variables to this. Adults are much better at focusing attention and understanding concepts. Therefore, if we have adult students they will certainly benefit from a kind of fixed instruction which guides them and prepares them to deal with both input and practice. For children who depending on their age do not understand concepts very well, even their own language, then more overt instruction may not help or at least we need to think very carefully about how we present our overt instruction. For children over instruction might come much better packaged in the form of directed feedback and not necessarily explanations or presentations of concepts.

6. What are some of the main teaching approaches and issues in focused pragmatics instruction? (PD)

There is overt and convert. Obviously we need to use both but in what proportion and how? The answer is not easy because it really depends on the different variables we mentioned above. In general we should be using much more covert teaching than overt and neither should appear in a solid boring block as we so often do in the classroom. They should both be used and as naturally s possible as we discussed in our new type of classroom environment where we build or create a socialized setting. Input is forever the key!

7. What are some of the major design issues in focused pragmatics instruction? (PD)

Based on our answer to the above question it seems to be clear that some overt teaching is helpful in developing pragmatic skills and speaking prowess in general. Exactly how much overt instruction and how it should be applied our questions that need to be answered. The research we read in the chapter really doesn't mention very much about How people went about teaching overtly. When we think of teaching overtly we think of the implementation of a top-down teaching process. This is certainly one aspect, or one possible aspect of overtly teaching pragmatic skills. We did Sibley mention before a piece of input is supplied or before an activity aspects of pragmatics and pragmatic development. So we might actually teach our students something about speech acts by explaining. Another approach is in the types of input we choose. Even though we are teaching certain things overtly the input that we give our students is still the most important aspect of our teaching. So we need to find good input and useful input based on what we now know about discourse and how discourse is produced. We also need to make sure that we sequence our input according to elements of pragmatic development. What we deal with the input is that a very important aspect or technique in teaching pragmatics. Nunan (1989) makes an important distinction between what he calls real world type activities and pedagogical activities. We're world types of activities would be things that you would expect your students to have to do in the real world, such as making a phone call, filling out a form, making a presentation. Pedagogical activities, on the other hand, are activities which the students would really only expect to encounter in the classroom. We need to make sure that we used both types of activities in developing pragmatic skill. And petting our students rather than getting top-down explanations we might intermingle or mix and match pedagogical activities, which would certainly be more overt, and real world activities which are much more covert. Finally, one of the last elements of design and when we are thinking about focused pragmatics instruction is feedback. The whole point of this pragmatic focus or overtness in teaching pragmatics, is so that the students can actually notice what is going on in the input and in their output. They somehow need to identify the mismatch between what they do in what they have observed other skill in the type of input that they receive which of course should be good input. Feedback that is extremely important element in getting them to notice. The trick in giving feedback is to make it as overt as possible without stopping a conversation or damaging the ego of the speaker. In doing so the probably simplest rule that we can think of would be to try to make the input meaningful and natural.