Discourse in English Language Education

John Flowerdew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136170126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Discourse in English Language Education introduces students to the major concepts and questions in Discourse Studies and their applications to language education. Each chapter draws on key research to examine critically a particular approach in the field, providing a review of important literature, examples to illustrate the principal issues concerned and an outline of the implications for their application to pedagogy.

Features include:

• coverage of a broad range of approaches in the field, including Systemic Functional Linguistics and Register, Speech Acts, the Cooperative Principle and Politeness, Conversation Analysis, Genre Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics
• analysis of a wide range of discourse examples that include casual conversation, newspapers, fiction, radio, classrooms, blogs and real-life learner texts
• a selection of illustrations and tables carefully chosen to enhance students' understanding of different concepts and approaches
• stimulating discussion questions at the end of each chapter, specially designed to foster critical thinking, reflection and engagement with the topics covered.

Engaging, accessible and comprehensive, Discourse in English Language Education richly demonstrates how Discourse Studies can inform the teaching of English and other languages, both as a foreign language and in the mother tongue.

It will be essential reading for upper undergraduates and postgraduates with interests in Applied Linguistics, TESOL and Language Education.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the various meanings of the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘Discourse Analysis/Studies’, highlights a number of features of discourse and Discourse Analysis/Studies, considers the notion of communicative competence and its relation to discourse and explains how it is an appropriate goal for Language Education. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the rest of the book.

1.1 DEFINING DISCOURSE

There are various usages of the term discourse, but we will begin here by defining it broadly as language in its contexts of use. In considering language in its contexts of use, the concern is also with language above the level of the sentence. The emphasis on contexts of use and the suprasentential level is important, because for much of the history of modern linguistics, under the influence of the generative linguist Chomsky, language has been analysed as separate from context, as decontextualised sentences. The rationale for a contextualised and suprasentential consideration of language is based upon the belief that knowing a language is concerned with more than just grammar and vocabulary: it also includes how to participate in a conversation or how to structure a written text. To be able to do this, it is necessary to take into account the context, or situation, in which a particular use of language occurs and how the units of language combine together and structure the overall discourse.

More restricted in sense, the term ‘discourse’ can also be used to refer to a particular set of ideas and how they are articulated, such as the discourse of environmentalism, the discourse of neoliberalism or the discourse of feminism. In this case, the term refers to a type of specialised knowledge and language used by a particular social group. This meaning is associated with French post-structuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault. It will be particularly important in Chapter 10.

The discourse analyst Gee (2011a) memorably refers to the first of the two meanings of discourse considered thus far — discourse as language in the contexts of its use and above the level of the sentence — as little ‘d’ discourse and the second meaning — discourse as ideas and how they are articulated — as big ‘D’ discourses (note the first is always singular, while the second can be pluralised).

1.2 DEFINING DISCOURSE STUDIES AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Following our definition of discourse in the previous section, Discourse Analysis, or, to use a more recent term, Discourse Studies can be defined as the study of language in its contexts of use and above the level of the sentence. The more recent term Discourse Studies is perhaps more appropriate than the older term, Discourse Analysis, because it gets away from the misconception that the field is only concerned with analysis (that it is just a method), while it is also concerned with theory and application (and it comprises a host of methods) (van Dijk, 2001b). Both terms will be used in this book: Discourse Analysis to refer to the actual analysis, and Discourse Studies to refer to the field, or discipline, in general.

Discourse Studies, as a discipline, is arguably most closely associated with linguistics, but is essentially an interdisciplinary activity, employed in such diverse fields as anthropology, business studies, communication studies, cultural studies, educational studies, environmental studies, law, literary studies, media studies, philosophy, politics, psychology, sociology, and many others, in addition to linguistics.

1.3 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS MAY EMPHASISE DISCOURSE STRUCTURE OR DISCOURSE FUNCTION OR BOTH

As in physics, chemistry or biology, Discourse Analysis may involve structural analysis. Here a text or group of texts would be broken down into their component parts. These parts (which are, in fact, usually determined in terms of their functions, or meanings) might be based on the topics or turns at speaking, in spoken discourse, or the paragraphs and sentences, or propositions, in written discourse (more technical units will be presented later). A structural approach to Discourse Analysis might also look at how elements of language are held together in coherent units.

Instead of, or in addition to, a structural analysis, Discourse Analysis might take a functional approach. Here the discourse analyst considers the particular meanings and communicative forces associated with what is said or written. This approach to discourse considers language as a type of communicative action. It considers questions such as the following: How is language used persuasively — e.g. to request, accept, refuse, complain? What sort of language is polite language? How do people use language to convey meanings indirectly? What constitutes racist or sexist language? How do people exercise power through their use of language? What might be the hidden motivations behind certain uses of language?

Alternatively, in a functional approach, the discourse analyst might look at particular discourse genres (Chapter 8). Here the discourse analyst asks: How is language used in academic essays, in research articles, in conference presentations, in letters, in reports and in meetings? Here the concern is again with communicative purposes or communicative action, but the focus is on particular contexts of use.

Then again, in a functional approach to discourse, the analyst might consider how language is used by particular social groups (known as register analysis: see Chapter 2). How do teachers or politicians or business executives use language? How do men and women vary in their use of language? What is particular about the language used by such people that it identifies them as belonging to particular social groups?

Functional analysis suggests a qualitative rather than a quantitative methodology and, indeed, most Discourse Analysis is qualitative in nature. The concern is not with measuring and counting, but with describing. However, with the use of computers, quantitative analysis has received more attention and discourse analysts may also use computers to derive quantitative findings; for example, on the relative frequency of particular language patterns by different individuals or social groups in particular texts or groups of texts. This approach to Discourse Analysis is known as Corpus Linguistics and will be dealt with in Chapter 9.

1.4 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS MAY FOCUS ON ANY SORT OF TEXTS

Discourse Analysis may focus on any sort of text, written or spoken. The term ‘text’, in Discourse Analysis, refers to any stretch of spoken or written language. In written text, Discourse Analysis may consider texts as diverse as news reports, textbooks, company reports, personal letters, business letters, e-mails and faxes. In spoken discourse, it may focus on casual conversations, business and other professional meetings, service encounters (buying and selling goods and services) and classroom lessons, among many others.

While Discourse Analysis has traditionally focused on written and spoken text, in recent years it has started to extend its field of activity to consider multimodal discourse, where written and/or spoken text is combined with visual or aural dimensions, such as television programmes, movies, websites, museum exhibits and advertisements of various kinds. These texts, which form the data of Discourse Analysis, may be contemporary or historical. Indeed, Discourse Analysis has much to offer historical studies (Flowerdew, 2012a).

1.5 THERE ARE VARIOUS APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE STUDIES

Discourse Studies may adopt various approaches to analysis. Some of the main approaches will be used as the organising principle of this book: they include register analysis (Chapter 2), which studies the typical features of particular fields of activity or professions; cohesion, coherence and thematic development (Chapters 3–4), which investigate how text is held together, in terms of both structure and function; Pragmatics (Chapters 5–6), which studies language in terms of the actions it performs; Conversation Analysis (Chapter 7), which takes a microanalytic approach to spoken interaction; Genre Analysis (Chapter 8), which studies language in terms of the different recurrent stages it goes through in specific contexts; Corpus-based Discourse Analysis (Chapter 10), which uses computers in the analysis of very large bodies of text (known as corpora — singular corpus) in order to identify particular phraseologies (wordings) and rhetorical patterning; and Critical Discourse Analysis (Chapter 10), which interprets texts from a social perspective, analysing power relations and cases of manipulation and discrimination in discourse. These are just some of the approaches. There are numerous others and many discourse analysts adopt an eclectic or hybrid approach.¹

1.6 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IS CONDUCTED IN MANY FIELDS OF ACTIVITY

Discourse Analysis is conducted in many fields, both informal and institutional. In informal fields, Discourse Analysis has been used to analyse how people interact in conversation and in service encounters, as already mentioned, and to analyse how they tell stories, how they gossip and how they chat. In formal fields, Discourse Analysis has been fruitfully employed in the political arena, in analysing the media, in the law, in healthcare, and in business and other forms of bureaucracy.

1.7 DISCOURSE STUDIES FOCUS ON LANGUAGE IN ITS CONTEXTS OF USE

The definition given above for Discourse Studies refers to the study of language in its contexts of use. But what is meant exactly by this term context? Another word for context is situation. In order to understand the meaning of an utterance², one needs to know the particular features of the situation in which it was uttered. In a very well-known study, Hymes (1972a) identified 16 features of situation, or context, some of which are listed as follows:

• the physical and temporal setting;

• the participants (speaker or writer, listener or reader);

• the purposes of the participants;

• the channel of communication (e.g. face to face, electronic, televised, written);

• the attitude of the participants;

• the genre, or type of speech event: poem, lecture, editorial, sermon;

• background knowledge pertaining to the participants.

How do features of context such as these affect meaning and the analyst’s interpretation of meaning? We can understand the role of context if we consider in what situations certain utterances might or might not be appropriate. To take some examples, first, for the contextual feature participants, an expression such as ‘Sit down!’ is likely to be interpreted as appropriate when spoken by a parent to a child. When addressed to a superior, however, it would likely be interpreted as rude. The important variable, therefore, in this example, is the participants, whether one of them is a child or a superior. To take another example, this time for channel of communication, the following might be perfectly acceptable as a text message sent via the channel of a mobile phone: ‘CUL8ER’ (that is to say, ‘see you later’), but sent by means of another channel, such as a business letter, it would more likely be perceived as uneducated or rude. To take a third example, here for background knowledge, suppose...