DISCOURSE ANALYSIS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHERS

Introduction

Discourse Analysis is concerned with the study of the relationship between language and context in which it is used. It grew out of work in different disciplines in the 1960s and early 1970s, including linguistics, semiotics, psychology, anthropology and sociology. Discourse analysts study language in use: written text of all kinds, and spoken data, from conversation to highly institutionalized forms of talk.

British discourse analysis was greatly influenced by M.A.K. Halliday’s functional approach to language (e.g. Halliday 1973), which in turn has connections with the Prague school of linguists. Halliday’s framework emphasizes the social functions of language and the thematic and informational structure of speech and writing. Also important in Britain were Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) at the University of Birmingham, who developed a model for the description of teacher-pupil talk, based on a hierarchy of discourse units. The British work has principally followed structural-linguistic criteria, on the basis of the isolation of units, and sets of rules defining well-formed sequences of discourse.

On the other hand, American discourse analysis has been dominated by work within the etnomethodological tradition, which emphasizes the research method close of close observation of groups of people communicating in natural settings. The American work has produced a large number of descriptions of discourse types, as well as insights into the social constraints of politeness and face-preserving phenomena in talk, overlapping with British work in pragmatics.

This paper would elaborate a brief explanation about spoken discourse as well as writing one. While the spoken discourse would concern more on the analysis of form-function, and speech acts-discourse structures, the writing discourse would be analyzed based on the text and its level of interpretation which are cohesive and coherence, and recognizing textual patterns.

Review of Literature

1.        Spoken Discourse

1.1.  Form and Function

The famous British comedy duo, Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, started one of their shows in 1973 with the following dialogue:

Ernie    : Tell ‘em about the show

Eric (to the audience)  : Have we got a show for you tonight folks!

Have we got a show for you!

(aside to Ernie) Have we got a show for them?

This short dialogue raises a number of problems for anyone wishing to do a linguistic analysis of it. Most people would agree that it is funny because Eric is playing with grammatical structure that seems to be ambiguous: ‘Have we got a show for you!’ has an inverted verb and subject. Inversion of the verb and its subject happens only under restricted condition in English; the most typical circumstances in which this happens is when questions are being asked, but it also happens in exclamations (‘Wasn’t my face red!).

            Eric’s inverted grammatical form in its first two occurrences clearly has the function of an exclamation, telling the audience something, not asking them anything, until the humorous moment when he begins to doubt whether they do have a show to offer, at which point he uses the same grammatical form to ask Ernie a genuine question. By the same token, in other situations, an inverted declarative form (subject before verb), typically associated with ‘statements’, might be heard as a question requiring an answer:

            A: You’re leaving for London.

            B: Yes, immediately.

            So how we interpret grammatical form depends on a number of factors, some linguistic, some purely situational. One linguistic feature that may affect our interpretation is the intonation.

            Eric (to the audience): Have we got a SHOW for you tonight folks!

                                                Have we got a SHOW for you! (aside to Ernie)

                                                HAVE

                                                            We got a show for them?

Two variables in Eric’s delivery change. Firstly, the tone contour, the direction of his pitch, whether it rises of falls, changes. Secondly, his voice jumps to a higher pitch level.

1.2.  Speech acts and Discourse Structures

In one sense we are talking about ‘functions’: we are concerned as much with what Eric and Ernie are doing with language as with what they are saying. Speech acts defined as a request of an instruction or an exemplification we are concentrating on what that piece of language is doing, or how the listener/reader is supposed to react (Austin, 1962 and Searle, 1969). Here is an example of speech acts happened in casual setting.

A: Well, try this spray, what I got; this is the biggest they come.

B: Oh . . .

A: … little make-up capsule.

B: Oh, right. It’s like these inhalers, isn’t it?

A: And I’ve found that not so bad since I’ve been using it, and it doesn’t

     make you so grumpy.

B: This is up your nose?

A: Mm.

B: Oh, wow! It looks like a bit sort of violent, doesn’t it? It works well,

     does it?

                                                (Birmingham Collection of English Text)

Our immediate reaction is that conversation can often begin with well, but that there is something odd about ‘try this spray…’ Suggesting to someone ‘try X’ usually only occurs in response to some remark or event or perceived state of affairs that warrants intervention, and such information is lacking here.

The dialogue is structured in the sense that it can be coherently interpreted and seems to be progressing somewhere, but we are in the middle of a structure rather than witnessing the complete unfolding of the whole. In is in this respect, the interest in whole discourse structures, that discourse analysis adds something extra to the traditional concern with functions/speech acts.

Here are other examples of spoken discourse happened in the classroom.

(T=Teacher, P=Pupil who speaks)

T: Now then… I’ve got some things here, too. Hands up. What is that,

     what is it?

P: Saw

T: It’s a saw, yes this is a saw. What do we do with a saw?

P: Cut wood

T: Yes. You’re shouting out though. What do we do with a saw?

     Marvelete.

P: Cut wood.

T: We cut wood. And, erm, what do we do with a hacksaw, this hacksaw?

P: Cut trees.

T: Do we cut trees with this?

P: Cut wood.

T: Do we cut wood with this?

P: No.

T: What do we do with that then?

P: Cut wood.

T: We cut wood with that. What do we do with that?

P: Sir.

T: Cleveland

P: Metal

T: We cut metal. Yes we cut metal. And, er, I’ve got this here. What’s that

    Trevor?

P: An axe

T: It’s an axe yes. What do I cut with the axe?

P: Wood, wood.

T: Yes, I cut wood with the axe. Right …Now then, I’ve got some more things here…(etc).

The teacher, in this case, gives the pupils a clear signal of the beginning and end of this mini-phase of the lesson by using the words now then and right in a particular way (with falling intonation and a short pause afterwards) that make them into a sort of ‘frame’ on either side of the sequence of questions and answers. Framing move is precisely what Sinclair and Coulthard call the function of such utterances. Then, the two framing moves, together the question and answer sequence that falls between them can be called transaction, which again captures the feeling of what is being done with the language here.

In order to capture the similarity of the pattern in each case, Sinclair and Coulthard (1975: 26-7) called the first move on each exchange an opening move, the second an answering move and the third a follow-up move. Sinclair and Brazil (1982: 49) prefer to talk initiation, response and follow-up.

Move	Exchange 1	Exchange 2	Exchange 3
Initiation	A: What time is it?	A: Tim’s coming tomorrow	A: Here, hold this.
Response	B: Six thirty.	B: Oh yeah.	B: (takes the box)
Follow-up	A: Thanks	A: Yes	A: Thanks

So far we have looked only at one model for the analysis of spoken interaction, the Sinclair-Coulthard ‘Birmingham’ model. We have argued that it is useful for describing talk in and out of the classroom; it captures patterns that reflect the basic functions of interaction and offers s hierarchical model where smaller units can be seen to combine to form larger ones and where the large units can be seen to consist of these smaller ones. The bare bones of the hierarchy) or rank scale) can be expressed as follows:

TRANSACTION

EXCHANGE

 

MOVE

ACT

            Sinclair and Coulthard’s model is very useful for analyzing patterns of interaction where talk is relatively tightly structured, such as between doctors and patients, but all the complications arise when we try to apply the model to talk in more informal, casual and spontaneous contexts.

2.        Written Discourse

In order to have a deep understanding regarding written discourse, take a look at to the passage follows:

The parents of seven-year-old Australian boy woke to find a giant

Python crushing and trying to swallow him.

The incident occurred in Cairns, Queensland and the boy’s mother,

Mrs. Kathy Dryden said: It was like a horror movie. It was a hot

night and Bartholomew was lying under a mosquito net. He suddenly

started screaming.

We rushed to the bedroom to find a huge snake trying to strangle

him. It was coiled around his arms and neck and was going down his

body. Mrs. Dryden and her husband, Peter, tried to stab the creature with

knives but the python bit the body several times before escaping.

                                    (From the Birmingham Post, 12 March 1987, p.10)

The text requires us to activate our knowledge of pythons as dangerous creatures which may threaten human life, which strangle their prey and to whose presence one must react with certain urgency. The ‘creature’ must be taken to be the python rather than the boy (which creature could well refer to in another next), since parents do not normally stab their children in order to save their lives.

On the one hand, it is possible for us analyzing the text based on its cohesive and coherence. The sentence ‘The parents of seven-year-old Australian boy woke to find a giant Python crushing and trying to swallow him’ are cohesive (the parents of seven-year-old Australian/him), but it will be coherent if only this sentence is followed by the next sentence and has a cause-effect relationship.

On the other hand, another level of interpretation which we are involved in as we process text is that recognizing textual patterns. Certain patterns in text reoccur time and time again and become deeply ingrained as part of our cultural knowledge. The patterns manifested in regularly occurring functional relationship between bits of the text. The bits may be phrases, clauses, sentences, or groups of sentences; we shall refer to them as textual segments to avoid confusion with grammatical elements and syntactic relations within clauses and sentences.

An example of segments coinciding with sentences is these two sentences from a report on a photographic exhibition:

The stress is on documentary and rightly so. Arty photography are a bore.

                                                            (the Guardian, 27^th October 1988:24)

The interpretation that makes most sense is that the relationship between the second sentence and the first is that the second provides a reason for the first. The two segments are therefore in a phenomenon-reason relationship with one another.

The phenomenon-reason relation which united the two sentences above, along with cause-consequence and instrument-achievement, can be brought under the general heading of logical sequence relations. When segments of a text are compared or contrasted with one another, then we may talk of matching relation, which are also extremely common. Logical sequencing and matching are the two basic categories of the clause-relational approach.

Conclusion

            We have seen in this chapter that discourse analysis is a vast subject area within linguistics, encompassing as it does the analysis of spoken and written language over and above concern concerns such as the structure of the clause or sentence. In this brief introduction we have looked at just some ways of analyzing speech and writing and just some aspects of those particular models we have chosen to highlight. This and further of the approaches outlined here will form the background to reassessment of the basics of language teaching as they are conventionally understood: the levels of language description (grammar, lexis and phonology) and the skills of language use (reading, writing, listening, speaking). There will be also be suggestions concerning teaching materials and procedures whenever it seems that discourse analysis has some direct bearing on these matters.

Reference

McCarthy, M. 1991. Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University    Press