Discourse Studies for ELT INTRODUCTION

Dr. Youssef Tamer Associate Professor

Department of English, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences Ibn Zohr University

prof.youssef.tamer@gmail.com www.youtube.com/teflandict

englishstudiesinfo.blogspot.com

Introduction• Different meanings of ‘discourse’ and ‘Discourse Analysis/Studies’

• Various characteristics of discourse and Discourse Analysis/Studies

• The concept communicative competence

• How communicative competence is related to discourse

• How it is an appropriate goal of English Language Teaching

Definition of DiscourseMany uses of the term discourse

It is broadly defined as language in its context of use

It is concerned with language above the level of the sentence

Against Generativists’ emphasis on studying language outside of its context of usage (Decontextualised sentences - Armchair linguistics)

Understanding language is concerned with more than simply grammar and vocabulary

Definition of Discourse

Knowing a language also involves how to participate in a conversation

Or how to structure a written text

To achieve this it is necessary to consider the following:

The context or situation in which a particular use of language occurs

How the units of language combine together and structure the overall discourse

Definition of DiscourseIt is also used to mean a particular set of ideas and how they are articulated

Like the discourse of environmentalists or of feminism

It is thus used to refer to a kind of specialised knowledge and language used by a specific social group

This is associated with French post-structuralist thinkers like Foucault (Chap 10)

Definition of Discourse

Gee (2011a) refers to the first type as little ‘d’ discourse

He refers to the second as big ‘D’ discourse

The first is always singular while the second can be pluralised

Definition of discourse studies and discourse analysis

• Discourse studies is a more recent term than discourse analysis

• It can be defined as the study of language in its social context of use and above the level of the sentence

• Discourse Analysis will be used in this course to refer to the actual analysis

• Discourse Studies will be used to refer to the field, or discipline

• Discourse studies is an interdisciplinary discipline used in diverse fields mainly linguistics, educational studies, cultural studies… etc

Its emphasis can be on discourse structure

• Discourse analysis can deal with a purely structural analysis

• A text can be divided into topics or turns in spoken discourse

• Or the paragraph and sentences, or propositions in written discourse

• A structural approach can also examine how elements of language are held together in coherent units

Its emphasis can be on discourse functions• Discourse Analysis can adopt a functional approach

• It views language as a type of communicative function

• Focus is placed on the specific meanings and communicative forces associated with a particular oral or written discourse

• It tries to answer questions like the following:

• What sort of language is polite?

• How do people use language to convey meanings indirectly?

• How language is used persuasively to request, accept, refuse, complain….?

Its emphasis can be on discourse functions

• Emphasis can be on specific discourse genres (chapter8)

• How language is used in academic essays, in research articles, in conference presentations, in letters…

• Focus can also be on how language is used by specific social groups -register analysis- (chapter2)

• How do teachers or politicians use language?

• How do man and women vary in their language use?…

Research methodology in Discourse Analysis

• Qualitative rather than quantitative

• It is concerned with describing rather than counting and measuring

• With the advent of technology, it has become also quantitative

• e.g, the relative frequency of specific language patterns by various people and social groups in particular texts

• This approach to discourse analysis is known as Corpus Linguistics (Chapter9)

DA can deal with any type of texts

• ‘Text’ means any stretch of spoken or written language

• DA can deal with both

• In written text, DA deals with news reports, textbooks, company reports, personal letters, business letters, e-mails, faxes…

• In spoken communication, DA deals with casual conversation, business and other professional meetings, service encounters (buying & selling), classroom lessons…

Approaches to DA• Register analysis (Chapter2): Investigates the typical characteristics

of a specific activity or professions

• Cohesion, coherence and thematic development (Chapters3-4): Studies how text is held together regarding both structure and function

• Pragmatics (Chapters5-6): Investigates language with regard to the actions it performs

• Conversational analysis (Chapter7): Takes a microanalytic approach to spoken interaction

Approaches to DA• Genre analysis (Chapter8): Deals with language with regard to the

various recurrent stages it goes through in specific contexts

• Corpus-based Discourse Analysis (Chapter10): Used computers in the study of very large bodies of text so as to identify specific phraseologies (wordings) and rhetorical patterning

• Critical Discourse Analysis (Chapter10): Interprets texts from a social perspective, investigating social relations and causes of manipulation and discrimination in discourse

Discourse investigates language with a focus on contexts of use

• Context/situation

• So as to understand the meaning of a particular utterance, one needs the specific characteristics of the context/situation where it was used

Discourse investigates language with a focus on contexts of use

• Hymes (1972a) introduced 16 characteristics of context/situation:

• The physical and temporal setting

• The participants (speaker or writer, listener or reader)

• the purpose 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…….

CUL8ER !

Channel of Communication

Intertextuality of discourse

• American Airlines is Terminal

• Aircraft operates out of terminals

• Meaning: The airline is on the verge of bankruptcy

• = Considering other texts in the analysis of a given text

• One text cannot be understood except in relation to other texts

Discourse and communication

However, this model Ignores the dimension of context/situationOur interpretation of a message is however affected

by the context where it is usedInferential models

Model of communication: Code model, or conduit metaphor modelReddy, 1979; Sperber & Wilson, 1995

Discourse and communication competence

• Chomsky (1960s) was interested only in competence

• He considered performance (memory limitations, distractions, slips of tongue…) as a distortion of the ideal model that is competence

• Hymes (1972b: 278) “there are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless”

• Hymes developed his model of contextual variables referred to in a previous slide to study these situationally defined conventions and patterns

Discourse and communicative competence

• Communicative approach to language teaching (CLT)

• Applied linguists shifted Hymes’s agenda away from investigating what was happening in language communities to a set of standards for an ideal teaching and learning curriculum

• CLT became the predominant paradigm for language development internationally

Discourse and communicative competence

• Canale and Swain (1980) broke communicative competence down into three subcomponents

• 1-Grammatical competence

• 2-Sociolinguistic competence

• 3-Strategic competence

Discourse and communicative competence

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