From the companion website for Rogers, R. (2011). An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education, 2nd edition. New York: Taylor and Francis at

www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415874298

INTERVIEW WITH JAMES GEE1

Rogers, R. (2004, May). [Interview with James Gee.] In Companion Website to R. Rogers

(Ed.) An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education (second edition). New

York: Routledge. [http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415874298]

PERSONAL HISTORY WITH CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Melissa Mosley: What is your training as a discourse analyst?

James Gee: I got into discourse analysis by accident, as a lot of people did. I was trained

as a theoretical linguist working on syntactic theory and the philosophy of language. I

actually came out of a tradition that was hostile to any of the social or cultural

understandings of language. The core of linguistics was structural understanding about

language. My first job was at a college called Hampshire College in Amherst,

Massachusetts. It was a very interesting college, a very liberal one. There were no

grades or credits. Kids went through it by taking exams. If they took courses, they didn’t

really have to take course, they weren’t required. But if they took courses you had to

make it engaging or they could leave at any time. We had a program in cognitive

science, one of the earliest ones, certainly one of the earliest ones for undergraduates.

And we had several linguists, but attracting students to our theoretical linguistics classes

was not an easy matter. Many of the students at Hampshire were into the Humanities.

1 This interview was conducted by Melissa Mosley (Assistant Professor, University of

Texas-Austin) on April 16, 2009 meeting of the American Educational Research

Association.

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So, we agreed one day in order to try to entice them into our syntax classes, for

example, that we would teach a course on a thing called stylistic studies, which is a

linguistic study of literature. At the time, there was a body of people doing that. It

wasn’t a very well respected part of linguistics, but since it involved literature, we

thought, well that it would be a hook and they would see some linguistics and they will

take more. And we then said, who’s going to teach this? I had actually an interesting

educational past, in which I had zero or close to zero in literature. I had read really

nothing in literature. Which I later thought was a good thing, because it hadn’t been

spoiled for me by school. So I went out and asked some friends, what do you read if you

read literature, especially poetry? Somebody recommended the Norton Anthology of

Poetry. I read all his stuff and taught a class on using linguistic tools to analyze literature.

That really started a germ of the idea of analyzing texts for how they functioned. Not

only semantically, but also to create things like affect or various other effects. It didn’t

happen all at once but it was the beginning. And through other jobs because colleagues

were around that I wanted to intersect with, or who were influencing me. I gradually

took this kind of analysis of literature into analyzing non-literary language and certainly

going much more toward the social and cultural aspects of language. Nonetheless, if you

read my stuff on discourse, I don’t think many people are aware of it—but if you look—

you will see there’s still some kinship with the analysis of literature. I’ve always viewed

that what we discover when we analyze everyday people’s production of language, is

that we’re all literary. We all produce language that is saturated with meaning at all

levels. We’re good at it as human beings. So the tools with which we analyze literature

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are quite applicable to how everyday people do stuff. And we discover that everyday

people are really quite creative with their language unless you’ve really done something

to harm them.

MM: Are there other background experiences that led you to CDA, academically and/or

personally?

JG: Have other experiences led me to CDA? The first thing I’ve got to say is that I’m not a

CDA person. CDA when you capitalize it—to me—means Norman Fairclough and his

work and the people that work in his tradition. When you don’t capitalize it and just say

critical discourse analysis, it means a group of people who I don’t see myself always a

part of. And the reason is this: my argument is that human languages are built in such a

way that any time you express anything there is always what I call a political aspect.

That is, what I mean by politics is situations where social goods are at stake, things like

status or deference, or being told that what you did is appropriate or good or bad.

Those things change your standing in social relationships and in groups and therefore

they’re social goods. They’re political in the sense that they change our relationships to

people and institutions. Language cannot help but to express that, right? Because all

uses of language are situated in a continuum between trying to express either solidarity

with somebody or deference or status with them, or someplace in between. And of

course, solidarity and deference or status are social goods. And so any analysis of

discourse that is true to language in that sense will have that political slant in that sense.

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So, to me, in that respect all discourse analysis is critical discourse analysis in the little c

d a sense.

MM: And who were your mentors, both formal and informal?

JG: Mentors? I wasn’t mentored by anybody directly because the mentoring I had was in

theoretical linguistics. I’m self-taught in that way. My work comes out of three different

traditions that I melded together. One is American anthropological linguistics and social

linguistics, so the work of Dell Hymes and John Gumperz and Bill Labov was influential to

me. I had learned some of that stuff in graduate school although we were always taught

to treat it as peripheral. But I had been trained in part by a woman named Elizabeth

Traugott who was very good at that stuff and was very influential in teaching it to me at

a time when I didn’t pay as much attention to it as I should have.

The other thing was that as I got into discourse analysis directly I became very

influenced by Foucault and Bruno Latour. And those are probably the two biggest

influences on my work outside of linguistics. I translated Foucault for my own uses and

I’ve never claimed that I represent anything Foucault ever said because there’s a big

industry studying Focuault and anytime you say “he said this” they will say “no he

didn’t.” And I don’t care. I read him my way and I also saw Latour’s work as very

influential. The third tradition that is in there is work on situated cognition and

embodied cognition. Originally, I got that work from the cultural models literature which

is really anthropologists studying cognition but then over time got very influenced by

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learning science people saying, “look, the way we think is not just in your head, it’s

embodied in social practices and in contexts and environments. And our knowledge is

distributed across people and environments.” So those are the traditions that I melded

together, over time in the work, solely because I liked them.

CDA AS APPROACH, STANCE, METHOD(S)

MM: What do you see as the foundations of critical discourse analysis in small cda?

JG: My book called An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis, as well as my writings

about it, are what I see as the foundation, which is situated meaning, that is you have to

analyze meaning as it’s occurring in specific contexts and that people are in a real sense

making that meaning up. They’re considering the context and saying what is, for

example, saying “what is democracy mean here and now”? They may even give novel

meanings to that. Social languages, that is different ways of putting together

grammatical constructions and discourse properties in order to enact identities to be

recognized as some socially recognizable person, whether it’s a Marxist, or a housewife,

or an activist, or a student.

Big D discourses, which is the way we use not just language but all other aspects

of our being, how we coordinate with other people, with places, times, how we dress,

act, interact, value and use language to enact these socially situated identities. And then

the discourse models or cultural models, that is, the theories that people hold that they

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pick up through interaction and media that make sense of what they’re doing through

these Big D discourses. So those elements are what I see as the foundations of not just

critical discourse analysis, of discourse analysis period. Remember for me that language

has as an inherent property that it must always communicate stuff about social

relationships that are also political.

MM: What theoretical frames do you use in your work around language?

JG: Well, my colleagues in Australia who are very taken with Halliday, there are still

people who see there is a residue of Chomsky’s work in my approach to discourse

analysis and language. But the theoretical frames as I said earlier, are ones that I

patched together myself, though they’re taken from people like Hymes. The lines and

the stanzas stuff, you know Hymes had done that work on Native American languages

and I was simply saying “look it was in all languages, not just in ritual languages.”

Social languages is partly indebted to regular dialect studies when you’re talking

about social dialects. It’s certainly indebted to the British work on register, and it’s got

some ties to Bakhtin’s stuff on speech genres. So what I did was, I took foundations

from a lot of different places and I re-did them for myself and put them into what I felt

was a coherent package and that’s what I encourage people to do. Not to slavishly

follow my method of discourse analysis or anyone else’s, but to see them as tools on

offer and ask yourself, “For the task I have and for what I want to analyze, which are the

best tools?” Sometimes that might be mine, or sometimes it might be Norman

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Fairclough’s, sometimes it might be van Dijk’s or somebody else’s. Sometimes you’re

going to have to invent a tool yourself. So what I view is offering resources. You have to

apply in a context that is meaningful for your own work.

MM: What theoretical framework do you use in your work around learning?

JG: I use social cultural theories of learning that came out of I what I was playing around

with when the New Literacy Studies was evolving and, as I say, then eventually trying to

wed those to work in situated cognition, body cognition, and distributed cognition.

When I first did that, I was going to Australia quite a bit, twice a year for about 10 years

because there was a lot of work going on around so-called genre theory. Hallidayans

were starting to do their form of discourse analysis and apply it to schools, so it was a

very exciting time and they had been partly influenced by my work, so I was over there a

lot and there is a movement in Australia around people like Allen Luke, that calls itself

critical literacy and when I began toward the end of that period to talk about not just

social cultural stuff, but try to bring learning back into the mix, learning that showed

how mind, environment, and context are all there, so there is a mind there, it upset a lot

of people and they said, “why do we have to talk about the mind at all?” I tried to make

an argument to them that they didn’t buy at the time, but I think it’s turned out to be

true, is that refusing to talk about the mind and theories about how the mind work,

even those these are theories that are completely caught up in how the mind works

through experience, the world and the environment, leaves us at an institutional

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disadvantage if we want to engage in an educational debate. Because in America, these

educational debates have traditionally been dominated by psychologists, now with

situated learning theory, the psychologists are beginning to get anthropological and

they are beginning to get into social cultural stuff, but failing to have a theory of learning

really leaves you off the table. And I so think that’s why that in America, some of the

people who do social cultural theory, have not had the influence or clout that they could

have had and it’s also why the genre movement in Australia eventually petered out,

because they had a very good theory of language and how that language could be

translated into various pedagogical techniques, but they did not have a theory of

learning, and I once asked Jim Martin, founder of one aspect of genre theory, about

what theory of learning would you say licences your approach to pedagogy and he said,

“I’m a linguist, I don’t have a theory of learning and I don’t need one.” And I think that in

the modern world, if you want to intervene in education, that’s not going to work.

MM: What theoretical frames do you use in your work around power?

JG: Well, I was influenced by Foucault on power as I think everybody else was. But I

began to get kind of tired of discussions of power that were always about oppression,

imperialism, and post-colonialism, and post-modernism. I must say my interest in post-

modernism which was high at one time, I got bored with it and I did not see it buying us

a lot stuff and any real change. And that’s one of the reasons why I went on to do my

work in video games because I really wanted to say, “let’s for a while quit the analysis of

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how oppression—and of course, Foucault is good on these issues—and let’s look at

what people are doing in the new digital media, and digital literacies” which is a natural

place to go for New Literacy Studies and let’s for a minute try to understand it before

we say it’s all capitalism or consumerism or it’s all duping people or even before we say

it’s a form of resistance. Let’s go find out what they’re really doing first. Because what

we learned from the New Literacy Studies is that general theories don’t usually work.

When you look at what people are doing, it’s different across contexts. It’s having

different effects, it’s complicated, it’s nuanced and really grand theories of power, even

theories that say, “it [power] could go either way,” can stop you from seeing that it’s

very complicated and lots of different things are happening and in some cases, we don’t

know because the practices are changing very quickly and changing under our eyes. For

example, how digital media—games but other digital media—really reorganized the

traditional literacy. Not that it is going away but reorganizing the whole ecology of

traditional literacy, in ways that I think we’re going to have to spend a few years

knowing what’s happening, before we start getting the grand theories of power. So I

certainly realize that people are being oppressed by a lot of stuff, but I also think there

are liberating moments and if we want to create more liberating moments, we are going

to have to get down in the trenches and understand stuff at a micro level.

Grand theoreticians don’t like micro stuff, but that’s what we’re about. We’re

really saying the real action of what really makes for people’s lives changing, for ill or

bad, is happening at the micro levels of interaction and those micro levels over a long

period of time are creating over the macro levels, the big picture. But you have to

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intervene on both levels, that’s what we’re about. I think real discourse analysts have to

be skeptical of grand theories that really haven’t looked at a micro level and how

context is so determined with different practices and changes over time.

MM: So you mentioned earlier in the Introduction to Discourse Analysis book, that tools

of inquiry, situated meanings, cultural models and discourse models and social

languages, could you take a minute to elaborate on those three tools of inquiry.

JG: The tools of inquiry that I use in part, they’re rarely meant to be tools that are useful

for some things and not others. Situated meanings is trying to get clear to you that one

way to start an analysis is there terms in here, words in here, that are taking on

meanings that are really germane to this interaction, to this context, where people are

in a sense making those meanings up on the spot and they’re going to give you real

insight into what this means at this micro level and not in general.

The social languages is about the way people are recruiting. I view that all people

are multilingual, they may not know different things we call languages, but nobody has

one style. We all have different grammars and those grammars are used to enact, they

way I often put it is, anytime you communicate you have to be seen as a certain type of

who, doing a certain type of what. Who am I? Who’s talking here? And what in the hell

are we doing? And we have different social languages to do that. And we do mix them

and there are hybrids, of course, and it can get very complicated. The social languages

are telling you what are the social actors here and what are they doing and how are

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people recognizing each other? The danger of that is that you can think language is the

sole thing going on. But people are making meaning with every aspect of what they’re

doing, how they’re holding their bodies, how they’re acting and interacting, how they’re

valuing, how they’re coordinating with objects, tools, and technology around them,

places and so on.

So the Big D discourses are saying social language is always embedded in a lot of

other stuff. That was my technical term—stuff. And if you leave out the other stuff, you

also miss a lot of the action. It’s tempting to leave out the other stuff because we’re

linguists; we’re in charge of language. That’s one of the troubles. This type of discourse

analysis has to be done by people who aren’t just doing linguistics. So it was meant to

be, it’s meant as a way to formulate questions that would get you into doing this stuff.

There are some other tools in the book, and there’s a whole bunch of building devices,

but they’re all meant to be the same thing, that is to give you some questions to start

with and then you hopefully run with what you find in some fruitful way.

MM: Can you describe each of the seven building tasks?

JG: I’m going to tell you something about the seven building tasks. They were devices in

the book to try to motivate people. I was trying to think how to write a book as a linguist

that wasn’t written for linguists? And if the Australians had done it, they would have put

in a lot of systemic functional grammar, which I have an appendix on for a really user-

friendly introduction for Americans. And so I thought, these aren’t linguists and one of

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the things I really wanted to get across to people, which also was a core theme of the

New London Group, is with language we are doing stuff, we are not communicating

information alone, we are doing stuff, we’re building stuff and …

MM: How do the seven building tools interrelate with the tools of inquiry?

JG: The tools of inquiry are my theoretical devices that capture my theory of language.

That was my way of stating simultaneously a tool of analysis and a theory of language.

And if you look at that book and the tools of inquiry, they flow from my ideas about

what language is. So I think that a primary thing we are doing with language is

communicating a social identity and communicating a social activity. That is why social

languages are defined that way. I also think a primary thing we’re doing in language is

that we’re not just inheriting it, we’re inventing it which is why situated meanings are in

there. I also think that language is never divorced from non-language practices. And that

we integrate and make meaning with everything we do which is why Big D discourse is

in there. So it is my theory of language then writ as tools. The relationship to the

building tasks is that first the building tasks reflect this designer attitude toward

language. But, the tools of inquiry and building tasks are meant to be questions. They

are tools at this level. You’re trying to do a discourse analysis, you want to know if my

method works, ask a question for each building task, for each tool, see if you got some

useful stuff, if you did, use it, if you don’t, go to the next one.

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I do argue very strongly that everybody’s theories work well for some data and

not well for others. So, for example, my theory is not useful for short conversations

where people are making very short turns. Right? Everyday conversations where people

are saying “What do you think about this weather?” “Yeah, it’s great,” “I wish it were a

bit sunnier.” “Its supposed to get better this afternoon.” That, in my mind, you should

use conversational analysis, so-called c.a. worked well for that stuff and my stuff does

not work well for that. On the other hand, if you want to get at how people build

meaning over time, you want to get at the creativity, I mentioned around stylistics, then

c.a. is not good for that, my stuff is better for that.

MM: How do you account for multimodality in your work?

JG: In my original work through the Big D Discourse, I brought in and tried to integrate in

language with ways of acting, thinking, valuing, times, places, tools and I viewed that as

a dance. By the way, that’s where Latour comes in because he’s got some of the best

theories about how we’re always engaged in a dance where our bodies, our language,

our values, our tools, everything is in the mix and it really becomes how do we

coordinate it, how do we manage it, how do we get managed by it? That isn’t

multimodality, but it’s multi-something. The video game work that I’ve done over the

last few years was my attempt to get into multimodality. I had certainly been influenced

by Gunther Kress’s work in multimodality, but what was really clear is that Kress in the

beginning, this is not so much true about his work right now, but he was talking about

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static screens and images. They weren’t moving and they weren’t digital. I was also well

aware that people like Gunther Kress and myself that were beginning to do this are baby

boomers. We are talking about a world of multimodality and digital media that is

reorganizing language and literacy but from a perspective of baby boomers who are not

digital natives. And now this field has a lot of digital natives doing it. I didn’t have any

idea how to deal with multimodality and I loved Gunther Kress’s work, but it’s too much

like … it’s like taking a picture and you’re doing a structural analysis of it and it isn’t

moving and what we knew from the New Literacy Studies is that you have to analyze the

practice so multimodality is a practice and those practices are almost always bringing in

language, moving images, sounds, and even people producing stuff. I was getting

interested in video games and that gave me a good platform to do that.

MM: To what extent does it matter that the analysis is systematic in analysis? What

does it mean to be rigorous in one’s analysis?

JG: Well, it matters that it is scientific. And I have a section on validity in my Introduction

to Discourse Analysis book. What does it mean to be rigorous? It means two things to

me. There is a lot of detail so I am going to just do this in a very general way. One thing

is that rigor means that you have tied your analysis to legitimate theory of language that

you can defend. Right? One of the nice things about discourse analysis is that it is tied to

particular claims about language and to devices in language that can be tested, I mean

you can argue for them. You, for example, say relative clauses are functioning in a

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certain way, gives certain meaning to text, well, we do know what relative clauses do

and we know what functions they can have. And to the extent you want to argue that

they have newer ones, there are ways to argue that relative clauses are doing that in

relation to the other grammatical resources available in language. So one part of rigor is

tying to legitimate theories of language. Or at least arguing for those theories of

language. The other thing about rigor is, that science is a communal discourse and rigor

comes when I make claims with really clear arguments and you dispute them. Right?

You dispute them either because you say, “Look, I want to see more of your data” or “I

took your data and re-analyzed it.” And, you see, there is way too little of that. It’s

important there should be a community of people here really communicating in that

sense that they’re calling into question each other’s claims. It hasn’t happened enough.

It happens in physics and that is part of what rigor is. Years ago when I was doing my

work in lines and stanzas and I had written a paper analyzing lines and stanzas in texts,

Dell Hymes took that very same data and re-analyzed it. Now that is a really interesting

thing to do because now you see two people analyzing the same data, giving arguments

for it and people can now begin to compare and contrast it and build from that. That is

communal rigor and there is not enough of that.

CONTEXT

MM: Can you talk about reflexivity in your analysis and how do you position yourself

within the analysis you conduct?

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JG: I don’t really like that word. It’s a fancy word. But what is interesting and what I do

like to talk about is that for us, discourse analysts, context is a really fascinating thing—

because it both exists prior to speaking and is created by speaking. And that is the sense

of reflexivity that is the sense that interests me. As I talk, I create the context. But at the

same time, as I talk, the context is there and my talk is responding to it. And what makes

this a really interesting thing to do and a really difficult thing to do is to capture that. We

all know you can fail either way. We all know that we can fail either way. You can

analyze language in such a way that you take the context for granted as if its just there

with no work being done and that’s one way to fail, and another way to fail is that you

can analyze the meaning people are making in such a way that you miss the fact we

can’t completely control all context. It goes back to the question of power. Institutions

do exist, other people are there, the Big D discourses were there before us, they are

there after us. So capturing this moment in which some things are fixed and some things

are being created and they are interacting with each other is what makes this a really

fascinating thing to do. And, it’s so hard no one’s done it completely correctly. Largely,

one good way is for people to compare approaches and not just discourse analysis but

anthropological approaches to language, is to see how they deal with context and how

they deal with the issue of context both being there and being created simultaneously.

That’s one of the comparative devices and one of the things no one gets completely

right. It’s just like the micro–macro question, what the relationship between moment to

moment interaction in larger institutional structures and how they interrelate to create

each other. We know that’s the core question of social science. If it had been solved

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we’d be out of business. So it actually is a way to ask in any approach, how do you deal

with the relationship between the micro level and the macro level, and that’s the way to

compare and contrast approaches, and another way is to ask how you deal with

contexts as something that is both created and there.

MM: How do you define context? And how do you see the role of context?

JG: Context, partly to me, is everything that’s there, so it’s not just language, it’s the

people, the environment, but it’s also the interpretation of meaning we give it. Right?

Part of the thing that makes it so hard is that we give meaning to everything. We give

meaning to objects, not just words.

The environment that we’re in here, we’re in a hotel room, it’s here and, of

course, it’s infinite, but also, there’s every object in this room, including you, too, and

I’m giving meaning to you, and you’re giving it to me, and we’re changing that meaning

by how we’re interacting to the words and everything else we’re doing. That, in one

sense is context and what that raises is a very well known problem, and, in fact, when I

teach discourse analysis I always start with this. Context is infinite. Is the context here in

this room, someone just knocked on the door and changed the context. She just

widened the context, right? Is it the city of San Diego? Is it that we are at AERA? Context

can get to be infinite. This is called the “frame problem” in computer science. We give

meaning to things based on the context. But since the context is potentially infinite, how

could we possibly do that?

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So at some point I have to cut off the context to say in order to give meaning to

what’s being said, I’m only going to consider “this much” of the context and not more of

it. Otherwise, because it’s infinite, we would process forever. How people do that is a

big question in psycholinguistics, it also questions the core questions in the work on

relevance. How do we know what’s relevant? There is a lot of philosophical work on this

issue. But it also gives rise to a technique in discourse analysis, and that is, you can

always widen the context. So if somebody makes a claim and you want to question it,

broaden the context that they have considered and see if it changes the meaning of the

claim. If you can keep doing that in discourse analysis and change the meaning, you’re

getting more and more analysis. And the moment you keep broadening the context and

nothing new happens, you’re done, you’re finished. It can be a political intervention

technique, you know, I point out in the book—what causes tuberculosis? Bacteria

causes it and it has been pointed out. But you know that disease goes up and down with

unregulated capitalism. So if you are living in a big city with unregulated capitalism, you

get more of the disease and if there are safety regulations and preventions, you get less

of it. So why wouldn’t you say that unregulated capitalism causes tuberculosis? What

happened is the biologist frames it so that the only context is biological. What we just

did is frame it in a larger socio-political context and then we raised new questions and

new issues and that became a political intervention. Context in that sense is a deep

problem and also a tool.

CHANGES IN APPROACH

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MM: How do you see your work change over time?

JG: Well, it’s changed over time because of different influences. Originally I was very

influenced by people like Dell Hymes and then I discovered Latour and Foucault before

that. Because I kept moving jobs. I discovered these things because at different jobs,

different people had different interests. And I was going in and in my career, I’ve

sometimes been in Linguistics departments and sometimes in Schools of Education. And

the influences are always different. And I’ve had seven jobs, so there were a lot of

different influences. So each of those influences changed me. So Foucault and Latour

certainly did. One of the things that influenced me was that my work in discourse

analysis is connected to the so-called New Literacy Studies, a movement that I helped

found. You know, that literacy should be studied in social and cultural contexts not just

in cognitive contexts. As I did my work in New Literacy Studies—because discourse

analysis was really the method I used for making arguments in the New Literacy

Studies—I really saw that New Literacy Studies was beginning to flounder because it had

no theory of learning. The only people we ever talked about in terms of learning was

Jean Lave and Communities of Practice. That was good stuff and important stuff, but

there was beginning to be a revolution about learning in cognitive psychology as people

were getting off of individual minds and onto things like embodied cognition and

situated cognition and distributed cognition which stressed other people in context and

tools. Also new theories of the mind around connectionism with distributed, parallel

processing which actually ironically stressed, as you studied the mind that the mind was

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filled up with experiences, it wasn’t filled up with generalizations. It was filled up with

actual experiences almost like you videotaped them all. The mind is infinite in the

experiences and that puts the emphasis on the experiences we are having in the world,

and not with just what is going on in our heads. That stuff began to say “if I’m going to

intervene in this world of education in the times when I am in it and I’m going to hope

the New Literacy Studies evolves and develops and does not just stagnate,” we’ve got to

have a whole lot more to say about learning and that what’s brought into the New

Literacy Studies my work on situated cognition and brought that into discourse analysis.

CDA IN CONTEXT

MM: Thinking about the context of your work, what conditions do you feel made it

possible for the theories and methods of CDA or discourse analysis to emerge in social

sciences and in education particularly?

JG: I’m not sure critical discourse analysis has emerged in the social sciences. I think that

a problem that you have in discourse analysis as well as in social cultural studies of

language more generally, is that you have had for decades different micro communities

doing the work that is very similar and reaching very similar conclusions but using quite

different languages, because they come out of different traditions. So people like

Norman Fairclough, Gunther Kress, and myself and Jim Wertsch, and Brian Street and a

whole bunch of other people have often converged on what people who read us

perceive as similar conclusions, but don’t know because they can’t tell because the

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languages are different. Ironically, if you look in the early work of these people they

didn’t even cite each other. They do now because we’re all old enough to know each

other. I was on the faculty at Clark with Wertsch. Most people perceive us as having

very similar things to say. We, when we talk, seem to agree with each other, but who

would know because no one has ever done the work to translate across the different

traditions. I come out of an American linguistic tradition of social linguistics and

anthropological linguistics with my earlier Chomskyan training. James Wertsch comes

out of a cultural psychology tradition going back to Vygotsky and other Russian

theorists. Norman Fairclough comes out of a mixture—as many European linguists do—

of Halliday and Marxism. People would be hard pressed to know whether Norman and I

agree. What does he actually mean by orders of discourse and what does it have to do

with my social languages and Big D discourses? People haven’t done the work to

translate across those and the reality is that you don’t really have major impact in

academics as a whole—in as something as big as in the social sciences until those micro

communities begin to get much larger and I don’t think that’s actually happened. The

other thing in discourse analysis which is odd in a way, there’s many, many types of it

that are done outside linguistics departments and are really quite poorly tied to analysis

of language. They usually just analyze themes. It’s very common in education to have

people claim they are doing discourse analysis—and in other areas—when in fact what

they are doing is content analysis and it isn’t tied to any structural theory of language.

My work is tied to a given theory about how language works. I’ve told you one piece of

it that language is inherently political, but there’s a lot of other pieces of it. On the other

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hand there are, of course, different theories of discourse analysis. Linguistic theories of

discourse analysis have the virtue of being well tied to language but have the vice of

usually having no point. One of the divides is linguistic theories of discourse analysis is

that they have the virtue of being well tied to language but have the vice of usually

having no point. Right? You just analyze something because you want to show you can

analyze it. And it is almost unscientific to have picked it because it has a point or bears

some controversy. Discourse analysis outside of linguistics usually has a point. You try to

argue for something, like Norman Fairclough’s work on neoliberalism. But on the other

hand, that does not look to linguists scientific, but that it is interested—that you have a

political ax to grind. You’ve got a lot of these divides like so much work in socio-cultural

stuff and tons of work in education has not been as influential as it could have been if

there had been more bridge building. Norman Fairclough and Gunther Kress and I were

part of a group called the New London Group many years ago which was one of the first

times we actually came together and began to work out a common language. The New

London Group’s report is produced by committee. It is a common language which we

agreed upon, especially the language of design as a way of describing grammar as

something you don’t just inherit but you produce and design on the spot for achieving

functions and effect. It would have been useful to do a lot more of that. But even in that

meeting, I was struck by the fact that Gunther Kress and Norman Fairclough had

already, by that time, known each other well and read each other’s work, and yet at one

point, a very telling moment when Gunther got up and put up a slide, one famous slide

he’s used a lot of times about his kid making a circle and how we always reinvent signs,

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we make them up new, we don’t just inherit them, and Norman Fairclough said, “I never

knew that’s what you really meant. You didn’t really mean that, did you? That can’t be

right. You’re not serious about that, are you?” Here’s people who had read each other

and knew each other’s work and only there discovered what they meant and where

those claims were coming from. And they at least go back to Halliday. Kress comes out

of a social semiotic tradition. So that was a good thing, but there wasn’t enough of that.

There has not been enough of that.

MM: What does your approach to discourse analysis offer that other approaches to

discourse analysis do not?

JG: What does my approach offer because it’s critical that discourse analysis in general

doesn’t is the question. And of course, my approach is just discourse analysis but there is

an interesting point there and that is, I believe discourse analysis: (a) has to be based on a

theory of language because that changes the analytic tools you’re going to use but I also

believe it is an applied science, that it therefore must have a point.

The reason you’re doing a discourse analysis is that you want the results to bear on a

question. Hopefully a fruitful, controversial question if answered would help people do

stuff. It is why I was drawn to do discourse analysis around educational issues. I ended

up by accident in education. I took a job in applied linguistics that ended up in the

school of education. I didn’t know it till the day I got there. But I certainly found “wow”

educational issues are really good ones to do discourse analysis on because if the

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discourse analysis is good and answers the question, it’s going to bear on some

interesting controversies that impact some people’s lives. And so that’s the difference.

Discourse analysis that is scientific in someone’s view that science isn’t applied or isn’t

vested in an interest is going to describe, for example, there being constructions in

every possible way and it’s going to illuminate our understanding of language if done

well but it isn’t going to bear on anything. And I personally believe that as an applied

science, it’s best that it bears on something so instead of making a distinction between

discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis, I would make it between descriptive

discourse analysis that holds a particular positivist view of science that’s not supposed

to bear on anything directly, at least you’re not supposed to come into it wanting it to

bear on anything and a view of science where it’s applied science and it’s a virtue that it

bears on something. It isn’t bad that you came in with a vested interest because if

you’re a good scientist the data will show if your interest was wrong, it was wrong. And

if you don’t do it, your colleagues will look at it and say it didn’t work so that’s the

difference I think was important.

I want you to see that people are designers, they’re implementers, they’re

actively using their grammar to produce. It’s not just something they took, it’s not just a

code. And I asked myself how to do that and I thought, okay, “I’ll just use the word

‘building’.”

And what are some of the things like with tinker toys that you can build, and I also know

people really love lists, and by the way, if you’re just starting out as a writer, put lists in,

people always pay attention to lists, because they can write lists down. That device was

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much more popular. I couldn’t even remember what the building tasks were, but I

constantly get mail about them. But they’re obvious things. Anytime you’re

communicating, you’re trying to build social relationships, what aspects of language are

building relationships? You’re building ways of privileging certain forms of knowledge.

What counts as knowledge and what doesn’t count as knowledge? In this interview, I’ve

obviously spent a lot of the time trying to privilege a type of knowledge that is applied

and intervenes and thinks it is important to have a point, rather than purely descriptive

knowledge. You could go in and say, “how did he do that?” So there’s seven building

tasks, but there could be 11. What they’re really meant for is for people who want to

begin to do this, begin to practice discourse analysis, they are one way to ask questions.

Is there any really interesting things going on about how people are building

relationships? Or how people are privileging certain forms of knowledge? Or what

identities they’re building? And it’s just a way in there. And any text you analyze, it

won’t always be that all the building tasks are fruitful in that text, you might find that

one task—what you’re doing is one of the tasks—is really interesting. And then you

would run that. So it’s a way to get started.

More important to me, I really wanted people to think about grammar

differently. Everyday people think of grammar as something that is stored passively in

my head and I’m just following the rules. They don’t see themselves as actually, partly

making up the rules as they go. You’re using it almost like a kit, like a set of colors you

can paint with. The grammar is just that. It’s a palette of colors and you paint your own

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painting and what you’re painting is a building, it is a design. And you’re seeing yourself

as the designer.

MM: In what other ways does your approach differ from other approaches in CDA?

JG: We don’t know because they came out of different traditions. I know Gunther Kress.

He is a good friend of mine, and whenever we’re together, he says, “I’m always

impressed by how much we agree.” Whenever he asks me a question, he agrees with

the answer and whenever I ask him a question, he agrees with the answer. But he

comes out of a different tradition, a social semiotics tradition. Obviously, Marxism was

much more influential to those people trained in Europe than it ever was in America. I

was very influenced by Marxism by accident, because at Hampshire College when I got

there I had no Marxist training in my linguistics, but when I got to Hampshire College

there was quite a cadre of neo-Marxists on the faculty. And I learned a lot from them

and got attacked a lot by them and I learned a lot from them, so I certainly knew my

neo-Marxist theories. And if you look at the first edition of my social linguistics book,

which is in its third edition now, the whole first chapter was very indebted to people like

Adorno and other neo-Marxists. And that was the Hampshire influence. But the

influence of Marxism in a European thing is just much deeper and so these are very

different traditions. And they also use very different tools. When I was a graduate

student at Stanford, Halliday came and talked and gave a couple of classes and I

certainly knew his work. It was looked down upon very severely by Chomskyans

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because—it was the worst word we could call anything—it was descriptive. What we did

was explanatory and what he did was descriptive. And that was really a term of great

abuse. Obviously, my understanding of Halliday is a second language. It’s not like Jim

Martin, where it’s a first language, and I think Halliday’s stuff is enormously valuable,

but Americans don’t understand it, and they have very little tolerance for it.

Furthermore, Halliday’s work comes out of another tradition, a whole tradition of British

anthropological linguistics that is not very robust in America.

CRITIQUES OF CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

MM: There have been many critiques of CDA. Can you respond to some of those

critiques?

JG: If it is capital CDA, then Norman Fairclough can respond to that and I think he

already has. We all know that there are critiques of everything. Let me say about any

critiques of Norman or anybody else. One of the things that any critic can do is say your

thing doesn’t work very well. Or, you were analyzing written text and you should have

analyzed spoken text or you paid attention to this aspect of power and not this aspect.

See, we can’t do everything. That form of criticism—which is very common—and

sometimes it is brought on because people claim “my theory is uniquely right.” And, in

that case, you deserve that criticism. The truth of the matter is that we can’t do

everything. Our tools are good for some stuff and it just isn’t an interesting criticism to

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say that Norman didn’t deal with this or this. His theory doesn’t handle this well enough.

Well then go get another theory or build your own. Or build an extension on Norman’s.

Unless you think that Norman’s theory is universal. And I don’t know if he thinks that is

the case or not. I don’t think mine is. Beyond that, I don’t think that there has been

enough critique of it. Again, I think we have all worked in our own silos and we have our

own approaches and it is a real privilege when you get critiqued because it means that

somebody paid attention to you. I actually have not seen enough critique. I am not

aware of any serious critiques. For example, CA, conversation analysis, has been

critiqued much more because those guys all agreed with each other and they all have

the same language. They have a powerful and wrong-headed idea of science that is

descriptive in a poor way and the idea that context can’t play a role unless it is directly

referred to. And so they have been critiqued for that—I think rightly—but, more power

to them we know what they were claiming and they claimed it together and built on it

together. And we can’t really say that for CDA. I would defy you to find an approach

where loads of people are doing it with the same language. I mean we all have kind of

people following it but it has not been enough of a consensus to be critiqued. Nobody

knows what the foundations are across multiple people. So what it does become is

individual critique—of Norman—rather than a general critique.

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN EDUCATION

MM: In what ways do you see discourse analyses that are critical useful to the field of

education?

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JG: I wish there were a lot more of them. The trouble is that some of the very good

discourse analysis people like Norman Fairclough have never been interested in schools

or education. And a lot of people doing discourse analysis of education don’t seem to be

very interested in language in any rigorous way. At their best, they can be very

important in education because they bear on a controversy and actually illuminate it in

a way that we change practice. I’ll give you one example. There are several others.

Thank goodness that there are not as many as there could be. Very early in my career, I

worked with a person called Sarah Michaels who did an analysis of sharing time which is

a practice in schools with little kids where they share things, show and tell whatever

they’ve done. And she was working in this with a whole team of people working on this

at Berkeley and later Courtney Cazden did the same kind of thing at Cambridge and

those types of people shared their data with me and I wrote a number of articles on it.

What is interesting about those analyses is not that they were right. In fact, I think some

of the early analyses had some flaws but they really made people look at the event

differently. People thought “wow, sharing time, what an irrelevant thing to study.

School hasn’t even started yet and it is just getting kids ready for the day, nothing could

be happening and it really isn’t about anything. Its about just getting the kids geared

up.” And what those early analyses showed is that is not true. It’s about early literacy

training. And for kids who can’t read or write yet and it is actually privileging a certain

form of schooled literacy that you are getting the kid ready for without telling the kids

that is what you are doing. And it is also oblivious to the fact that asking someone to

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share a so-called story has culturally different meanings. Some people, some African-

American kids, for example, have a different sense of what a story is as a genre than do

Anglo-kids. It also showed that different children use different things like intonational

features to mark boundaries differently and to get heard differently by teachers. This

results in teachers making negative judgments of them which are really based on the

linguistic biases of the teacher, biases she is not conscious of and therefore transfers it to

a judgment of the kids’ talent or personality or school based identity.

. All of that meant that it became impossible after that to do sharing time after that

innocently and to not worry about that. And it made other people ask—for other

practices—what else is going on in school that might look innocent where we might

expose that this practice has specific goals and can change those practices?

In that work it was very clear that some very young children were getting hurt by

their teacher by being told that their story did not make sense. When, in fact, all of us

were able to show how they made sense. My work showed that they were part of an

oral tradition that was hundreds of years old and far from making no sense was viewed

as poetic and a form of literary meaning making which has gone on in cultures for a very

long time. And yet they were told that they had deficits. And what happens when you

tell that to a seven-year-old from an authority figure is that they are given this really

difficult choice of whether they should listen to you the authority figure in school and I

don’t make sense and therefore people like me—my uncle Harry doesn’t make sense—

because we showed these were cultural practices—or should I disown you as an

authority figure and say “Uncle Harry does make sense and you don’t know what you

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are talking about.” And to make a seven-year-old make that decision which is a decision

to turn off to school is a bad thing. And those analyses right or wrong because we

learned more as we went on, they had a real impact. They made it harder to hurt those

children.

MM: Can you talk about when you teach CDA, how do teach it? Things you find difficult?

Commonly asked questions? Useful strategies?

JG: I don’t teach CDA because I don’t do CDA. I teach discourse analysis as a first and

foremost as a theory of language. I don’t view discourse analysis as a “methodology”

and I certainly don’t view it as qualitative analysis. I don’t think there is any such thing as

qualitative research or quantitative research. Not everything that doesn’t use a number

is the same thing and not everything that does use a number is the same thing. And,

indeed, sometimes we do use numbers in discourse analysis. But any method in any

science is tied to a theory in a domain. So if you have a method for studying cells, you

first have to tell us what cells are in biology. Right? Take evolution. If you think evolution

happens at the level of individuals versus species, versus DNA, you have a different set

of methods, right? If I think evolution is a matter of genes, it is happening at the gene

level, I have one set of methods for study. If I think it is happening at the level of the

species, I have another set of methods. So any method is tied to a theory in a domain.

So the first thing I teach is the theory of language on which my methods are

based. And then I teach how those methods can be used as tools for certain problems

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and tasks and not others. I don’t think I run into huge difficulties in doing that, partly

because I’ve got this truth and borrowing that won’t work for everything. The problem

is that it is not easy to do this if it is not embedded within linguistics. And we can’t really

embed it in linguistics because people aren’t really doing this in linguistics departments.

We’ve already said that people in linguistics departments rarely care about intervening

and outside of linguistic departments we care too little about grammar and that is the

dilemma we have to live with. That is a dilemma, by the way, caused by the fact that

Chomsky defined linguistics as the study of core grammar. At least that was the core.

We actually refer to it as core linguistics or theoretical linguistics and we privilege it—in

the 1960s and 1970s—had the great impact of making linguistics a front burner issue in

which the best and brightest people went into it—people paid a lot of attention to it.

They don’t anymore. But it also, politically, meant that linguistics departments—far

from owning all of language, basically owned structural elements of language. And

Jacobson defined linguistics as anything relevant to language. Now politically, had

linguistics developed in this country as the linguistics department that was where

linguistics was anything related to language that would have been hugely important

department on campuses. But as it became defined around a narrow view of language,

after Chomsky’s cache waned, then these departments are backwaters. So the English

department owns a bunch of language and the Education schools owned a bunch of

language and the Anthropology … and see, now it is all over the place. It’s too bad but

that means if we want to do our linguistics, we often have to do it outside. And that is a

difficulty because it means that the work isn’t as rigorous as it should be but on the

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other hand it does mean that we have some impact beyond 12 people reading about

auxiliary structures. I wrote my thesis on naked infinitives—there are seven verbs. I

wrote a 500-page thesis on seven verbs in the language and their properties. I was

totally fascinated by them but it was not going to change the world.

MM: What are some of those issues right now that you think it’s important for scholars

to take up who are interested in using discourse analysis to look at educational issues

and social issues?

JG: I actually don’t think that us baby boomers should define these new issues. One of

the things that has evolved from the New Literacy Studies, and the New Literacies

Studies (which is the digital literacies studies that I have been involved with my

discourse analysis)—I’ve seen young scholars too much following the old guys. I must

say for both the New Literacy Studies and some of the discourse analysis stuff we’re

talking about, great accomplishments were made by us baby boomers but we’ve hit a

wall. It’s stagnating a bit. It needs new stuff. We’re not going to get that new stuff by

just following us old guys too slavishly and way too much work I see does that. Or

slavishly following Bakhtin for that example. You can’t be slavishly following any old guy

anymore because the world has changed too much and I do think we need a whole

bunch of new stuff. I’ll give you some examples. We absolutely need a functional

grammar that is a new tradition, a whole new way of writing about functionality and we

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need an analysis of multimodality that is really true to digital media and maybe those

would interrelate. A theory of functionality and it might have to be multimodal now.

Somebody’s got to rewrite Freire. Freire’s work was seminal in trying to show

how thinking about language and discourse could be liberatory and might be a political

intervention but he came out of a certain time and certain tradition. Freire himself

always said “my theories are about those places that are about to have a revolution or

already had one. They don’t apply to the U.S. because they’re not about to have a

revolution.” We did, of course, have a bunch of American Freirians but Freire was aware

his theories were about a time and a place in a world that isn’t just the same anymore.

And he also came out of a Marxist tradition, a liberatory theology tradition as well that

was very fruitful at the time, but are not really good to ape and apply now. They need to

be rethought, we need somebody to rethink Freire and that would have to be thought

of how new theories of literacy, new theories of language fit for the world we’re in. He’s

been slavishly followed and he wouldn’t have liked that. So there’s a lot of stuff to do

and some of the most important stuff would be just the stuff I wouldn’t know about.

MM: The last question is what advice do you have for new scholars working with critical

discourse analysis?

G: I always say to young people coming in if you’re being trained now in any area,

you’ve got a judgment to make that is very difficult to make. And that is, are the people

who are training you or the people who are well known in the field, therefore the

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people you are reading, are they riding the last stages of a wave that’s about to end? Or

are they riding at the beginning of the wave that’s going to crest? If you’re in an area

and you’re going to study and you make a judgment and it is a correct judgment; this

wave’s still got a lot of time, this wave that these people have created still has a lot of

time, you better ride the wave. That means you better follow them and you better pay

attention to them and you better be a good person in that regard because the new

wave ain’t coming in your time, at least for a long time, and you’re going to be

successful for riding that wave. But what if they are at the end of that wave? And there

is a new wave coming. And you ride that wave. You’re going to ride that wave as a

young person into nothing. This happened when Chomsky came along, he killed

structural linguistics. There were tons of young people thought that was going to go on

forever, they had just gotten tenure, they had just gotten trained, he put them out of

business overnight and they were very angry. In my early days I ran into these people

and they were very angry. It’s really tricky to make that judgment. Particularly tricky if

you think a new wave’s coming and your professors are there because you don’t want

to go in there and say “hey you’re out of date,” and in my opinion these New Literacy

Studies and the different approaches to discourse analysis—my approach and Norman’s

approach and others—are fruitful things whose wave is coming to an end. It is not going

to be that our contributions will be completely lost but there’s going to be new waves.

My video game work was one attempt to get on a new wave or even start one. And I

actually did see the video game work as a really natural continuation of the New

Literacy Studies, taking it into these new literacies that are digital but with the same

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idea that you want to look at the practices, you don’t want to just look at the literacy. So

that’s my judgment but any young person has to make it. Therefore, I’d certainly get

well trained. By the way, I do have another ax I need to grind here just for discourse

analysis. It is difficult to do this but do get good training in linguistics. Do get good

training in social science and you’re going to have to do that on your own because if you

go to the linguistics department, they’re not gonna give damn about education and

they’re not gonna make the grammar relevant to your stuff. Then you’re going to have

to really learn that stuff and then do the work of making it relevant yourself. And then

you are going to have to go over to the social science stuff and learn that and you’re

going to have to adapt it to language. It’s sad that we’ve never developed a real good

program where we get deep linguistics training and deep social science training and

there are vanishing few people that have both. I have both just by accident of history

that I deserted my field but it is necessary and for any young person, that is necessary.

Don’t just listen to people who know linguistics thirteenth hand and think you know

about language. It is not easy to do in the modern university.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

JG: One of the biggest needs, some young person has got to write a functional approach

to grammar that has got the strength of Halliday, but is taken out of the tradition he’s in

that’s not as widely known. Functional approaches to language, which are crucial for

what we do, they never developed in America because of the influence of Chomsky.

There were functional approaches, the Prague School, was pretty well known here.

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There were other people who developed them, but they never took root in a big way.

They never got systematic where people shared them because of the great esteem of

Chomsky’s approach, which is a non-functional approach to grammar. In Halliday’s work

in Europe, especially in Australia, did give them that stuff with the price being you had

to be in that tradition. After Halliday retired in Australia, in many of the places where he

was powerful, his tradition is eroding now because of influences of these so-called

theoretical approaches. So even that is beginning to die out. The biggest barrier to the

discourse analysis stuff that we’re talking about, all of the stuff that you mentioned, is

that it’s not going to go into the next generation in any rigorous form in any opinion

until somebody writes an up to date approach to functional grammar that can cross

these boundaries. If I was a younger person, I would do it, I think it would be a very

important task to do.

Now, people say that Kress and Fairclough are influenced by Halliday and they

certainly are; they were partly trained by him. But if you look at their analysis, they

don’t draw on any of Halliday’s work in any detailed way in any of their analyses, not

like the way that Jim Martin does, who is the best Halliday person ever, in my opinion.

They’re influenced by him in a generalized way and then they’ve developed their own

stuff the way I have. If you really want to see Halliday’s stuff used in detail, his wife

Ruqaiya Hasan’s work is a great example. She’s brilliant. And Martin and, by the way,

the two of them don’t agree on what genre means. There’s an article that Ruqaiya has

that’s about 90 pages, it is one of the most theoretical articles ever written, and it

reminds me of theological debates about how many angels fit on the head of a pin, in

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which she takes issue with his use of the word “genre.” That’s where you see Halliday’s

stuff in great depth. One of the weaknesses of all of our work is that you don’t get

enough of really detailed defense of your analysis of linguistics terms. Partly because

audiences are intolerant of it. Right? We’re trying to generate with a relatively wide

audience and we don’t have enough opportunity to get down to what is the linguistic

defense of what we’re saying about language and analytical tools we have. That is my

opinion and other people disagree with it. But it is a weakness that is compounded by

the lack of a widespread theory of functional grammar.

What I’ve *also+ come to realize is—and again this is going to have to be a task

for somebody else because I am old—is that we don’t have any good analytic tools for

true multimodality. That is, the handling of a videogame. It’s like opera. The trouble with

opera is that it has every genre in it, so do video games. You’ve got stories, images,

moving images, you’ve got players producing the stuff. We don’t have any analytic

techniques for that. It’s going to be the next generation. Gunther Kress’s stuff is just a

start. I certainly look at games through the lens of my discourse analysis, but I haven’t

developed the techniques. Even at this conference here (AERA 2009), we’ve heard,

where there are lots of sessions on games and digital media, we don’t have good ways

of analyzing multimodality. Jay Lemke has done some fabulous stuff but we’re at the

very beginning. Here is an area where someone can make up a discourse analytic

approach to true multimodality, which will certainly have to be the study of practice but

giving us a language to do that will be a great task for some young person.

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