JOHN FLOWERDEWCHAPTER ONEPRESENTED BY M.BOLOURIM.BOLOURI9@GMAIL.COM

Topics

1. Meanings of ‘discourse’ and ‘Discourse Analysis/Studies

2. Notion of communicative competence and its relation to discourse

3. What is an appropriate goal for Language Education?

How to define discourse:little ‘d’ discourse1. language in its contexts of use2. language above the level of the sentence3. knowing a language is concerned with more than just

grammar and vocabulary: it includes how to participate in a conversation how to structure a written text

big ‘D’ discourses

a type of specialized knowledge and language used by a particular social group or a set of ideas

Discourse studies/ DA The study of language in its contexts of use and

above the level of the sentence

It is arguably most closely associated with linguistics, but is essentially an interdisciplinary activity

Discourse Studies refers to the field, or discipline, in general (theory , application and a host of methods)

Discourse Analysis refers to the actual analysis (a method)

Discourse analysis/ DA

structural analysisA. A group of texts would be broken down into their

component parts

Parts are determined based on their:

1. Functions

2. Meanings

3. Topics

4. Turns in spoken or written discourse

B. how elements of language are held together in coherent units

Discourse analysis/ DA

Functional approach

particular meanings and communicative forces associated with discourse

A communicative action

How is language used 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?

Discourse analysis/ DA Functional approach

particular discourse genres (genre analysis)

How is language used in academic essays, in research articles, in conference presentations, in letters, in reports and in meetings?

It is a communicative action, but the focus is on particular contexts of use.

Discourse analysis/ DA

Functional approach

Register analysis: how language is used by particular social groups

How do teachers or politicians or business executives use language?

How do men and women vary in their use oflanguage?

What is particular about the language used by such people that it identifies them as belonging to particular social groups?

Corpus Linguistics (quantitative analysis) It is an approach in DA

Discourse Analysis is qualitative in nature. The concern is not with measuring and counting, but with describing.

However, this approach is concerned with

the use of computers

Example:

the relative frequency of particular language patterns by different individuals or social groups in particular texts or groups of texts

What is “text” in DA? any stretch of spoken or written language.

In written text: news reports, textbooks, company reports, personal letters, business letters, e-mails and faxes.

In spoken discourse: casual conversations, business and other professional meetings, service encounters , buying and selling goods and services, and classroom lessons…

multimodal discourse: 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

Main Approaches of DS register analysis (the typical features of particular fields of

activity or professions) cohesion, coherence and thematic development (how text

is held together, in terms of both structure and function) Pragmatics (language in terms of the actions it performs) Conversation Analysis (a micro-analytic approach to

spoken interaction) Genre Analysis (language in terms of the different recurrent

stages it goes through in specific contexts Corpus-based Discourse Analysis (the use of computers in

the analysis of very large bodies of text to identify particular phraseologies (wordings) and rhetorical patterning

Critical Discourse Analysis/ CDA (texts from a social perspective, analyzing power relations and cases of manipulation and discrimination in discourse

eclectic or hybrid approach

Apply in what fields or texts?

Historical / contemporary text

Written/ spoken discourse

Informal/formal fields

Infml: how people interact in conversation and in service encounters, how they tell stories, how they gossip and how they chat

Fm: political arena, in analyzing the media, in the law, in healthcare, and in business and other forms of bureaucracy

intertextuality of discourse a single text (considering other texts in the analysis of

a given text)

1. how one text relates back to another text or texts

2. direct quotation of one text in another (through the use of inverted commas)

intertextual links are implicit. It is extremely common in

1. newspaper headlines

2. various types of advertisement

3. Poetry ‘In the beginning, there was a nursery, with windows

opening on to a garden, and beyond that the sea.the Gospel of St John in the Bible: ‘In the beginning

there was the word’

What is “context”: Situation (In order to understand the meaning of an

utterance2, one needs to know the particular features of the situation)

Hymes (1972a) identified 16 features of situation:

• 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 to interpret an utterance?

when appropriate or inappropriate?

Sit down

CUL8ER

Make sure you follow all the rules

A. These bananas cost 3 dollarsB. I’ll take them

I have a problem. I haven’t got any money.

Van Dijk (2008) what is context:

‘not some kind of objective condition or direct cause’, but are, rather, subjective constructs that develop over the course of an interaction.

Individuals each develop and define their own contexts according to their ‘(on-going) subjective interpretations of communicative situations’

not just a social phenomenon, but a socio-cognitive one.

Systemic Functional Linguistics(Halliday)what is context?

It consists of three broad parameters:

1. field (the subject matter of the text

2. tenor (the relations between the participants and their attitudes)

3. mode (how the language is organized and functions in the text)

Main obstacles in foreign lg communication

background knowledge

Cultural values

So

Discourse is a vehicle for communication

Recent model: inferential model

Speakers take into account

the context

the background and world knowledge of their addressees

They calibrate what they say to match up with this assumed hearer knowledge.

They do not need to say everything, but can rely on their addressees to fill in any details that are not explicitly communicated.

Chomsky (1965) famous distinction

Competence Performance

the underlying grammatical system

known by all native speakers of a language

Chomsky was only interested incompetence

actual language use in real situations

incorporated memory limitations, distractions and slips of the tongue

a distortion of the ideal model (competence)

Hymes (1972) communicative competence

the competence that is required in real communication

‘there are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless’ (1972b: 278)

Hymes developed his model of contextual variables

His theory was recontextualized as the communicative approach to language teaching (CLT)

a set of standards for an ideal teaching and learning curriculum

Canale and Swain (1980)3, who broke communicative competence down into three subcomponents: (next slide)

Canale and Swain (1980)

1. Grammatical competence: knowledge and skill with regard to lexical items and rules of morphology, syntax, sentence grammar semantics and phonology.

2. Sociolinguistic competence: Hymes’s rules of use; knowledge and skill regarding formality, politeness and appropriateness of meaning to situation.

3. Strategic competence: strategies to compensate for breakdowns in communication and to enhance language learning.

Celce-Murcia’s revised model (1983) dynamic process Canale (1983)a fourth component, discourse competence the knowledge and skill in combining linguistic elements to

achieve a unified textual whole (how to add?) a more complex, but better integrated, model of

communicative competence1. sociocultural competence-Hymes’s rules of speaking

2. Linguistic competence3. Formulaic competence (fixed, prefabricated chunks of lg)

4. Interactional competence (actional and conversational comp)

5. Strategic competence (link-up)6. Discourse competence (a level above the other sub-

competencies , a level which both incorporates and controls all of the other elements)

Summary of chapter one

Discourse General and restricted definitions

Discourse analysis Structural and functional approaches

Discourse studies Various discipline and main approaches (CA, RA, CDA,

Types of Discourse SP, WR, Multimodal, Fm, Infm…

Context Hyme (1972) 16 featuresVan Dijk (1982) soci-cognitiveHalliday 3 parameters

Intertextuality of discourse Relation of utterance or quotation

Model of communication Code model/ ChomskyInferential model/

Communicative competence Hyme 1972Canale and Swaine 1980-3 componentsCanale 1983 4 components Celce-Murcia 2007 6 components