T.C.

NECMETTİN ERBAKAN UNIVERSITY

THE INSTITUDE OF EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES

THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE

TEACHING

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSEBy

İPEK YILDIRIM

WHAT IS DISCOURSE ???

If we are aware enough, we will realize about

the extraordinary range of contexts in which

communication is involved Because of its pervasiveness in life, discourse is studied in a number of

different disciplines.

In the field of applied linguistics, the most relevant is that which has come to

be known as ‘discourse analysis’.

The discourse analysis studies texts, whether written or spoken, long or

short.

Discourse analysts work with ‘utterances’,

and they focus on the following questions

when analyzing texts:

Who are the participants in the discourse? (writer and reader(s)/speaker(s)

and listener(s)

What is their relationship?

Is it one between equals?

What are their goals?

More specifically,

discourse analysts ask:

‘What does this piece of language mean in this context?’

What factor enable us to interpret the text?

What do we need to know about the context?

What clues are there in the surrounding text which will enable us to

apprehend the meaning?

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE

So far, we had answered these questions.

And lastly, we have seen how the receiver’s knowledge affects the ordering of

information and thus the grammatical choices and word order of discourse

too.

Now, we need to look more precisely at the role of KNOWLEDGE and how it

interacts with language to create a DISCOURSE.

In recent years, the role of knowledge in discourse

production and comprehension has been stimulated by

findings in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence tries to understand how knowledge

and language interact and reproduce the process in

computers.

Schemata:

Schema theory is a theory which attempts to explain how we

comprehend and relate to a text.

Cook says;

The mind stimulated by key words or phrases, in the text, or by the

content, activates a knowledge schema, and uses it to make sense of

the schema.

Shortly,

A schema is the pre-existent knowledge of typical situations.

SCHEMATA

A witness in a court case

1. I woke up at seven forty. I had breakfast at 8 and left for work at

about 8.30.

1. 2. I woke up at seven forty. I was wearing pyjamas. After lying still

for a few minutes, I threw back the duvet, got out of bed, walked to

the door of the bedroom, opened the door, switched on the light …

How does the witness know

which detail is required or

omitted?

Schemata allow human communication to be

economical.

1. I went to work.

2. I went to work in my clothes.

A sender needs only mention features which are not

contained in it.

3. I went to work in my pyjamas.

\

EVIDENCE FOR SCHEMATA

1. Assumption is made to fills in details which were not actually given:

I go to bed at 11 p.m.

2. The use of definite article:

I was late and we decided to call a taxi . Unfortunately, the driver spent a

long time finding our house.

3. Interpretation of words with more than one meaning:

The king put his seal on the letter.

COMPLEX SCHEMATA

All of us come to a text with different

outlooks that colour our interpretation.

Actual discourse is unlikely to be

interpretable with reference to a single

schema.

The mind must activate many schemata

at once each interacting with the other:

But schemata need not to be limited to unordered

catalogues of people and things within a stereotyped

situation or stereotyped sequences of events telling us

what is likely to happen next.

We might surmise the schema in a school lesson:

The roles of teacher and students

Responses to possibble events.

But what about the flat or house in which you live?

Is there a standardised schema of a ‘house’ ?

RELEVANCE

The Relevance theory tries to answer the question:

What determines which schema gets activated?

In short, Relevance theorists Sperber and Wilson consider

that human mind have a long-term aim: to increase their

knowledge of the world.

In each encounter with discourse, we start with a set of

assumptions, whose accuracy we seek to improve.

Information is relevant when it has a significant effect

on our assumptions, that is, when it allows us to alter our

knowledge structures to give us a more accurate

representation of the world.

According to the theory;

Other things being equal, the greater the contextual effects, the greater the relevance.

Other things being equal, the smaller the processing effort, the greater the relevance.

What is relevant information?

Information is relevant to you if it interacts in a certain way with your

existing assumptions about the world. There are 3 types of interaction leading

to contextual effects:

1) it produces new information

2) it strengthens our existing assumptions.

3) it contradicts and eliminates our existing assumptions.

DISCOURSE DEVIATION

Miscommunication may occur in a number of situations, such as:

When there are misjudgments and mismatches of schemata between the sender and the receiver. These are particularly likely when people try to communicate across cultures

Communication suffers when people make false assumptions about shared schemata

When one steps outside the predictable patterns (discourse deviation)

Especially language learners are social outsiders of a

different community by virtue of belonging to another.

They may fail to understand or to make them understood

because they lack the social knowledge to create the

discourse.

As a result they may come with the oddities and we may

judge this negatively and positively.

So, the success in communication depends as much upon

the receiver as on the sender.

And between speakers of different languages ; it depends

as much upon the native speaker as on the foreign

learner.

Delete any information which you think the two

children would have in common.:

Peter: Do you like autumn Bob?

Bob: No I don’t. It’s a dull season. The grass is yellow. The leaves fall from the

trees. It often rains. I like winter and summer. In summer the days are longer and

warmer and the nights are shorter than in autumn.

Peter: But I like autumn. I think it’s a beautiful season. I like to go to the forest

in autumn. It’s so beautiful.

Bob: And what about spring? Do you like it?

Peter: Oh yes, I like it very much, too. The leaves of the trees are small and

green. The grass is green, too. It’s warm in spring. I think that all seasons are

wonderful.

Rewrite the passage, remove superfluous information:

Earnest Miller Hemingway was born indoors in 1899 at Oak Park, a highly

respectable suburb of Chicago, a large city in the USA. The young Earnest,

who grew older as the years passed by, attended a local school, and although

energetic and successful in all school activities, he twice ran away from

home, though he returned on both occasions. In 1921 he was married of his

own free will to a woman he had met and fallen in love with. That year he

came to Europe by boat as a roving correspondent. He ate food every day and

slept at night.

Find evidence of schemata for the use of

definite article.

I bought a bicycle yesterday. The frame is extra large.

I looked into the room. The ceiling was very high.

A bus came roaring round the corner. The vehicle nearly flattened the

pedestrian.

Draw a diameter in black. The line is about three inches.

She decided to sell the cow and buy a shop with the money.

It was dark and stormy the night the millionaire was murdered.

The killer left no clues for the police to trace.

CONCLUSION

There is a lot to be needed in the creation and understanding of coherent

discourse than knowledge of the language system alone.

Coherence is created by our interaction.

Schema might differ from one person to another.

We fill in the details using our background knowledge.

We can connect some information with our existing knowledge even if the

sender hadn’t mention that.

Communication suffers when people make false assumptions about shared

schemata.

When one steps outside the predictable patterns, miscommunication may

occur.