Applied linguistics Norbert Schmitt

1. Discourse Analysis
Approaches to Discourse Analysis
Spoken and Written Discourse
Professor: Dr. Salimi
Presented by: Mojgan Azimi
February 2017

2. Introduction
What is discourse?
“Stretches of language perceived to be meaningful,
unified and purposive.” (cook, 1989)
Discourse Features:
Stretch of language longer than a sentence
Meaningful and coherent
communicative and purposive
Written or spoken

3. Discourse Analysis is the analysis of language in its
social context.
It involves real text not invented, constructed, artificial
text.
It works with utterances not independent sentences.
Questions investigated by Discourse Analysis:
Who are the participants in the discourse?
What is their relationship?
•
Are there differences in power or knowledge
between the participants?
What are their goals ?
What does the text mean?
What knowledge of context is needed?

4. Approaches to Discourse Analysis

5. Sociology:CA
An approach to the study of social interaction in everyday life
situation.
Focus on conversation.
Concerned mainly with dialogic, spoken discourse of a fairly
informal character.
It addresses :
How to take turns in conversation
How to open and close conversation
How to launch new topics ,close old one and shift topics
How conversation gradually progress from one utterance to
the next

6. Turn-taking
Based on social interaction in
conversation.
It starts with occasion when speaker
speaks and ends when another speaker
takes a turn
Two possible way to get the turn:
•Be chosen or nominated by current speaker
•If no-one is directly selected, they may
speak of their own choice (self-selection)

7. One aspect of turn taking that shows the
listener follows speaker is back channel
response :(Mmm,uhuh,sure.right) .
Another important aspect of turn-taking is the
way interlocutors predict one another’s turns
,mechanism such as completing or overlapping
the speaker’s utterance:
A) I had much trouble answering the questions
B) The exam was really hard

8. Patterns in Turn-taking
• Adjacency pairs: a pair of turns that mutually
affect one another ( greeting–greeting,
compliment–thanks, apology–acceptance )
• Solidary routines (for example, A: I have a
terrible headache, B: Oh, I’m sorry, can I do
anything?)
• converging pairs (for example, A: I just love
that green sweater, B: Oh, so do I, isn’t it
great!)

9. Sociolinguistic Approaches:
Ethnography
Ethnography is concerned with ‘the
situation and uses, the patterns and
functions, of speaking as an activity in
its own right.
A central theme: speech event
Hymes (1972)
Speech events include interactions
such as a conversation at a party or
ordering a meal, etc.

10. Components of Communication
Hyme’s SPEAKING grid emphasizes the contextual
dimensions that determine our use of language.
One important part of the grid is genre which says there
are different text-type with their own different internal
structures which accord with different social goals.

11. Sociolinguistic Approaches:Variation
Theory
Developed by Labove(1972)
Major contribution to the analysis of
discourse is description of the structure of
spoken narratives
Overall structure of narrative of personal
experience is:
Abstract
Orientation
Complication
Evaluation
Resolution
Coda

12. Linguistic Approaches:Structural-functional
The Birmingham SchoolDeveloped by Sinclair et. al (1975)
The focus was on the classroom discourse
Considering teachers’ question and pupils’ answer
,unit of pattern was identified (discourse markers
that indicates boundary for starting sth new, such
as: then, right, now) which they called
Transaction.
Next level of pattern consists of question-answer-
feedback which is called Exchange.
Next level represents single action such as
questioning, answering and feeding back which is
called move.
Finally there are local, micro-actions such as:
nominating a student to speak or acknowledging

13. ‘IRF Model’
A typical exchange in the teacher-fronted
classroom is the ‘eliciting exchange’, which has
three moves, an initiating move, a responding
move and a follow-up move:
T: How do we use a thermometer? Jennie.
INITIATING MOVE
P: Put it in your mouth.
RESPONDING MOVE
T: You put it in your mouth.
FOLLOW-UP MOVE

14. Linguistic Approaches:Systemic Functional
Linguistics (SFL)
SFL is one variety of functional linguistics
Its focus is on analysis of texts considering the
social context in which they occur
The similarity between CA and SFL:
Both describe the relationship between
language and its social context
The difference between CA and SFL:
SFL focuses on the way language is organized
to enable conversation to function
CA focuses on social life and sees
conversation as a key to that

15. Spoken and Written
Discourse
Discourse analysis shows that Spoken English does
have consistent structure likeWritten English
Spoken and Written discourse have different lexical
density defined as rate of occurrence of lexical item
(content words such as, sun, confuse, tiny) against
grammatical items (for example, he, was, on). Spoken
discourse typically has a far lower lexical density

16. Differences Between Informal and
Formal Spoken Discourse

17. One Important Aspect of Difference
Between Spoken and Written Discourse:
Grammar
Written discourses relies on text-activated context and therefore it
is more structured and formal
Spoken discourse relies on immediate context and has less need
to refer to everything (Elipses)
Absence of auxiliary
A: Anybody want soup? B: No thank you. (Understood: ‘Does
anyone want soup?)
Absence of pronoun and article
A: Nice restaurant. B: Yes, it is, isn’t it. (Understood: ‘It’s a nice
restaurant.’)
A discourse grammar, since it derives its description from real
contexts of use rather than from isolated or invented
sentences, will necessarily be interested in the spoken–written
divide wherever it is relevant.

18. Lexical Patterns in Spoken
Language
A. Repetition: used for signaling and confirming an
agreed meaning. Ex:Speaker 1: California was
really beautiful. Speaker 2: It’s a beautiful place.
B. Relexicalization: ability to retrieve synonyms and
antonyms quickly. Ex: A)Well, it is hard isn’t it.
B)It’s not easy to go forward.
Repetition and relexicalization are part of the speaking
skill, and in the case of relexicalization (that is, the
ability to retrieve synonyms and antonyms quickly),
present a considerable challenge to second language
learners.

19. Corpus Linguistics and Variation in
Discourse
Corpus linguistics uses large collections of both spoken and
written natural texts (corpora or corpuses, singular corpus) that
are stored on computers.
Corpus linguists believe that external evidence, looking at
language use, is a better source for description.
Broadly, corpus linguistics may be performed in two ways:
quantitative and qualitative.
The quantitative approach usually looks for the largest corpus
possible (up to 100–600 million words at the time of writing),
from as wide a range of sources as possible.
Computationally analyzed data tell about the frequency of
occurrence of words, phrases, collocations or structures.
In a qualitative approach, for example, a spoken corpus
frequency list might show an unexpectedly high frequency for
words such as absolutely, exactly and brilliant compared with a
written corpus frequency list.

20. Implications for PedagogyDiscourse analysis enables language practitioners to precisely delineate
in syllabuses and materials the different genres of language with which
learners will need to engage, and to select and evaluate discourses that
are relevant to particular learners’ needs.
It helps teachers to explain the underlying features of the text types
associated with different types of writing.( academic paper, business
letter)
It may serve to raise awareness of the nature of teacher–learner
interaction. It can help teachers consider their own interaction practices
in a more systematic manner and offer a context for learners to engage
in the genuine interaction.
It provides teachers with more insight to evaluate learners’ performance
in the class in terms of its proximity to or distance from real-world
discourse.
CA offers the possibility of systematic teaching of features, such as the
language of openings and closings, discourse markers and common
adjacency pairs.
Discourse analysis provides the descriptive information which
pedagogical grammarians and lexicographers require to produce more

21. Thank You