summary presentation DA

1. DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND LANGUAGE TEACHING
Students: Claudia Millafilo
Aracely Rodríguez
Scarlett Espinoza
Teacher: Hector Vega
Date: July 7th
, 2015

2. Discourse analysis and Language teaching
Since the appearance of the communicative approach on the 70’s, a new need
emerged when talking about language teaching: the need to have a focus on communication
rather than learning the grammatical structures of the language. Therefore, the new target
of language teaching was to provide learners the tools to communicate by using the target
language. To follow this further, discourse analysis provided the basis to make decisions
regarding language teaching and learning.
However, the situation was not always the same, as for many years language
teaching focused on the analysis of sentences. Thus, language teaching was extremely
decontextualized from language practice and there was a major lack of real meaning.
Opposite to this, the more recent approaches have focused on discourse or texts as the
basic units of analysis and the situation changed notably. As a consequence of the latter,
sociolinguistic features became also important; therefore, all the participants involved and
their characteristics had to be taken into account, as it would occur in natural interaction.
Finally, communication strategies became a necessity for learners so as to compensate
their lack of linguistic knowledge. As the years went by the idea of shared knowledge popped
up as an essential part of this process.As an illustration, the general knowledge of the world
and sociocultural knowledge had to be taken into account in order to contextualize formal
language teaching as well as the idea that every language classroom is a unique discourse
community sharing some characteristics to identify it as such.
When communicating there are four skills involved: speaking, writing, reading and
listening. For each skill, language learners need unique strategies. For example, in
receptive skills readers and listeners have to activate schematic and contextual knowledge
for better understanding. Therefore, teachers have to provide learners listening activities
that combine phonetic and lexis grammatical signals as well as content and contextual
features e.g. jigsaw. On the other hand, when it comes to reading, teachers should promote
personal involvement with texts in order to develop individual strategies and become
independent readers. Also, teachers must choose texts that give enough contextual clues,
so that language learners understand unfamiliar words. When speaking about productive
skills there can be found two. On one side, it is writing for getting learners to write a “well
written text”, they have to work on coherence and cohesion having always in mind the
readers’ background knowledge. On the other side, the speaking skill requires a productive
process, which is performed “here and now”.
Finally, the main difficulty that has been found in order to move beyond to a
communicative language teaching considering both theoretical and practical levels is to
provide language teachers with proper grounding in discourse analysis. Many language-
teaching professionals are trained in a certain language area; nonetheless, a few are
included in theoretical programs of pedagogical discourse analysis in order to be connected
with practical activities within the context of a classroom.