What is Discourse Analysis?

Discourse analysis is minimally the study of language in use that extends beyond sentence boundaries. It started to attract attention form a variety of disciplines in the late 1960s and through the 1970s. At least two terms come to be used in parallel fashion: text linguistics, which focused on written text from a variety of fields and genres, and discourses analysis, which entailed a more cognitive and social perspective on language use and communication exchanges and which includes spoken as well as written discourse.

Although today discourse analysis can be considered a well-defined discipline on its own, it is closely linked with a number of other disciplines and could, In fact, serve as an umbrella term for a variety of approaches. Ethnography of communication, from the sociological or anthropological point of view, for instance. Is language analysis of communicative behavior and of it is role within given social contexts. Within linguistics, discourses analysis has taken as least two difference paths: one is the extension of grammatical analysis to include functional objectives and the others is the study of institutionalized language use within specific cultural settings Bhatia, (1993: 3-4). The former, which is theatrical in nature, can often be related to a particular school of linguistic analysis such as formal linguistic (e.g., Van Dijk’s text linguistics) or systemic linguistic (e.g., Bhatia’s genre analysis); the latter is more concerned with describing actual communication within institutionalized contexts (e.g., Doctor patient interaction, legal contracts).

Another important aspect of discourses analysis is that of application. Many discourses studies have been motivated by concern with language teaching. With speech analysis, with the writing or reading process and with genre and register analyses. It is these different types of applied discourses analysis that are most relevant to the aims of this books and will therefore be addressed in subsequent chapters. It is also there different types of applied discourses analysis that have led to a general movement within language pedagogy, which moves from focus on grammar to concern with discourses and also moves away from language analysis, as the general of language teaching, to the goal of teaching language for communication. The present book is designed to help the teacher make his transition.

Posted by Unknown on Sunday 7 September 2014 - Rating: 4.5

Title : What is Discourse Analysis?
Description : Discourse analysis is minimally the study of language in use that extends beyond sentence boundaries. It started to attract attention fo...

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