Written Language in Discourse Analysis
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This document provides an overview of key concepts in written language and discourse analysis from 6 chapters of a book. It discusses notions of coherence, clause relations, and textual patterns in chapter 1. It explores cohesion, theme and rheme, and tense and aspect in chapter 2. Chapter 3 examines lexical cohesion and vocabulary for organizing text. Principles of spoken and written discourse are compared. The document also outlines various textual patterns commonly found in written works like problem-solution, general-specific, and question-answer patterns. Finally, it discusses the influence of discourse analysis on reading pedagogy and the importance of both bottom-up and top-down reading strategies.
Written Language in Discourse Analysis
- 2. • Review of the book based on writing point of view •Chapter one: notions of coherence, clause relations, textual pattern in written language • Chapter 2: explore cohesion, theme and rheme, tense and aspect • Chapter 3: lexical cohesion and text organizing vocabulary •Chapter 5: spoken discourse is relevant to written discourse: ex, the active listener and active reader are engaged in very similar processes
- 3. •Transferable from the rest of this book are two general principles: That not everything described by discourse analysts is relevant to or may have any immediate applications in language teaching, and, on the other hand, that the more we can learn from discourse analysts as to how different texts are organised and how the process of creating written text is realised at various levels, from small units to large, the more likely we are to be able to create authentic materials and activities for the classroom.
- 4. Text types • Our knowledge of written text has been greatly assisted by the existence of huge computerized corpora of written material, and corpus building over the years has led to an interest in detailed taxonomies of textual types. • However, we still lack hard evidence of just how written text impinges on the day-to-day life of most people. We can obtain statistics for library-borrowing, or for newspaper sales, and get some idea of what most people read of these 'mainstream' text types, but a whole hidden world exists too, of memos, forms, notices, telexes, tickets, letters, hoardings, labels, junk mail, etc., and it is very difficult to guess just what people's daily reading and writing is.
- 5. Speech and writing • Both spoken and written discourses are dependent on their immediate • contexts to a greater or lesser degree. • The idea that writing is in some way 'freestanding', whereas speech is more closely tied to its context, has come under attack as an oversimplification by discourse analysts. • Context-dependability is found in both spoken and written texts. • Spoken 'language in action', where language is used to accompany actions being performed by the speakers, is also typically heavily context- dependent and may show a high frequency of occurrence of deictic words such as this one, over there, near you and bring that here, which can only be decoded in relation to where the speakers are at the time of speaking. • Written example: A sign saying 'NO BICYCLES' is highly context-dependent: it may mean “it is forbidden to ride or park a bicycle here” or perhaps “all available bicycles already hired/sold”, depending on where the notice is located.
- 6. Units in written discourse • The sentence is more obvious as a grammatical unit in writing, although certainly not in all kinds of writing: signs and notices, small ads, notes, etc. The internal construction of the sentence has always been the province of grammar, but in Chapter 2, we argued that a number of things in clause and sentence grammar have implications for the discourse as a whole, in particular, word order, cohesion, and tense and aspect. For the purposes of our discussion of these discoursal features, the sentence will have no special status other than as a grammatical and orthographic unit which can be exploited where desired for pedagogical illustration, just as the clause can. Text jigsaw
- 7. Clause relations • In chapter 1 we looked at the clause-relational approach to written text, where it was stressed that the units of written discourse, rather than always being co- extensive with sentences, were best seen as functional segments which could be related to one another by a finite set of cognitive relations, such as cause- consequence, instrument-achievement, temporal sequence, and matching relations such as contrasting and equivalence. But we also noted in Chapters 2 and 3 that the borderline between how conjunctions signal clause relations and how certain lexical items do the same is somewhat blurred, and that conjunctions such as and, so and because have their lexical equivalents in nouns, verbs and adjectives such as additional, cause (as noun or verb), con- sequent(ce), instrumental, reason, and so on. Therefore, as well as activities that focus on conjunction and other local cohesive choices, activities aimed at the lexicon of clause-relational signals may also be useful. Segment-chain activities can be used for this purpose. P 155-156 Example (6.4)
- 8. Getting to grips with larger patterns • We have considered larger patterns of discourse organisation at various points in this book. The problem-solution pattern was illustrated in Chapter 1, and again in Chapter 3 in relation to vocabulary signals. Chapter 3 also looked at examples of claim- counterclaim (or hypothetical- real) patterns, and Chapters 2 and 5 referred to narrative patterns. These are not the only patterns found in texts; another common one is the 'question- answer' pattern, which has some features in common with the problem-solution pattern, but whose primary motivation is the pursuit of a satisfactory answer to a question explicitly posed (usually) at the beginning of the text. • Example (6.5), P 158.
- 9. • Other typical textual patterns include various permutations of the general specific pattern, where macro-structures such as the following are found: • Examples of these patterns can be found in texts such as estate agents' sales literature in Britain, where a general description of the property for sale is followed by detailed descriptions of individual rooms/features, and then, finally a return to a general statement about the whole property again.
- 10. One point to note about patterns is that they are of no fixed size in terms of number of sentences or paragraphs contained in them. Another point is that any given text may contain more than one of the common patterns, either following one another or embedded within one another. hus a problem-solution pattern may contain general specific patterns within individual segments, or a claim- counterclaim pattern when proposed solutions are being evaluated, both of which features are present in the example (6.6), P 159.
- 11. Patterns and the learner • If we look at learners' attempts to create textual patterns of the kinds we have described above, we find that there are sometimes problems. Just as we noted that learners whose overall competence was poor often got trapped in the difficulties of local encoding at the expense of larger discourse management in spoken discourse, so too can we observe such difficulties affecting learners' written work. If we look again at a text from which we took an extract earlier, this time reproducing the whole text, we can see an attempt at a general-specific pattern which seems to just end in midstream, lacking the typical return to a general statement after the specific examples that is expected in a well-formed text.
- 12. Culture and rhetoric • Our data examples so far show one thing: European learners of English in general are perfectly capable of transferring discourse patterns such as problem-solution patterns from their L1 to an L2 Where problems arise, they seem to be relatable to lack of linguistic competence at the lexico-grammatical level and the natural difficulties of coping with global planning when one is under great stress encoding at the sentence level. But what of the writing of learners from cultures quite different from Western ones? Are there established norms of writing in other literate cultures that are different and might therefore be expected to interfere with the macro-level decision-making of the learner writing in English?
- 13. Discourse and the reader • we cannot leave discussion of discourse analysis and language teaching, without considering the influence of discourse analysis on the teaching of reading. we cannot explain discourse patterning at the macro-level without paying due attention to the role of gammar and lexis; by the same token, we cannot foster good reading without considering global and local reading skills simultaneously. In recent years, questions of reading pedagogy have centered on whether bottom-up (i.e. decoding of the text step-by-step from small textual elements such as words and phrases) or top-down (using macro-level clues to decode the text) strategies are more important. This fits with our general view of discourse as being manifested in macro-level patterns to which a constellation of local lexico-grammatical choices contribute.
- 14. • At the macro-level, much has been made in recent years of schema theory, that is, the role of background knowledge in the reader's ability to make sense of the text. The theory in itself seems plausible enough; the more we are locked into the world of the text, the easier it is to absorb new information.
- 15. I hopethingswillworkout for you. Thanksfor yourtime