Discourse Analysis

Elsa Hermosilla Miguel,

21st, February, 2011

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: SPOKEN AND WRITTEN TEXTS. TEACHING IMPLICATIONS

1. INTRODUCTION

In the field of language teaching, the nature of language as a communication has been a central issue since 1970s. There has been a growing concern to understand how people communicate with each other and how people use language to accomplish certain actions.

In this essay we are going to deal with discourse analysis which is concerned with the study of relationships between the contexts in which language is used. We can consider that it is a relatively new discipline that was born around the 1970s out of work in different disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, linguistics and psychology. Its body of work is the text, whether spoken or written and its relationships which the context where they are uttered or written. In this essay, we understand text as Halliday and Hasan (1985) define it: “any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length that does form a unified whole […]. A text is a unit of language in use. It is not a grammatical unit, like a clause or a sentence; and it not defined by its size […]. A text is best regarded as a semantic unit; a unit not of form but of meaning. […] A language which is functional, that is doing some job in some context, as opposed to isolated words or sentences.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse some aspects of discourse and conversational analysis as it is the case of studying the differences between written and spoken texts and how speakers and readers engage in discourse since this is one of the most important goals in language learning and teaching. We will examine the different syntactic, lexical and paradigmatic features which make spoken texts so different from written texts and we will also examine what the “typical” structure in a informal or formal conversation is to conclude by stating that spoken texts are not a formless and chaotic type of texts as it was considered before the advent of discourse analysis; spoken texts were considered for a long time as a kind of second-class from of language with no clear organization. Also, we will give an account of the importance of discourse analysis in language learning and some of their teaching implications and ideas when teaching spoken or written texts.

2. SOME GENERAL ASPECTS REGARDING TEXTS.

We live in a society which uses language as a way of communication both for the maintenance and creation of social relationships and also for the transmission of knowledge.

The acquisition of listening and speaking is done naturally without any formal instruction when we are talking about L1, whereas writing and reading have to be formally taught and are usually difficult stages in the process of linguistic instruction. Speech and writing are not alternative processes in the act of communication; most of times we cannot use both ways of communication indistinctly. Normally, speech is used for more casual situations, whereas writing tends to be used for more formal purposes. Spoken language is used to maintain relationships whereas written language usually present ideas. This is not to say that spoken language does not present ideas, or that written language does not implement relationships; only that those are their main functions.

When comparing spoken and writing we can observe that many of the features of the spoken texts cannot be embodied in writing. This is the case of prosodic and paralinguistic features which are difficult to represent in writing because they do not belong to any particular point in the linear representation of speech. They can only be presented by musical notation with symbols around the word. Besides, the speaker is always under pressure to continue his speech while checking hearer’s reaction. On the contrary, the writer chooses carefully a particular word but he cannot monitor the addressee’s reaction to the message.

One important aspect of writing as opposed to speech is that the reader can go at his own pace. That means that word repetitions are unnecessary, as reader can always go back and re-read the relevant passage. On the contrary, speech is designed for the moment. It is calculated in order to have an impact while it is being used at the very moment of speaking and cannot be kept unless it is recorded.

Another big difference is that writing addresses a worldwide audience but an anonymous audience, so it cannot adjust to readers’ specific expectations. Furthermore, the reader cannot respond or clarify questions about the text, hence neat message organization, division into paragraphs and layout are of great importance for a good understanding.

Speech, on the other hand is intended for the listener, that is, the listener has been taken into account before the speaker speaks and that enables us to adjust the register. As interlocutors are very often face-to-face participants they take advantage of extralinguistic signals as grimaces or deictic markers such as “here”, “now”, etc.

Another important aspect of speech is the way in which we say things; a great quantity of the information can be understood from inflection, intonation and hand gestures. On the other hand, writing can only use punctuation, capital letters, italics or so on to convey the same meaning.

The fact that speech is done unconsciously does not mean that it is less important. As we know, the study of speaking in its own right has been a relatively recent addition to the range of linguistics and applied linguistics. But there are number of justifications that prove the study of speaking in its own right. Discourse and corpuses-based studies of langue have identified a number of oral genres and sub-genres which are characterized by patterns of discourse and lexico-grammatical features which are quite distinct from those of written discourse.

3. DIFFERENT TYPES OF SPOKEN TESTS

Very broadly, we can differentiate two kinds of spoken texts: prepared texts and spontaneous texts. In the first type of text, the spoken text is organized as it were in written language. That is the kind of texts such as lectures, poetry reading and political speeches. In this variety of spoken text, the speaker is producing speech which has been prepared before the act of speaking. For that reason, it bears many similarities in terms of syntax, lexis and discourse organization with written texts.

On the other hand, spontaneous speech is the main way of communication in our society and its main feature is that the speaker has not thought about it beforehand; perhaps in content but not in form. For this reason, it has its own characteristics: there many mistakes and inaccuracies both grammatical and lexical, there are hesitations, silences, repetitions and sentences are usually

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