Discourse
analysis minimally the study of language in use that extends beyond sentence
boundaries. It started to attract attention from a variety of disciplines in the
late 1960s and through the 1970s. At least two term came to be used in
parallel fashion: text linguistics, which focused on written texts from a
variety of fields and genres, and discourse analysis, which entailed a more
cognitive and social prespective on language use and communication, from the
sociological or anthropological point of view, for instance, is language
analysis of communicative behavior and of its role within given social
contexts. Within linguistics discourse analysis has taken at least two
different paths: one is the extention of grammatical analysis to include functional
objectives and the other is the study of instutionalized language use within
specific cultural settings (Bhatia, 1993:3-4). The former, which is theoritical
in nature, can often be related to a particular school of linguistic analysis
such as formal linguistics (e.g, van Dijk’s text linguistics) or systemic
linguistics (e.g, Bhatia’s genre analysis); the latter is more concerned with
describing actual communication within institutionalized contexts (e.g doctor
patiened interaction, legal contrast). 1 More general discourse analysis
investigates everyday conversation, written discourse of all types, narrative,
and other kinds of written or spoken texts. In this book, we have adopted Ostman
and Virtanen’s (1995) position on discourse analysis, which is to regard it “as
an umberela-term for all issues that have been dealt with in the linguistic
study of text and discourse.”2
Another
important aspect of discourse analysis is that of application. Thus, many
discourse studies have been motivated by concern with language teaching, with
speech these different types of applied discourse analysis that have led to a
general movement within language pedagogy, which moves from focus on grammar to
concern with discourse and also moves away from language analysis, as the goal
of language teaching, to the goal of teaching language communication. The
present book is designed to help the teacher make this transition.
It
is not our purpose here to survey comprehensively all the various approaches to
discourse analysis; however, the number of different approaches that scholars
are currently pursuing explains in part the amorphous nature of discourse
analysis in the chapter that follow. These examples and our disscusions of them
will give the reader an evolving sense of what discourse analysis is. We see
no problem with this approach, given that discourse analysis is currently a
developing areas in linguistics and related disciplines (anthropology, sociology,
psicology, and philosophy). This is why we believe we should work with a fluid
and contingent definition of discourse analysis.
