WHAT IS DISCOURSE ANALYSIS?

WHAT IS DISCOURSE ANALYSIS?

Talking about discourse analysis there are different points of view depending on the perception of the people; the majority of them linguists. They found themselves involved in a variety of topics, sometimes the only thing these topics have in common is that they are related to language and their effects.

According to Johnstone, B. (2008) Discourse analysis is the study of language in everyday sense in which most people use the term. When linguists talk about discourse analysis some of them see it as a mass noun: discourse, it means the way people speak of other things, on the other hand scholars influenced by Foucault, tend to use the word discourse as a count noun, taking this word as ideology or ways of thinking, at the end these two conceptions are much related.

The uses of discourse analysis are innumerable; it is mostly based on descriptions of situations where language is involved. According to the author discourse analysts are always asking questions related to other fields like linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, language acquisition communication, identity, among others. But what distinguishes DA from other studies is not the kind of questions but how they solve them by analysing the structure and functions of language in use and understanding human beings in society.

The data for discourse analysis is taken form texts, those can be written or oral. The analysts based better on no written discourse since it appears in real life. They study records of discourse in the form of audio or video recording and the amount of chunks taken depends on the person’s interests, as it is a qualitative analysis the results depends on the analyst perceptions and how he/she see things.

 Transcriptions are representations of the speakers as well as being demonstrations of speech. It is clear that oral texts need to be transcribed, there are many ways to represent speech, the idea is to include every spoken word, the features included in this process are determined by the analyst and what he wants to emphasize on. Analysts just take the data and  divided it into parts, It is mention in the text that taking things apart is a process that helps analysts to go deeper on  the specific characteristics of each part of discourse as well as see things form diverse perspectives.

To study these texts the analysts apply an analytical heuristic that is in some way using certain procedures to answer question like why is this part of discourse the way it is? Why that particular words in the particular order? Analysts have to think also about the text structure, intention of the writer, interests of the reader etc.

It is also said how discourse is shaped by its context, and how discourse shapes its context from the following perspectives

·         Discourse is shaped by the world, and D shapes the world

·         D is shaped by language, and D shapes language

·         D is shaped by participants, and D shapes participants

·          D is shaped by prior discourse, and D shapes the possibilities for future discourse

·         D is shaped by its medium, and D shapes the possibilities for its medium

·         D is shaped by purpose, and D shapes possible purposes.

From my point of view I can say that at the beginning without having a clear idea of what was discourse analysis, it sounded like a distant issue may be related to politics or other aspects, but now I have realize the importance of DA, and how useful it can be in our educational field.

I would like to take some sentences literally from this first chapter that says a lot to me: the first one is “anyone who wants to understand human beings has to understand discourse”, and the second one is “human worlds are shaped by discourse”. Every day, we as teachers have to deal human beings either students, parents, or colleagues, then paying attention to discourse could help us to understand, change and improve many aspects not only related to language but also with the whole duties in education.

Discourse analysis can be taken as a difficult job, especially when we have to transcribe oral texts the ones that can be more useful in our field, but we can start step by step analysing the discourses in our context and see what happened and how well we can deal with that, in fact, discourse analysis is a matter of seeing things, we do not need to be experts but we have to start.