Showing papers on "Discourse analysis published in 2007"

Choose Your Method: A Comparison of Phenomenology, Discourse Analysis, and Grounded Theory

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to compare three qualitative approaches that can be used in health research: phenomenology, discourse analysis, and grounded theory. The authors include a model that summarizes similarities and differences among the approaches, with attention to their historical development, goals, methods, audience, and products. They then illustrate how these approaches differ by applying them to the same data set. The goal in phenomenology is to study how people make meaning of their lived experience; discourse analysis examines how language is used to accomplish personal, social, and political projects; and grounded theory develops explanatory theories of basic social processes studied in context. The authors argue that by familiarizing themselves with the origins and details of these approaches, researchers can make better matches between their research question(s) and the goals and products of the study.

Doing conversation analysis

Abstract: PART ONE: CONSIDERING CA Introducing the CA Paradigm Three Exemplary Studies Ideas and Evidence in CA Research CA and Different Disciplinary Agendas PART TWO: PRODUCING DATA Collecting/Producing Recordings Transcribing Talk-in-Interaction PART THREE: ANALYSING DATA Analytic Strategies Elaborating the Analysis PART FOUR: APPLIED CA Institutional Interaction Local Rationalities, Formal Knowledge and Critical Concerns

Sociocultural discourse analysis: analysing classroom talk as a social mode of thinking

Abstract: This paper describes a methodology for the analysis of classroom talk, called sociocultural discourse analysis, which focuses on the use of language as a social mode of thinking – a tool for teaching-and-learning, constructing knowledge, creating joint understanding and tackling problems collaboratively. It has been used in a series of school-based research projects in the UK and elsewhere and its use is illustrated with data from those projects. The methodology is expressly based on sociocultural theory and, in particular, on the Vygotskian conception of language as both a cultural and a psychological tool. Its application involves a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods and enables the study of both educational processes and learning outcomes.

Teacher questioning in science classrooms: Approaches that stimulate productive thinking

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to find out how teachers use questions in classroom discourse to scaffold student thinking and help students construct scientific knowledge. The study was conducted in large-class settings where the medium of instruction was English although the students were non-native speakers of the language. Six teachers teaching grade 7 science classes from four schools participated in the study. Thirty-six lessons covering a range of topics were observed across a variety of lesson structures such as expository teaching, whole-class discussions, and laboratory work. The lessons were audiotaped and videotaped. Verbal transcripts of classroom discourse were analyzed interpretively. Particular attention was paid to questioning exchanges that stimulated productive thinking in students, as manifested by their verbal responses. A framework was developed that included four questioning approaches adopted by the teachers. This included Socratic questioning, verbal jigsaw, semantic tapestry, and framing. This paper describes these various questioning approaches, their features, and the conditions under which they were used. It also discusses the implications of these approaches for instructional practice. The findings from this study have potential in translating research insights into practical advice for teachers regarding tactical moves in classroom discourse, and provide guidelines for teachers to increase their repertoire of questioning skills. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 44: 815–843, 2007

Discourse on the move

Abstract: Discourse on the Move is the first book-length exploration of how corpus-based methods can be used for discourse analysis, applied to the description of discourse organization. The primary goal is to bring these two analytical perspectives together: undertaking a detailed discourse analysis of each individual text, but doing so in terms that can be generalized across all texts of a corpus. The book explores two major approaches to this task: ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. In the ‘top-down’ approach, the functional components of a genre are determined first, and then all texts in a corpus are analyzed in terms of those components. In contrast, textual components emerge from the corpus analysis in the bottom-up approach, and the discourse organization of individual texts is then analyzed in terms of linguistically-defined textual categories. Both approaches are illustrated through case studies of discourse structure in particular genres: fund-raising letters, biology/biochemistry research articles, and university classroom teaching.

Discourse Analysis: An Introduction

Abstract: 1. What is discourse analysis? 2. Discourse and society 3. Discourse and pragmatics 4. Discourse and genre 5. Discourse and conversation 6. Discourse grammar 7. Corpus approaches to discourse analysis 8. Multimodal discourse analysis 9. Critical discourse analysis 10. Doing discourse analysis Bibliography Appendix: Answers to the exercises Glossary Index.

Teacher Teams and Distributed Leadership: A Study of Group Discourse and Collaboration

Abstract: Purpose:This article explores distributed leadership as it relates to two teacher teams in one public secondary school Both situational and social aspects of distributed leadership are foci of investigationMethods:The qualitative study used constant comparative analysis and discourse analysis to explore leadership as a distributed phenomenon Data from field notes and video recordings of two teacher teams during one semester were usedFindings:Three constructs emerged that informed our understanding of collaborative interaction within each professional learning team: purpose, autonomy, and patterns of discourse Purpose and autonomy, manifest as organizational conditions, largely shape patterns of discourse that characterize the interaction of the team members We argue that the nature of purpose and autonomy within a teacher team can influence the social distribution of leadershipConclusions:The nature of teams in shared governance structures—the fact that teams can organize to either find or solve pr

The Practice of Critical Discourse Analysis: an Introduction

Abstract: 1. Background and theory 2. Discourse and social context 3. Positioning and point of view 4. Intertextual analysis 5. Figurative language, metaphor and message 6. The construction of identity 7. Politeness, power and solidarity 8. The discourse of prejudice 9. The discourse of consumerism 10. Discourse and the law

The Language of “Race” and Prejudice A Discourse of Denial, Reason, and Liberal-Practical Politics

Abstract: >> During the past 20 years, there has been a burgeoning literature on racial discourse in Western liberal democracies that has been informed by several disciplines. This literature has analysed linguistic and discursive patterns of everyday talk and formal institutional talk that can be found in parliamentary debates, political speeches, and the media. One of the most pervasive features of contemporary race discourse is the denial of prejudice. Increasing social taboos against openly expressing racist sentiments has led to the development of discursive strategies that present negative views of outgroups as reasonable and justified while at the same time protecting the speaker from charges of racism and prejudice. This research has demonstrated the flexible and ambivalent nature of contemporary race discourse. The present article reviews these discursive patterns or ways of talking about the other and emphasises the significant contribution that this work has made to research on language and discrimination.

Neo‐Hymesian linguistic ethnography in the United Kingdom

Abstract: This paper describes the development of ‘linguistic ethnography’ in Britain over the last 5‐15 years. British anthropology tends to overlook language, and instead, the U.K. Linguistic Ethnography Forum (LEF) has emerged from socio- and applied linguistics, bringing together a number of formative traditions (inter alia, Interactional Sociolinguistics, New Literacy Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis). The career paths and the institutional positions of LEF participants make their ethnography more a matter of getting analytic distance on what’s close-at-hand than a process of getting familiar with the strange. When linked with post-structuralism more generally, this ‘from-inside-outwards’ trajectory produces analytic sensibilities tuned to discourse analysis as a method, doubtful about ‘comprehensive’ and ‘exotic’ ethnography, and welldisposed to practical/political intervention. LE sits comfortably in the much broader shift from mono- to inter-disciplinarity in British higher education, though the inter-disciplinary environment makes it hard to take the relationship between linguistics and ethnography for granted.

Struggling over subjectivity: A discursive analysis of strategic development in an engineering group:

Abstract: We have seen growing interest in discursive perspectives on strategy. This perspective holds great promise for development of an understanding on how strategy discourse and subjectivity are intertwined. We wish to add to this existing research by outlining a discursive struggle approach to subjectivity. To understand the complex subjectification and empowering/disempowering effects of organizational strategy discourse, this approach focuses on organization-specific discourse mobilizations and various ways of resistance. Drawing on an analysis of the discourses and practices of ‘strategic development’ in an engineering and consulting group we provide an empirical illustration of such struggles over subjectivity. In particular, we report three examples of competing ways of making sense of and giving sense to strategic development, with specific subjectification tendencies. First, we show how corporate management can mobilize and appropriate a specific kind of strategy discourse to attempt to gain control of...

Discourse markers and spoken english: Native and learner use in pedagogic settings

Abstract: This study examines and compares the production of discourse markers by native speakers and learners of English based on a pedagogic sub-corpus from CANCODE, a corpus of spoken British English, and a corpus of interactive classroom discourse of secondary pupils in Hong Kong. The results indicate that in both groups discourse markers serve as useful interactional manoeuvres to structure and organize speech on interpersonal, referential, structural, and cognitive levels. The Hong Kong learners are found to display a liberal use of referentially functional discourse markers (and, but, because, OK, so, etc.) but a relatively restricted use of other markers (yeah, really, say, sort of, I see, you see, well, right, actually, cos, you know, etc.). Native speakers are found to use discourse markers for a wider variety of pragmatic functions and the study therefore also discusses some possible pedagogical implications involved in preparing learners to become more interactionally competent speakers.

Socio-cognitive dynamics of knowledge building in the work of 9- and 10-year-olds

Abstract: This study examines four months of online discourse of 22 Grade 4 students engaged in efforts to advance their understanding of optics. Their work is part of a school-wide knowledge building initiative, the essence of which is giving students collective responsibility for idea improvement. This goal is supported by software—Knowledge Forum—designed to provide a public and collaborative space for continual improvement of ideas. A new analytic tool—inquiry threads—was developed to analyze the discourse used by these students as they worked in this environment. Data analyses focus on four knowledge building principles: idea improvement; real ideas, authentic problems (involving concrete/empirical and abstract/conceptual artifacts); community knowledge (knowledge constructed for the benefit of the community as a whole); and constructive use of authoritative sources. Results indicate that these young students generated theories and explanation-seeking questions, designed experiments to produce real-world empirical data to support their theories, located and introduced expert resources, revised ideas, and responded to problems and ideas that emerged as community knowledge evolved. Advances were reflected in progress in refining ideas and evidence of growth of knowledge for the community as a whole. Design strategies and challenges for collective idea improvement are discussed.

Critical Realism in Discourse Analysis: A Presentation of a Systematic Method of Analysis Using Women's Talk of Motherhood, Childcare and Female Employment as an Example

Abstract: In critical realism, language is understood as constructing our social realities. However, these constructions are theorized as being shaped by the possibilities and constraints inherent in the material world. For critical realists, material practices are given an ontological status that is independent of, but in relation with, discursive practices. The advantage in taking a critical realist, rather than relativist, approach is that analysis can include relationships between people's material conditions and discursive practices. Despite calls to develop a critical realist discourse analysis there has been little empirical critical realist work, possibly because few have addressed the critique that critical realists have no systematic method of distinguishing between discursive and non-discursive. In this article we outline a three-stage procedure that enables a systematic critical realist discourse analysis using women's talk of motherhood, childcare and female employment as an example.

The Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0 Annotation Manual

Abstract: This report contains the guidelines for the annotation of discourse relations in the Penn Discourse Treebank (http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~pdtb), PDTB. Discourse relations in the PDTB are annotated in a bottom up fashion, and capture both lexically realized relations as well as implicit relations. Guidelines in this report are provided for all aspects of the annotation, including annotation explicit discourse connectives, implicit relations, arguments of relations, senses of relations, and the attribution of relations and their arguments. The report also provides descriptions of the annotation format representation.

Comparing Narrative and Expository Text Construction Across Adolescence: A Developmental Paradox

Abstract: In this study we argue that narrative storytelling and expository discussion, as 2 distinct discourse genres, differ both in linguistic expression and in their underlying principles of organization—schema-based in narratives and category-based in exposition. Innovative analyses applied to 160 personal-experience narratives and expository essays written by schoolchildren, adolescents, and adults on the shared topic of interpersonal conflict point to certain apparently contradictory facts about developing discourse abilities in the 2 genres. For example, genre differentiation is established early on (even the youngest children distinguish between the 2 types of discourse), but with age, participants tend to diverge from genre-typical content (by including expository-type generalizations in narratives and narrative-like incidents in expository texts). Also, across age groups, in local linguistic expression, participants use more advanced vocabulary and grammar in expository than in narrative texts, ...

Pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis. A cross-disciplinary inquiry.

Abstract: This paper discusses important and fruitful links between (Critical) Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics. In a detailed analysis of three utterances of an election speech by the Austrian rightwing politician Jorg Haider, it is illustrated in which ways a combined discourse-analytical and pragmatic approach grasps the intricacy of anti-Semitic meanings, directed towards the President of the Viennese Jewish Community. The necessity of in-depth context-analysis in multiple layers (from the socio-political context up to the co-text of each utterance) moreover emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches when investigating such complex issues as racism and anti-Semitism as produced and reproduced in discourse. More specifically, the relevance of pragmatic devices such as insinuations, presuppositions and implicatures, is discussed when analyzing instances of 'coded language', i.e., utterances with indirect and latent racist and anti-Semitic meanings as common in official discourses in Western Europe.

Historical Discourse: The Language of Time, Cause and Evaluation

Abstract: Historical Discourse analyses the importance of the language of time, cause and evaluation in both texts which students at secondary school are required to read, and their own writing for assessment. In contrast to studies which have denied that history has a specialised language, Caroline Coffin demonstrates through a detailed study of historical texts, that writing about the past requires different genres, lexical and grammatical structures. In this analysis, language emerges as a powerful tool for making meaning in historical writing. Presupposing no prior knowledge of systemic functional linguistics, this insightful book will be of interest to researchers in applied linguistics and discourse analysis, as well as history educators.

Can discourse analysis successfully explain the content of media and journalistic practice

Abstract: It is argued here that textual analysis of media accounts requires the study of the social structures from which competing ideological explanations develop. A comparison of the methods of the Glasgow University Media Group with the work of Norman Fairclough and Teun van Dijk shows that discourse analysis which remains text-based has problems in its ability to show: (1) the origins of competing discourses and how they relate to different social interests, (2) the diversity of social accounts compared to what is present (and absent) in a specific text, (3) the impact of external factors such as professional media practice on the manner in which the discourses are represented, and (4) what the text actually means to different parts of the audience. There are other problems with “text only” analyses in relation to (1) the accuracy of representations, (2) the significance of texts to our own audience, and (3) the question of how rhetoric “belongs to” or is used by different social interests. To overcome these ...

Global Media Discourse: A Critical Introduction

Abstract: Featuring a wide range of exercises, examples, and images, this textbook provides a practical way of analyzing the discourses of the global media industries Building on a comprehensive introduction to the history and theory of global media communication, specific case studies of lifestyle and entertainment media are explored with examples from films, global women's magazines, Vietnamese news reporting and computer war games Finally, this book investigates how global media communication is produced, looking at the formats, languages and images used in creating media materials, both globally and in localized forms At a time when the media is becoming increasingly global, often with the same films, news and television programmes shown all over the world; Global Media Discourse provides an accessible, lively introduction into how globalization is changing the language and communicative practices of the media Integrating a range of approaches, including political economy, discourse analysis and ethnography, this book will be of particular interest to students of media and communication studies, applied linguistics, and (critical) discourse analysis

Schooling and environmental/sustainability education: from discourses of policy and practice to discourses of professional learning

Abstract: The gap between policy rhetoric and school practices in environmental education has not only persisted but probably increased over the past twenty years, given the contested advent of education for sustainable development (ESD) as the dominant international policy discourse in this area, and an increased focus in schools on didactic teaching in traditional content areas resulting from narrowly defined accountability measures in many national educational policies. After examining changes and continuities in the discourse of environmental education/ESD and the policy contexts of schools over the past twenty years, this article argues for re‐conceptualising the rhetoric–practice gap such that practices in schools are not simply assessed in relation to policy discourse but policy discourse itself is re‐examined in relation to teachers’ practical theories and the contexts shaping their practices. Although the structures and norms of schooling continue to work against inquiry‐based action‐oriented environmental...

Sociolinguistics and discourse analysis : Orders of indexicality and polycentricity.

Abstract: Developments in the structure of societies, such as globalisation processes, compel us to devote more attention to issues of sociolinguistic variation in discourse, because features of such variation become ever more important to users. Yet a lot of discourse analysis starts from an old monolingual ideal, in which the sociolinguistic dimensions of the linguistic resources used by people remains underproblematised. This paper argues that our discourse analytic toolkit needs to be complemented with some seriously useful sociolinguistic tools and presents two such tools in this paper: orders of indexicality and polycentricity. Both concepts are designed to observe forms of linguistic and cultural variation that characterise Late Modern diasporic environments.

Linguistic Knowledge and Subject Knowledge: How Does Bilingualism Contribute to Subject Development?

Abstract: Experiments in bilingual education in Europe increasingly appear under the abbreviation ‘CLIL’ (Content and Language Integrated Learning). The main concept in it seems to be that of integration, as yet little described in research and insufficiently made conscious and explicit in the teaching process. This paper aims at studying the modes of integration between language and content by identifying different types of knowledge at the crossroads between the linguistic paradigm and the subject paradigm. It is based on discourse and interaction analysis of classroom interaction sequences in various subjects. It proposes elements for a basic theoretical framework designed to sustain the view of CLIL as an alternative not only in second language didactics, but also in the didactics of non-linguistic subjects.

On the Multi-modality, Materially and Contingency of Organization Discourse

Abstract: This essay considers the ways that organizational discourse studies have deployed the concept `discourse'. A review of the literature reveals conceptual ambiguities in the definition of `discourse', as well as pre-analytical distinctions that are imposed between discourse, action and text, and between discourse, beliefs and material practices. The paper suggests that such a priori analytical categories risk tying the researcher to an inflexible research agenda, ruling out engaging with organizational specifics and emergent aspects of practice. The essay argues for an alternative view of discourse that centres on the following three arguments: discourse is not limited to language but also includes image, design, technology and other modes of meaning making; discourse and materiality co-emerge; and discourse manifests a specific, historically situated form of life.

The body literate: Discourse and inscription in early literacy

Abstract: The collection will cover all the major fields of discourse studies: including, grammar, stylistics, conversation analysis, narrative analysis, argumentation, psychology of comprehension, ethnography of speaking, and media. It will include classic articles, work from the top scholars in the field, and reflect all the significant debates.

Grounded theory: a methodological spiral from positivism to postmodernism

Abstract: Aim. Our aim in this paper is to explain a methodological/methods package devised to incorporate situational and social world mapping with frame analysis, based on a grounded theory study of Australian rural nurses' experiences of mentoring. Background. Situational analysis, as conceived by Adele Clarke, shifts the research methodology of grounded theory from being located within a postpositivist paradigm to a postmodern paradigm. Clarke uses three types of maps during this process: situational, social world and positional, in combination with discourse analysis. Method. During our grounded theory study, the process of concurrent interview data generation and analysis incorporated situational and social world mapping techniques. An outcome of this was our increased awareness of how outside actors influenced participants in their constructions of mentoring. In our attempts to use Clarke's methodological package, however, it became apparent that our constructivist beliefs about human agency could not be reconciled with the postmodern project of discourse analysis. We then turned to the literature on symbolic interactionism and adopted frame analysis as a method to examine the literature on rural nursing and mentoring as secondary form of data. Findings. While we found situational and social world mapping very useful, we were less successful in using positional maps. In retrospect, we would argue that collective action framing provides an alternative to analysing such positions in the literature. This is particularly so for researchers who locate themselves within a constructivist paradigm, and who are therefore unwilling to reject the notion of human agency and the ability of individuals to shape their world in some way. Conclusion. Our example of using this package of situational and social worlds mapping with frame analysis is intended to assist other researchers to locate participants more transparently in the social worlds that they negotiate in their everyday practice.