ENGAGING LANGUAGE LEARNERS IN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

▣ Discourse Training for Teachers and Learners 

▶ENGAGING LANGUAGE LEARNERS IN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
■ To support our belief that it is beneficial for language learners to do some discourse analysis as a part of their learning, we present three somewhat different instructional units designed to have students do discourse analysis as part of the language learning process:

1. A speech act (i.e., complaining)
2. A discourse-level grammatical distinction (be going to versus will)
3. A writing task (the comparison/contrast essay)

We also briefly discuss learner strategies and how they can impact learner awareness of discourse. 

 

 

 

▶ A SPEECH ACT: COMPLAINING 

■ Hawkins (1985) documents her discourse analysis to teach the complaint "script," i.e., the macrostructure of speech activity, to high-intermediate level ESL students in an oral communication skills class. The primary complaint script in English, according to Hawkins, involves two goals: to call attention to behavior the speaker finds objectionable and then to change that behavior. The two goals present the learner with a dilemma since s/he must strike a delicate balance and be polite yet assertive in calling attention to the objectionable behavior while at the same time achieving the goal of getting the person responsible for changing his/her behavior. 

 

 

 

■ The prompts were taken from a study by Schaefer (1982), based on research to which many of Evelyn Hatch's graduate students at UCLA had contributed. The prompts covered a variety of relationships between the complainer and the addressee, including social status, sex, and physical appearance. 

 

 

 

■ Hawkins then carried out a four-step unit on complaints over the next three weeks as part of a variety of classroom activities. First, each student had to record and transcribe one native speaker responding to the same six oral prompts that Hawkins had used on the pretest. Second, the students were introduced to a discourse framework based on the seven complaint components listed in Schaefer (1982) for analyzing the data they had collected.

 

 

 

▶ Seven typical complaint components

■(Some components may be missing or reordered in any given complaint.)

1. opener (0) - utterance that initiates the complaint 

2. orientation (OR) - utterance that provides the addressee with information about the complainer's identity and intent in initiating the complaint 

3. act statement (AS) - utterance that states the trouble source

4. justification 

a. of the speaker (Js) - an utterance by the complainer that explains why s/he is personally making the complaint 

b. of the addressee (Ja) - an utterance by the complainer that offers a reason for the addressee is having committed the wrong (e.g., "Maybe you did not have time, but . . .") 

5. remedy (R) - utterance that calls for an action to correct the wrong 

a. threat (T) a type of remedy in which the complainer states an action s/he will execute depending on what the addressee does (e.g. "or I will take my business elsewhere") 

6. closing (C) - an utterance made by the complainer at the end of the complaint to conclude his/her turn. 

7. valuation (V) - an utterance by the complainer that expresses his/her feelings about either the addressee or the wrong committed. (Usually, this part is found with other components such as act statements, e.g., "This pizza is terrible!") 

 

 

 

■ A natural extension of Hawkins' work would be to focus on reactions to complaints. Language learners could deal with the complete communicative interaction within which the person who is the addressee of the complaint has to react, and there is a continuous exchange within which apologies, promises, or excuses might come up. However, it is crucial to make sure that students are given good choices of speech act realization to take into account the various pragmatic and situational features of the exchange. Boxer and Pickering (1995), who also happen to discuss the speech act of complaining, alert materials developers and textbook writers to the fact that real choices in natural communication also include indirect strategies for speech acts (an indirect complaint in our case) that are extremely important, especially when the speech act is likely to create conflict or antagonism. We would add that, primarily when we focus on complaining, opting out of the speech act may also be an ordinary - or even preferred strategy. 

 

 

 

▶ A DISCOURSE-LEVEL GRAMMATICAL CONTRAST: "WILL" VERSUS "BE GOING TO" 

■ A persistent question from ESL/EFL teachers and students is, "What is the difference between going to and will?" Previous accounts, based on the work of Binnick (1972) and McCarthy and Carter (1995), among others, have offered something like this: be going to is more informal, immediate, and interactive than will, which is more neutral or formal; be going to primarily refers to the immediate future or plans in future time, but will have several other meanings that are modal, such as promising, predicting with certainty, and so forth. 

 

 

 

■ These accounts are not wrong, but they are only partially valuable for teachers and learners unless accompanied by relevant and fully contextualized data samples. The research of Suh (1989) suggests a complimentary account of the two forms based on the discourse organizing functions of being going to and will in essentially monologic oral narrations dealing with future scenarios, something already briefly suggested; namely, that be going to is used to frame and initiate a discourse episode while will is used for the following details and elaborations. 

 

 

 

▶ CONCLUSION 

■ Swales (1990) has pointed out several benefits of carrying out consciousness-raising activities with language learners that focus on the macro-and microstructure of written discourse. Given the previous discussion, we feel his arguments can be expanded to include spoken as well as written discourse, and we have adapted his proposals accordingly so that benefits include the following: (1) learners improve both their receptive and productive language skills when teachers give attention to the structure and process of discourse; (2) learners examine general discourse features (i.e., top-down) before specific text features (i.e., bottom-up), and the general features help provide a context and an explanation for the use of specific forms; and (3) learners develop metalinguistic awareness that is useful in critiquing their speech and writing as well as that of others. 

 

 

 

■ McCarthy and Carter (1995) have noted that focusing on discourse entails essential changes in how language is taught. In other words, traditional language teaching methodology (which includes presentation, practice, and production) may need to be modified to include activities involving learners in developing greater awareness of the nature of spoken and written discourse (and the differences between these modes). Instead of the traditional present-practice-produce sequence, they propose the following: illustration, interaction, and induction. By "illustration," they mean using actual data wherever possible, presented in terms of choices that depend on context and use. By "interaction," they mean discourse-sensitive activities that focus on the uses of language and negotiation of meanings, designed to raise learners' conscious awareness of critical features through observation and class discussion. By "induction," they mean getting learners to conclude the functions of different lexico-grammatical options, thereby developing a skill for noticing critical features of form. They conclude that such a teaching approach has "considerable potential for a more rapid acquisition by learners of fluent, accurate, and naturalistic... communicative skills" (1995:217). 

 

 

 

■ Given all that we have said in this chapter and the preceding ones, we concur with McCarthy and Carter (1995). We would also like to add that language teachers who have used discourse-based approaches and materials in their classrooms (e.g., Hawkins, 1985; Holten, 1991) have reported that their students' reaction was very positive. The students volunteered that they had genuinely enjoyed the accurate data, the challenge of working with language at the discourse level and learning from these activities. However, we must emphasize once more in this concluding chapter that language teachers must be knowledgeable about language in general and the discourse level of the target language in particular before their students can benefit from instruction that approaches learning language through discourse. 

 

 

 

■ The language classroom becomes a particular type of discourse community in which teachers ideally become reflective classroom researchers who evaluate and rethink their approach, attitudes, and methods of presentation. The teacher is no longer simply the central authority figure and decision-maker in the classroom but someone who embodies the role of a knowledgeable mentor, coach, or guide. Language learners cannot be passive recipients in such an approach. They must become more independent, learn to make choices, and initiate learning activities. They should be actively responsible for their learning and awareness of strategies and tactics that will help them improve. In particular, they should be able to use metacognitive strategies and self-evaluation to improve their language performance. In discourse and context-based approach to language teaching, instructional materials should ideally offer choices to teachers and learners; they should be flexible and adapt to specific learner needs and contexts. They should be designed to facilitate the personal growth of both teachers and learners. The new roles may seem daunting to many, but they are highly desirable in that the approach we propose here encourages the positive development of both learners and teachers.