A Discourse Approach to Spoken and Written Narratives: Pedagogical Implications for EFL Learners

Qurratul Ain ,Yasir Hussain ,Fasih Ur Rehman

doi:10.33195/jll.v4iii.273

Abstract

Recent research on the analysis of spoken discourse (Halliday, 1985, McCarthy, 1998) shows that spoken language also has a consistent structure and in many respects, it does have the language patterns as that of written English. Thus, it proves that both spoken and written language have a describable structure. The aim of this study is to explore some discourse features of both spoken and written English and their pedagogical implication. For this purpose, two texts: a spontaneous speech (recorded and transcribed) and then a short-written poem are analyzed at both micro and macro level of discourse. As both texts have narrative content, Labov’s model of narrative analysis is applied to identify their organizing pattern. Similarities and differences in the discourse features of both texts are also examined. Some pedagogical implications of such an analysis are also suggested to language teachers; so that they can improve students’ language competence skills by adopting discourse-based teaching strategies.

Highlights

Richard Nordquist (2014) defines Discourse Analysis as “the study of the ways in which language is used in texts’ contexts”. It developed in the 1970s, discourse analysis
In Linguistics, it is used to define a language which is beyond the level of sentence
Discourse Analysis (DA) is a modern discipline of the social sciences that covers a wide variety of different approaches related to applied linguistics and language education such as sociology: conversational analysis (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973) Sociolinguistics: ethnography (Hymes, 1974), variation theory by Labov (1972), Philosophy: Speech act theory (Austin, 1962) Education classroom discourse (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975), linguistics: Systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1976)

Summary

Introduction

Richard Nordquist (2014) defines Discourse Analysis as “the study of the ways in which language is used in texts’ contexts”. In Linguistics, it is used to define a language which is beyond the level of sentence. Discourse Analysis (DA) is a modern discipline of the social sciences that covers a wide variety of different approaches related to applied linguistics and language education such as sociology: conversational analysis (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973) Sociolinguistics: ethnography (Hymes, 1974), variation theory by Labov (1972), Philosophy: Speech act theory (Austin, 1962) Education classroom discourse (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975), linguistics: Systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1976)

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