Defining Discourse Analysis: How the Focus Has Shifted Over Time
Lecture focus: Discourse analysis has expanded from the formal study of connected text to the study of language as contextualized, social, ideological, multimodal, and digitally mediated action.
Main sources: Celce-Murcia & Olshtain (2000), Flowerdew (2013), and Paltridge (2022)
Essential Question
How has the meaning of “discourse analysis” changed as scholars have changed what they believe counts as meaningful language?
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this lecture, you should be able to:
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define discourse and discourse analysis in contemporary applied linguistics;
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explain why discourse analysis goes beyond the sentence without ignoring grammar;
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identify major shifts in the field from the 1950s to the present;
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distinguish several major objects of discourse analysis, including text, interaction, genre, social practice, power, multimodality, and digital communication; and
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explain why discourse analysis matters for English language teaching and teacher education.
Opening: What Changes When We Move Beyond the Sentence?
Consider this sentence:
That was a great class.
Grammatically, the sentence is straightforward. But what does it actually mean?
It could be sincere praise. It could be sarcasm after a disastrous lesson. It could be a teacher evaluating students, a student speaking to a friend, or a comment posted online. Its interpretation depends on who said it, to whom, where, when, why, what came before it, and how it was expressed.
That gap between the grammatical sentence and meaning-in-use is where discourse analysis begins.
Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000) are especially useful for language teachers because they connect discourse with pragmatics, communicative competence, authentic language use, and the social and cultural conditions in which communication occurs. Flowerdew (2013) broadens the picture by showing how multiple traditions in discourse studies can be applied to English language education. Paltridge (2022) presents the contemporary field as explicitly plural: discourse can be studied through society, pragmatics, genre, conversation, grammar, corpora, multimodality, digital media, and critical perspectives.
The important point is that the field has not moved through a series of completely separate definitions. Its analytical lens has widened.
A Timeline of Discourse Analysis
| Period | Main analytical question | What counted as important? | Shift in focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1950s | How is language organized beyond a single sentence? | Connected speech and writing; recurring linguistic patterns | Sentence → extended text |
| 1960s–1970s | How does language function in real interaction? | Speech acts, context, communicative function, turn-taking, cohesion, social meaning | Text → language in use |
| 1980s–1990s | How do communities and institutions shape discourse? | Genre, register, academic/professional discourse, identity, ideology, power | Use → social practice |
| 2000s | How can discourse knowledge support communicative language teaching? | Authentic texts, pragmatics, communicative competence, discourse-level teaching and assessment | Description → pedagogical application |
| 2010s | How can multiple discourse traditions inform language education? | SFL, pragmatics, conversation analysis, genre, CDA, corpus linguistics, learner and classroom discourse | Single approach → multiple complementary approaches |
| 2020s | How is meaning made across modes, media, languages, and communities? | Multimodality, digital media, corpora, linguistic landscapes, translanguaging, global communication | Language alone → complex semiotic and digital ecosystems |
Important: These stages overlap. Newer approaches usually add analytical possibilities rather than make earlier approaches obsolete.
1. The 1950s: From the Sentence to Connected Discourse
One conventional starting point is Zellig Harris’s 1952 article “Discourse Analysis.” Harris proposed a formal method for examining connected speech or writing. The significance of this move was substantial: linguists no longer had to treat the sentence as the largest meaningful unit of analysis.
At this early stage, discourse analysis was still closely connected to structural linguistics. The analyst was primarily interested in the organization and distribution of linguistic forms across a stretch of text.
The key shift
Before: What is the structure of this sentence?
Now: How are sentences connected and patterned across a larger text?
This remains important today. Contemporary discourse analysts still study cohesion, reference, lexical patterns, thematic development, and grammatical choices across texts. What changed later was the realization that textual structure alone cannot explain why language means what it does.
2. The 1960s–1970s: Language Becomes Action and Interaction
During the following decades, the focus widened considerably. Scholars working in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, systemic functional linguistics, ethnography of communication, and conversation analysis increasingly treated language as something people do in social situations.
A sentence could no longer be fully understood only through its grammatical structure. Analysts began asking questions such as:
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What action is the speaker performing?
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What does the listener infer?
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How does context change meaning?
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How do speakers manage turns?
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How do participants signal politeness, agreement, disagreement, requests, refusals, or repair?
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How does language vary according to social situation and communicative purpose?
Conversation Analysis, for example, demonstrated that everyday talk has systematic organization. Work such as Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s study of turn-taking showed that ordinary conversation is not random: participants collaboratively organize who speaks, when turns change, and how sequences develop.
Systemic functional perspectives likewise encouraged analysts to see grammar not only as structure but as a resource for making meaning in social contexts.
The key shift
Connected text → language performing actions within interaction and context
This shift is central to Celce-Murcia and Olshtain’s (2000) pedagogical view. Learners need more than accurate sentences. They need to understand how linguistic resources work together with discourse, pragmatics, participants, and sociocultural expectations.
3. The 1980s–1990s: Discourse as Social Practice
As the field developed, analysts increasingly asked not only how communication works, but also whose purposes it serves.
This period saw growing interest in:
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genre and discourse communities;
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academic and professional communication;
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institutional discourse;
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identity and positioning;
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ideology;
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inequality and power; and
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the relationship between linguistic choices and broader social structures.
Critical Discourse Analysis became especially influential by treating discourse as connected to social power. Instead of analyzing a political speech, news article, policy document, or classroom interaction only for its organization, a critical analyst might ask:
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Which perspectives are presented as normal or authoritative?
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Who is represented as responsible or passive?
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Whose voices are included or excluded?
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What assumptions are treated as common sense?
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How might discourse reproduce or challenge inequality?
At the same time, genre-oriented work made it increasingly clear that recurring texts—research articles, lectures, job interviews, news reports, classroom tasks—are shaped by the expectations and purposes of particular communities.
The key shift
Language in context → language embedded in communities, institutions, identities, ideology, and power
Discourse analysis therefore became more interdisciplinary. Linguistic form remained important, but analysts increasingly connected textual evidence to social explanation.
4. Around 2000: Discourse Analysis Moves Directly into Language Teaching
For our purposes as language educators, Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000) represent an especially important moment. Their central argument is pedagogical: if the goal of language teaching is communicative ability, then learners must encounter language at the discourse level.
Their perspective brings together:
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discourse and pragmatics;
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grammar, vocabulary, and phonology;
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listening, speaking, reading, and writing;
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bottom-up and top-down processing;
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authentic texts and interactional events;
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sociocultural appropriateness; and
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curriculum, assessment, and teacher development.
This matters because a learner can produce a sentence that is grammatically correct yet communicatively inappropriate.
For example:
Give me your notes.
The sentence is structurally correct. But whether it works communicatively depends on the relationship between speakers, the situation, intonation, expectations of politeness, preceding talk, and the speaker’s intended action.
Celce-Murcia and Olshtain therefore help move language teaching from correct sentence production toward effective discourse participation.
The key shift
Knowing English → knowing how to use English appropriately and coherently in communicative events
For teacher education, this is fundamental: grammar is not removed from instruction; it is recontextualized as one resource among several that speakers and writers use to construct discourse.
5. The 2010s: Multiple Approaches Become a Strength
Flowerdew’s (2013) Discourse in English Language Education shows how broad the field had become. Rather than proposing one single method, Flowerdew brings together major traditions including:
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Systemic Functional Linguistics and register;
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speech acts and pragmatics;
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the Cooperative Principle and politeness;
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Conversation Analysis;
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Genre Analysis;
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Critical Discourse Analysis; and
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Corpus Linguistics.
He applies these perspectives to discourse from settings such as casual conversation, newspapers, classrooms, blogs, and learner texts.
This pluralism is important. Different research questions require different analytical tools.
If we ask How do students take turns in group work?, Conversation Analysis may be useful.
If we ask How is a research article organized to achieve its communicative purpose?, Genre Analysis may be more appropriate.
If we ask How does a textbook represent gender, migration, or social class?, Critical Discourse Analysis might be productive.
If we ask What linguistic patterns repeatedly occur across hundreds of academic texts?, Corpus Linguistics may provide the necessary evidence.
The key shift
“Which discourse analysis is correct?” → “Which approach best answers this discourse question?”
Flowerdew’s contribution is particularly valuable for language education because it demonstrates that discourse analysis can bridge theory, authentic language data, classroom practice, and learner development.
6. The 2020s: Multimodal, Digital, Global, and Methodologically Diverse
Paltridge’s third edition (2022) makes the contemporary expansion especially visible. The book includes discourse and society, pragmatics, genre, conversation, discourse grammar, corpus approaches, multimodal discourse, digital media, and Critical Discourse Analysis. It also incorporates newer areas such as English as a lingua franca, linguistic landscapes, and translanguaging.
This tells us something important about what now counts as discourse.
A contemporary discourse analyst might study:
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a classroom conversation;
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a research article;
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an Instagram post;
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a political speech;
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a YouTube video;
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a university website;
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an online discussion forum;
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a bilingual public sign;
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a corpus containing millions of words; or
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interaction where speakers move strategically across languages and modes.
Meaning may be distributed across words, images, layout, gesture, sound, typography, hyperlinks, platform conventions, and audience participation.
The key shift
Discourse as primarily spoken/written language → discourse as socially situated meaning-making across modes and media
The field has therefore become more—not less—linguistic. The difference is that linguistic evidence is now commonly interpreted in relation to a much larger communicative environment.
So, What Is Discourse Analysis?
A useful contemporary definition for this course is:
Discourse analysis is the systematic study of how people use linguistic and other meaning-making resources across stretches of communication to perform actions, construct relationships and identities, organize texts and interactions, participate in social practices, and reproduce or challenge ways of understanding the world.
We can unpack this definition into five layers:
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Language beyond isolated sentences — how parts of texts and interactions connect.
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Language in context — how situation, participants, purpose, and shared knowledge affect meaning.
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Language as action — how people request, persuade, position, evaluate, explain, resist, teach, and interact.
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Language as social practice — how discourse relates to communities, institutions, genres, identities, ideology, and power.
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Meaning across modes and media — how language interacts with image, sound, gesture, layout, technology, and multilingual resources.
This layered definition reflects the trajectory visible across Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000), Flowerdew (2013), and Paltridge (2022): the object of study keeps expanding while language-in-use remains at the center.
A Useful Contrast: Sentence Analysis vs. Discourse Analysis
Suppose a university teacher says:
You might want to reconsider that argument.
A sentence-level analysis might examine:
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modal verb: might;
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infinitive: to reconsider;
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demonstrative: that;
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noun phrase: that argument.
A discourse analysis might additionally ask:
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Is this actually a suggestion, criticism, or indirect instruction?
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Why does the teacher use might instead of must?
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What power relationship exists between teacher and student?
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What happened earlier in the interaction?
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How would intonation change the interpretation?
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Is this form conventional in academic feedback?
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How might an English learner interpret the indirectness?
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Would the same wording function similarly in written feedback and face-to-face conversation?
Discourse analysis does not replace grammatical analysis. It asks what those grammatical choices are doing in a particular communicative event.
Why This Matters for Language Teachers
From the perspective of these three core texts, discourse analysis gives teachers a way to move from teaching forms toward teaching forms-in-use.
It helps us ask:
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Are learners producing isolated correct sentences or coherent texts?
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Can they recognize the communicative purpose of a genre?
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Do they understand indirect meaning and pragmatic expectations?
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Can they enter, maintain, and close conversations?
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Can they adjust language according to audience and context?
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Can they recognize how language positions people and perspectives?
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Can they interpret multimodal and digital texts critically?
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Can they notice how real English differs from simplified textbook examples?
For teacher trainers, discourse analysis also makes the classroom itself analyzable. We can study teacher questions, wait time, feedback, turn allocation, task instructions, learner participation, and the language through which authority and identities are constructed.
Mini-Activity: Watch the Lens Expand
Read the short exchange:
Teacher: You finished already?
Student: Kind of.
Teacher: Right. Take another look at the conclusion.
With a partner, analyze the exchange through four progressively wider lenses:
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Text/Form: What grammatical and lexical choices do you notice?
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Pragmatics/Interaction: What does each speaker appear to mean rather than simply say?
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Social Context: What does the teacher–student relationship contribute to the interpretation?
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Critical/Pedagogical Lens: How is authority exercised? What kind of learner participation does the interaction invite?
Debrief
Notice that the words themselves did not change. Our analytical questions changed. That is also a useful way to understand the history of discourse analysis.
Key Takeaway
The history of discourse analysis can be remembered as an expanding set of questions:
How is this text organized?↓What are people doing with language here?↓How does context shape what this means?↓How does this discourse participate in a social practice?↓How are identity, ideology, and power involved?↓How is meaning distributed across modes, media, languages, and communities?
The field has moved from treating discourse primarily as language beyond the sentence toward understanding it as contextualized social meaning-making.
But the earlier questions have not disappeared. A contemporary discourse analyst may still examine grammar, cohesion, lexical patterns, or textual organization. The difference is that these features can now be connected to interaction, purpose, genre, identity, social practice, power, multimodality, and pedagogy.
Exit Question
Choose one familiar text or interaction—a classroom exchange, social-media post, assignment prompt, news headline, email, advertisement, or research abstract.
What could a discourse analyst learn from it that a sentence-level grammatical analysis alone would probably miss?
References
Celce-Murcia, M., & Olshtain, E. (2000). Discourse and context in language teaching: A guide for language teachers. Cambridge University Press.
Flowerdew, J. (2013). Discourse in English language education. Routledge.
Paltridge, B. (2022). Discourse analysis: An introduction (3rd ed.). Bloomsbury Academic.
Historical landmarks referenced in the timeline
Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. Longman.
Harris, Z. S. (1952). Discourse analysis. Language, 28(1), 1–30.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735.