DA Module 02 Modes of Discourse, Audience, and Communicative Purpose

Discourse Analysis Module 1: Entering the World of Discourse

⚡ Language, context, and the foundations of discourse analysis

Module Overview

Discourse analysis begins with a deceptively simple observation: people do not communicate through isolated sentences.

They use language to:

• act,
• relate,
• organize knowledge,
• position themselves, and
• respond to particular social situations.

During this opening week, you will become familiar with the course expectations while beginning to see language as situated action rather than merely a collection of grammatical forms.

The week moves from a diagnostic comparison of spoken and written texts to a historical overview of the field.

It also introduces the course’s transparent approach to generative artificial intelligence. AI may help locate starting points or stimulate questions, but responsibility for:

• interpretation,
• verification, and
• analytical judgment

remains with you.

By the end of the week, you should be able to explain why discourse analysis matters to future English teachers and how different traditions have shaped the questions analysts ask.

Essential Understandings

1. What changes when language is studied as discourse rather than as isolated sentences?
2. How can the historical development of discourse analysis inform contemporary English language teaching?

Guiding Questions

1. What problems were early discourse analysts trying to solve?
2. How do structural and functional perspectives differ in what they treat as evidence?
3. What is the relationship among text, discourse, context, and communicative purpose?

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

4. Explain the course objective, assessment structure, academic-integrity expectations, and approved uses of GenAI.
5. Distinguish preliminary meanings of text, discourse, sentence, context, and communicative event.
6. Organize major historical milestones and theoretical orientations in discourse analysis.
7. Connect at least two discourse-analytic traditions to possible applications in English language teaching.
8. Begin an AI planning appendix that records prompts, starting resources, verification decisions, and independent conclusions.

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Key Concepts and Vocabulary

Term	Working definition
Discourse analysis	The systematic study of language in use, including how meaning depends on textual, interactional, social, and cultural context.
Text	A stretch of spoken, written, or multimodal language treated as an analyzable product.
Discourse	Language understood as situated meaning-making, social action, and interaction.
Context	The linguistic, situational, social, cultural, and historical conditions that shape interpretation.
Co-text	The language immediately surrounding an expression within a text or interaction.
Structural perspective	An orientation that examines patterns, units, and formal organization beyond the sentence.
Functional perspective	An orientation that asks what language choices accomplish in communicative situations.
Communicative event	A socially recognizable occasion in which participants use language for particular purposes.
ELT	English language teaching, the professional context in which course concepts will be applied.
AI planning appendix	A transparent record of approved AI-assisted brainstorming or resource discovery completed before the student’s independent analysis.

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Main Chapter Content

1. Language Beyond the Sentence

Traditional grammar provides essential tools for describing:

• clauses,
• phrases,
• word classes, and
• sentence patterns.

Yet successful communication depends on more than grammatical well-formedness.

A sequence of correct sentences can still feel:

• confusing,
• inappropriate,
• evasive,
• rude, or
• disconnected.

Conversely, speakers regularly produce fragments, repetitions, pauses, and incomplete clauses that listeners understand without difficulty.

Discourse analysis addresses this wider level of meaning. It asks how stretches of language become interpretable as:

• explanations,
• stories,
• requests,
• arguments,
• lessons,
• interviews,
• jokes, or
• classroom exchanges.

The unit of analysis therefore expands.

Instead of asking only whether a sentence is correct, an analyst may ask:

• Who produced it?
• For whom?
• In what setting?
• After what previous turn?
• Through which medium?
• With what likely purpose?

Consider:

“That window is still open.”

In a grammar exercise, it is a declarative sentence in the present tense.

In different contexts, however, it may function as:

• an indirect request in a cold classroom,
• a report of procedural failure during a security inspection, or
• a device for creating suspense in a story.

Its communicative force emerges from the relationship between linguistic form and context.

This broader view is especially important for future English teachers. Learners need grammatical resources, but they also need to understand how those resources work across connected discourse.

They must recognize:

• how speakers open and close conversations,
• how writers guide readers through arguments,
• how politeness is negotiated, and
• how genre conventions shape expectations.

Discourse analysis makes these normally invisible patterns available for teaching.

2. Text, Discourse, and Context

The terms text and discourse are sometimes used interchangeably, but a productive working distinction can guide analysis.

Text can be treated as the observable record:

• words,
• clauses,
• turns,
• paragraphs,
• images, and
• other semiotic elements available for examination.

Discourse emphasizes the interpretive and social process through which that record becomes meaningful.

For example:

• A transcript is a text.
• The negotiation of authority, identity, politeness, or shared knowledge within it is part of its discourse.

Context is not decorative background.

It actively constrains interpretation.

Different dimensions include:

• Linguistic context / co-text: what comes before and after an expression.
• Situational context: participants, location, medium, activity, and immediate purpose.
• Social context: roles and relationships such as teacher–student, friend–friend, customer–employee, or expert–novice.
• Cultural and historical context: broader conventions and assumptions that participants may share unevenly.

Analysts must avoid treating context as unlimited.

An analysis becomes weak when every feature is explained by invoking vague ideas such as “culture” or unknowable intentions.

Strong analysis identifies the contextual evidence needed for a specific claim.

For example, a change from:

“Could you possibly…?”

to:

“Do this now.”

may be related to:

• power,
• urgency,
• genre, or
• interpersonal distance.

However, the analyst must show how the text and situation support that interpretation.

3. A Brief Map of the Field

Discourse analysis developed through several overlapping traditions rather than a single unified theory.

Structural approaches

• Extend linguistic description beyond the sentence.
• Examine how larger units are organized.

Functional approaches

Examine what language does, including:

• requesting,
• informing,
• persuading,
• evaluating,
• maintaining relationships, and
• organizing experience.

Pragmatics

Examines meaning in context, including:

• implied meanings,
• speech acts, and
• contextual interpretation.

Conversation analysis

Focuses closely on the sequential organization of naturally occurring talk.

Systemic-functional approaches

Connect grammatical choices to meanings and social functions.

Critical traditions

Examine how discourse participates in:

• ideology,
• identity,
• inequality, and
• institutional power.

These traditions ask different questions and often work with different kinds of data.

For example:

• A structural analysis might identify cohesive links across a paragraph.
• A functional analysis might explain how those links support an argument.
• A pragmatic analysis might examine an indirect request.
• A conversation analyst might examine how the next speaker responds.
• A critical analysis might ask whose interests are served by institutional interactional norms.

The purpose of the historical timeline is not to memorize a parade of names.

The purpose is to notice how definitions of language and evidence have broadened.

Each approach highlights some features while backgrounding others.

Future teachers benefit from methodological flexibility because different classroom problems require different analytical lenses.

4. Discourse Analysis as Professional Knowledge for ELT

Discourse analysis contributes to English language teaching in at least four ways.

1. Material selection

Teachers can evaluate:

• whether dialogues sound interactionally plausible,
• whether reading passages display expected organizational patterns, and
• whether model texts represent realistic genres.

2. Instruction

Teachers can make visible:

• cohesive devices,
• thematic progression,
• speech acts,
• conversational repair, and
• rhetorical patterns.

3. Classroom interaction

Teachers can examine:

• wait time,
• questioning patterns,
• turn allocation,
• feedback moves, and
• the balance between transactional instruction and relationship-building talk.

4. Assessment

Instead of evaluating only sentence-level accuracy, teachers can examine:

• coherence,
• register,
• stance,
• audience awareness,
• pragmatic appropriateness, and
• management of extended turns.

Professional application requires caution.

An analyst should not:

• present one sample as representative of an entire community,
• confuse personal preference with a discourse norm, or
• prescribe a single “correct” style when multiple conventions are legitimate.

The goal is to use analysis to expand learners’ choices and interpretive awareness, not to erase identities or enforce unexamined native-speaker norms.

5. Transparent AI-Supported Planning

This week introduces Level 2 AI use: planning support.

An approved GenAI tool may help:

• brainstorm historical theories,
• propose search terms, or
• locate possible authentic samples.

It may not replace:

• student reading,
• source evaluation, or
• analytical conclusions.

A plausible AI response is not automatically an accurate response.

Models may:

• merge traditions,
• invent references,
• oversimplify debates, or
• describe non-existent examples.

The AI planning appendix makes the process visible.

Record:

1. the exact prompt,
2. useful ideas returned,
3. sources independently checked, and
4. decisions you made.

Distinguish discovery from evidence.

An AI suggestion may point toward a scholar or concept, but an assigned text or verified publication must support the claim.

Also record rejected suggestions and explain why they were unsuitable.

Your shared knowledge base in Capacities.io should similarly show relationships rather than a copied list.

Connect each historical orientation to:

• typical questions,
• preferred data,
• analytical concepts, and
• potential ELT applications.

The final map should represent your understanding.

Technology supports organization; it does not supply ownership of the ideas.

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Tuesday — 9:00 AM–10:00 AM

Course Setup

1. Review ICTs.
   • Capacities
   • Microsoft Teams: fiq6tmo
2. Review the syllabus.
3. Complete the Learner Expectations and Course Readiness Survey.
4. Update or add your profile picture in Teams.

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Wednesday — 9:00 AM–10:00 AM

Reading for This Week

Chapter 1 from Celce-Murcia (2000), Discourse and Context

Preparation

Complete the Learner Expectations and Course Readiness Survey if you have not already done so.

Oral–Literacy Continuum

Consider types of discourse along an oral–literacy continuum.

Orientation	Spoken channel examples
Orate	Conversation
Literate	Lectures, sermons, speeches

Lecture

DA Week 1 Lecture Outline: Entering the World of Discourse

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Thursday — 9:00 AM–10:00 AM

Discussion Questions

1. Think of someone you know. How do they identify themselves through their use of language, perhaps because of their age, their job, or some other contextual factors?
2. Which is more important in learning a language: linguistic (grammatical) competence or communicative competence?
3. How might language teachers be empowered by understanding and employing discourse as a major focus in their language teaching?

Tools for Transcribing YouTube Videos

4. YouTube transcript
5. Tactiq / DownSub
6. TurboScribe

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Friday — 9:00 AM–10:00 AM

Begin Week 1 Task

1. Find a partner, work in trios, or form groups of four.
2. Begin working with the handout as a whole group.
3. Begin the Week 1 task.