Discourse analysis is a term that has come to have different interpretations for scholars working in different disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it is concerned mainly with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation; for a psycholinguist, it is primarily concerned with the nature of comprehension of short written texts; for the computational linguist, it is concerned with producing operational models of text-understanding within highly limited contexts. In this textbook, first published in 1983, the authors provide an extensive overview of the many and diverse approaches to the study of discourse, but base their own approach centrally on the discipline which, to varying degrees, is common to them all - linguistics. Using a methodology which has much in common with descriptive linguistics, they offer a lucid and wide-ranging account of how forms of language are used in communication. Their principal concern is to examine how any language produced by man, whether spoken or written, is used to communicate for a purpose in a context.
Those familiar with the work of Gillian Brown and George Yule on Discourse Analysis might be expecting a book which deals with the applications of such analysis to teaching English. Insofar as this is true, the title of the book is misleading : discourse analysis is an ambiguous term which has been used to refer to (i) conversational analysis, or (ii) the process of producing language as opposed to 'text', the product (cf Robinson, 1980). Brown and Yule opt for the latter definition i.e. p. 57 &dquo;discourse is text interpreted in context&dquo;. Thus, the arguments in this book could well hold for written language, especially those on interpretation and assessment, despite the title. However; the book concentrates on speaking and listening i.e. conversation, so the title of the book is misleading -it is not a textbook or manual on speaking and listening skills, but rather an argument for certain types of speaking and listening activities to promote fluency and understanding. As such, the four chapters are like four separate articles on the following topics:1) Spoken vs written languagea summary.2) How to teach the use of long transactional turns.3) How to grade listening tasks. 4) How to assess speech and listening ability by using a measure of required information.The sub-titles are also misleading and often do not reflect the content of the sections. The book is given the appearance of being more comprehensive than it is.However, in the areas that it does tackle, it does admirably. It would more profitably have been titled:
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