Republic of the Philippines
Commission on Higher Education
CHRIST THE KING COLLEGE
Calbayog City
Graduate Studies
MASTER OF ARTS IN EDUCATION MAJOR IN ENGLISH
Final Examination in ENGLISH 203
Oral and Written Discourse in Language Education
Name: MARFER JOY S. SALUDAR
Instructor: MS. HELEN RAMIREZ
Discuss briefly the following:
1. Discourse Data
In linguistics, discourse refers to a unit of language longer than a
single sentence. More broadly, discourse is the use of spoken or written
language in a social context. “Discourse is the way in which language
is used socially to convey broad historical meanings. It is the language
identified by the social conditions of its use, by who is using it and
under what conditions. Language can never be 'neutral' because it
bridges our personal and social worlds." Discourse cannot be confined
to sentential boundaries. It is something that goes beyond the limits of
sentence. In another words discourse is 'any coherent succession of
sentences, spoken or written' (Matthews, 2005:100). Discourse
analysis deals language in use: written text of all kinds and spoken
data. It received attention in different disciplines in the 1960s and early
1970s, including linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, psychology and
sociology.
2. Approaches to Discourse
3. Ethnography of Communication
The ethnography of communication (EOC), formerly called the
ethnography of speaking, is the analysis of communication within the
wider context of the social and cultural practices and beliefs of the
members of a particular culture or speech community. It is a method of
discourse analysis in linguistics that draws on the anthropological field
of ethnography. Unlike ethnography proper, though, EOC takes into
account both the communicative form, which may include but is not
limited to spoken language, and its function within the given culture.
General aims of this qualitative research method include being able to
discern which communication acts and/or codes are important to
different groups, what types of meanings groups apply to different
communication events, and how group members learn these codes, in
order to provide insight into particular communities. This additional
insight may be used to enhance communication with group members,
make sense of group members’ decisions, and distinguish groups from
one another, among other things. Dell Hymes proposed the
ethnography of communication as an approach towards analyzing
patterns of language use within speech communities, in order to
provide support for his idea of communicative competence, which itself
was a reaction to Noam Chomsky's distinction between linguistic
competence and linguistic performance.
Originally coined "ethnography of speaking" in Dell Hymes' eponymous
1962 paper, it was redefined in his 1964 paper, Introduction: Toward
Ethnographies of Communication to accommodate for the non-vocal
and non-verbal characteristics of communication, although most EOC
researchers still tend to focus upon speaking as it is generally
considered "to be a prominent - even primordial - means of
communication.”
4. Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the
ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics
encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in
interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy,
sociology, linguistics and anthropology. Unlike semantics, which
examines meaning that is conventional or "coded" in a given language,
pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only
on structural and linguistic knowledge (e.g., grammar, lexicon, etc.) of
the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, any
pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the
speaker, and other factors. In this respect, pragmatics explains how
language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since
meaning relies on the manner, place, time, etc. of an utterance. The
ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called
pragmatic competence.
The word pragmatics derives via Latin pragmaticus from the Greek
πραγματικός (pragmatikos), meaning amongst others "fit for action",
which comes from πρᾶγμα (pragma), "deed, act", and that from
πράσσω (prassō), "to do, to act, to pass over, to practise, to achieve".
5. Conversation Analysis
Conversation analysis is an approach to the study of social interaction
and talk-in-interaction that, although rooted in the sociological study of
everyday life, has exerted significant influence across the humanities
and social sciences including linguistics. Drawing on recordings (both
audio and video) naturalistic interaction (unscripted, non-elicited, etc.)
conversation analysts attempt to describe the stable practices and
underlying normative organizations of interaction by moving back and
forth between the close study of singular instances and the analysis of
patterns exhibited across collections of cases. Four important domains
of research within conversation analysis are turn-taking, repair, action
formation and ascription, and action sequencing.
6. Dialogic and Monologic Discourse
7. Speech Genres
8. Discourse and Cognition
9. Discourse Structure and Coherence
10. Computational Linguistics
