Text Analysis (2)
Conversation Analysis
• Conversation involves people taking turns in speaking.
• Conversation Analysis (CA) appeared in the 1960s, represented by H. Sacks,
E. Schegloff and G. Jefferson.
• Sidnell (2010) mentions three special features of CA.
• 1. examine talk and interaction in relation to culture. For example, the
organization of repair, reference to persons.
• 2. examine individual psychology in interaction. For example, psychological
account of the hitches, pauses, restarts and so on.
• 3. emphasize the external features of the participants and the world in which
they live.
• Sidnell, J. 2010. Conversation Analysis: An Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell.
• CA uses actual instances of talk-in-interaction as data.
• Topics in CA
• Turn-taking
• Turn construction
• sequence
• Adjacency pairs
• Openings
• Closings
• Repair, complaint, compliment
Classroom Interaction
• Classroom interaction
• Lessons are highly structured.
• Sinclair and Coulthard (1992) use the theory of rank scale to study
classroom discourse.
• First step: adjacent utterances
• Utterance: everything said by one speaker before another began to speak
• Exchange: two or more utterances
• Move: a unit smaller than utterance
• Exchange = initiation + response + feedback
• Sinclair, J. and M. Coulthard, 1992. Towards an analysis of discourse. In M. Coulthard ed., Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis.
Routledge.
• Right, well, good, OK, now, …
• Sinclair and Coulthard (1992) also realize that these words can
indicate boundaries in the lesson and call them frame.
• Focus: metastatement about the discourse
• Transaction: a unit above exchange
• Lesson: the highest unit of classroom discourse
• Act: an element in moves
(Sinclair and Coulthard 1992:5)
• Acts: The lowest rank of discourse
• Three major acts -- elicitation, directive and informative – can
be found in spoken discourse. In classroom discourse they
appear as the heads of Initiating moves.
• In their unmarked forms, they can be realized by
interrogatives, imperatives and declaratives.
(Sinclair and Coulthard 1992:10)
• Sinclair and Coulthard (1992) propose three rules to predict
whether a declarative or interrogative is something other than
a statement or question.
• They notice the sequence of the teacher’s initiation followed
by a pupil’s responding move.
• Informative – acknowledge
• Directive – acknowledge (react)
• Elicitation – reply (comment)
• They also identify a list of all the acts.
• Marker (well), starter, elicitation, check (are you ready?),
directive, informative, prompt (go on), clue, cue, bid,
nomination, acknowledge, reply, react (non-linguistic),
comment, accept, evaluate, silent stress, metastatement,
conclusion, loop, aside.
Moves
• Moves are made up of acts.
• In classroom discourse, framing moves are
frequently used, often followed by focusing
moves.
• Opening moves, answering moves, follow-up.
Exchanges, Transactions and Lessons
• Two types of exchange:
• boundary (framing and focusing)
• Teaching
• Each exchange type has the structure of Initiation, Response
and Feedback.
• Transactions often begin with Preliminary exchange and end
with a Final exchange.
• The lesson consists of a series of transactions.
• This framework is very helpful for analyzing spoken discourse
and deserves our attention.
• Coulthard (1994) examines the writer-reader communication process and
proposes some principles for evaluating texts.
• An extract from an eight-page pamphlet is considered to fail on both the
ideational and the interpersonal levels.
• He resorts to imagined readers. Because without any knowledge of who the
reader is, it is impossible to decide what to write about.
• To show how the text can be improved, Coulthard (1994) analyzes signalling,
rhetorical structures (the general/particular pattern and the problem-solution
pattern) and textual definition of words.
• Coulthard, M. 1994. On analyzing and evaluating written text. In Malcolm Coulthard ed., Advances in Written Text Analysis.
Routledge.
• Sinclair (1994) argues that with a large amount of language data available, we should
re-examine our theory and descriptions.
• He mentions several points:
• we should be suspicious of projecting techniques.
• We should be open to the patterns observable in language in quantity.
• Text/discourse studies, speech acts and pragmatics
• For Sinclair (1994), a special discourse model should offer an explanation of those
features of discourse that are unique to it.
• As the units for study become larger, the computer can help.
• Sinclair, J. 1994. Trust the text. In M. Coulthard ed., Advances in Written Text Analysis. Routledge.
• Sinclair (1994) mentions that we can use the computer to test
new hypotheses over large stretches of text.
• Make good use of the powerful computing tools.
• We should trust the text. We should be open to what it may
tell us.
• Is corpus linguistics useful in text analysis?
• What kind of data do we need in text analysis?
• How can we collect data for text analysis?
