Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers DOUGLAS A. DEMO, CENTER FOR APPLIED LINGUISTICS What Is Discourse Analysis?

Discourse analysis is the examination of language use by members of a speech community. It involves looking at both language form and language function and includes the study of both spoken interaction and written texts. It identifies lin-guistic features that characterize different genres as well as social and cultural factors that aid in our interpretation and understanding of different texts and types of talk. A discourse analysis of written texts might include a study of topic devel-opment and cohesion across the sentences, while an analysis of spoken language might focus on these aspects plus turn-taking practices, opening and closing sequences of social en-counters, or narrative structure. The study of discourse has developed in a variety of disci-plines—sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. Thus discourse analysis takes different theoreti-cal perspectives and analytic approaches: speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communica-tion, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analy-sis (Schiffrin, 1994). Although each approach emphasizes dif-ferent aspects of language use, they all view language as so-cial interaction. This digest focuses on the application of discourse analy-sis to second language teaching and learning. It provides ex-amples of how teachers can improve their teaching practices by investigating actual language use both in and out of the classroom, and how students can learn language through exposure to different types of discourse. Detailed introduc-tions to discourse analysis, with special attention to the needs and experiences of language teachers, can be found in Celce