Discourse Analysis and Teaching English as a Foreign Language

This paper discusses the implications of discourse analysis for teaching English as a foreign language. The main purpose of the paper is to substantiate the notion of 'discourse competence' as an essential component of 'communicative competence' which we hope our students will eventually attain. Citing various works on discourse analysis in English as supporting evidence, the paper points out that such concepts as 'structure', 'well-formedness', 'corrigibility', and 'predictability' apply to discourse, and that discourse structures work as constraints on distributions and semantic/functional interpretations of linguistic expressions in discourse. It is argued that without knowledge of these aspects of discourse full communication would be difficult to achieve, if not impossible. In conclusion, the necessity of implementing the findings of discourse analysis in TEFL is emphasized, leaving the problem of 'how' as a subject for further studies