Welcome to my blog! Here you will find samples of my best discourse analyses and the set of resources I collected for my English 373 class. I’ve created a set of overviews, relating the work of discourse analysts to my future profession, speech pathology. I also have a page describing the tools that I am capable of using to perform discourse analyses, and many of those tools I will be able to utilize as a speech pathologist.
Discourse analysis is the study of how language is organized and used in spoken or written texts, and is closely related to stylistics, the study of literary texts by means of linguistics and rhetoric. According to James Paul Gee, discourse analysis is the study of how people use language to say, do, and be, and the “saying” of language comes from doing and being. This analysis can either be critical or descriptive. Descriptive discourse analysts have an inductive approach; they search for what is interesting in a piece of text and then analyze what that means for society (start with the micro level and move to macro). Critical discourse analysts, on the other hand, use a deductive approach (macro to micro), beginning with a type of social problem/inequality and analyzing the discourse practices that reflect or sustain that problem. Grammar, rhetoric, and linguistic theory overlap when conducting a discourse analysis. Discourse analysis can be quantitative or qualitative, investigating any feature of language, including sentence structure (grammar), figured worlds/worldviews, genre, etc. Discourse analysis involves questioning how the language of a specific situation is a part of Gee’s seven building tasks (connections/disconnections, identities, politics, practices, relationships, sign systems and knowledge); the tools of inquiry (situated meanings, social languages, figured worlds, intertextuality, Discourses, and Conversations) are used to ask questions about the building tasks.
My blog reflects discourse analysis in the variety of resources I have analyzed, and in the IMRAD reports I have edited and posted. The resources include both written and spoken language: oral stories, prose literature, poetry, and my best and worst academic writing. The IMRAD reports required me to do a descriptive discourse analysis; I made a hypothesis or research question regarding what I thought was interesting in the text, and then I analyzed what that interesting feature might mean in a larger context. Sometimes my methods were quantitative, such as when I made charts to keep track of the number of times a feature of language occurred, but other times my methods were more qualitative. My IMRAD report #4, based on one paragraph from a poorly written paper of mine, reflects how grammar is used in discourse analysis. IMRAD reports #5 and #8 reflect literary stylistics. IMRAD report #5 dealt with two features of language that discourse analysts are interested in: genre and rhetoric, and IMRAD report #8 involved identifying conceptual metaphors from my favorite story, and then noting their effects on the reader’s experience or understanding. Finally, IMRAD report #9 focused on analyzing Gee’s building task of relationships in a story my grandpa told me.
Discourse Analysis 