Discourse Analysis and Foreign Language Teacher Education
THE STUDY
Course description
In the 1990s I taught a graduate seminar on DA in a “national canonical” (Byrnes, 2002, p. 26) FL department at a university in the United States. The purposes of the seminar were (a) to introduce students of applied linguistics and literature to the field of DA as a research methodology, (b) to enable student-teachers of language to gain a better understanding of the characteristics and ramifications of FL classroom discourse in context, and (c) to enable student-teachers of language to use DA in the teaching and explication of (literary) texts in the FL classroom. Ideally, the achievement of these first three objectives should lead to a fourth, namely, an understanding of the mutually coconstituitive relationship of language and reality. Such an understanding might facilitate a conceptualization of language-as-discourse as opposed to language-as-skills (e.g., McCarthy & Carter, 1994).
We began by reading Schiffrin (1994) who provides a general introduction to various approaches to discourse such as interactional sociolinguistics and ethnography of communication. These approaches are exemplified by detailed linguistic analyses of various data sets including casual conversation and reference desk interviews. Students also were required to video-tape and transcribe a 50-minute language class in order to identify and elucidate various discourse phenomena (e.g., silence, laughter, backchannel signals, turn-taking mechanisms) described in Hatch (1992). Next, we focused on a discourse-sensitive approach to the examination of literature based, in part, in systemic functional linguistics (Fowler, 1996) and the discourse analytic didacticization of ‘literary’ texts for use in the language classroom. This phase of the course was rich in hands-on, in-class activities in which concepts introduced in Fowler (1996) were applied to particular literary texts. For example, the opening paragraphs of Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung were analyzed for point of view; ‘danger of death’ narratives (Fleischman, 1990, pp. 318-326) were analyzed with respect to Labov’s (1972) elements of narrative structure; and Allen Ginsberg’s poem A Supermarket in California was scripted and performed (Cazden, 1992) in order to demonstrate the Bakhtinian (1981) concept of heteroglossia or multi-voicedness.
