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Discourse Analysis is a broad topic, it is a wide range ofdisciplines which are sometimes troublesome

So the engagement to this topic requires knowledge of allmodes of data analysis that took place before the emergenceof Discourse Analysis such as Contrastive Analysis, ErrorAnalysis, and Performance Analysis, fields which are mainlyconcerned with the study of language


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y Contrastive Analysis

This is a field of research which flourished in the 50s and 60s. Itemphasized the comparison of two languages__ the mother tongue of thelearner and the L2 that he/ she wants to learn. This endeavor wasmotivated by the then predominant belief that the acquisition of a

language is in essence the formation of unconscious verbal habits and willinevitably be influenced by the old set of habits__ i.e. the mother tongue.The L2 learner will transfer his old set of habits into the new linguisticcontext. Where L1 and L2 are similar, this transfer will be positive; wherethey are different, transfer will be negative.

This, in effect, equates the areas of difference between L1 and L2 withareas where the learner is going to meet with problems when learning L2.


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y An example of this is the Arab learner of English saying knife pocketinstead of pocket knife due to transfer from Arabic wich has reverseorderof head and modifier to that of English Arabic: Head+ Modifier

vs Modifier + Head in English


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A French learner of English has difficulty in pronouncing the English /0/ (as in

thin), because it does not exist in the phonological system of French as adistinctive sound. He usually replaces it with /s/. This is a case of negative

transfer. The learner has no otherwise problems with /s/, /k/, or /g/. We can

thus predict those areas of difficulty when we compare L1 and L2 and point out

those areas of difficulty between them. Now, if the errors that the L2 learner

commits are predicted as the result of the influence of the old set of habits on

his performance of L2, then we can concentrate on those areas of difference_

and hence difficulty_ in teaching L2. SLA is, therefore, the overcoming of the

differences between the two language systems.

In spite of its appeal, the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) __ as the above

set of assumptions has come to be called, was not without its flows andinadequacies. Two things are worth mentioning in this connection: vagueness in thedifficulty assumptions, and the validity of the errors basis (Lakhal Ayat 2008).


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A number of proponents of an error analysis approach claim that contrastive

analysis cannot serve as an adequate tool for identifying the areas of difficultyfor learners of a second language. But on the other hand, it has been noticed

that error analysis is not able to explain the avoidance phenomenon, since error

analysis registers only the errors done by learners of a second language

(Schatchter 1974). Avoidance behavior represents a communicative strategy of

a learner of a second language by which the learner prefers using a simplerform instead of target linguistic element for the reason of difficulty on the part

of the target feature. Consequently, avoidance behaviour serves as

manifestation of learning problems, and its results should be definitely

considered when compiling language syllabi and tests (laufer and Eliasson

1993). And since error analysis does not consider and is not able to explain the

avoidance phenomenon, it cannot be observed as an adequate approach forassisting teachers of a second language with learning materials (Elena Gluth)

Error Analysis

An example of that is the Arab learners who prefer using the active forminstead of the passive


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After Contrastive analysis and error analysis approaches,performance analysis took place. But it has been noticed thatthere is something which is quite missing. It is said that weshould focus on the input itself. i.e. what is given to students,

to what they are exposed. And since the input of the spokenlanguage is different from the input of the written language, itis better to expose students to discourse because in discourse,the focus is on what is said too and not on what is written only.All these approaches lead to the emergence of discourseAnalysis.


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A Brief Historical overview

Discourse analysis is concerned with the study of the relationship betweenlanguage and the contexts in which it is used. It grew out of work in differentdisciplines in the 1960s and early 1970s, including linguistics, semiotics,

psychology, anthropology and sociology. Discourse analysts study language in use:written texts of all kinds, and spoken data, from conversation to highlyinstitutionalised forms of talk. At a time when linguistics was largely concernedwith the analysis of single sentences, Zellig Harris published a paper with the title'Discourse analysis' (Harris 1952). Harris was interested in the distribution oflinguistic elements in extended texts, and the links between the text and its socialsituation, though his paper is a far cry from the discourse analysis we are used tonowadays. Also important in the early years was the emergence of semiotics andthe French structuralist approach to the study of narrative. In the 1960s, DellHymes provided a sociological perspective with the study of speech in its social

setting (e.g. Hymes 1964). The linguistic philosophers such as Austin (1962), Searle(1969) and Grice (1975) were also influential in the study of language as socialaction, reflected in speech-act theory and the formulation of conversationalmaxims, alongside the emergence of pragmatics, which is the study of meaning incontext (see Levinson 1983;Leech 1983).


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y British Discourse Analysis vs American Discourse analysisBritish discourse analysis was greatly inf luenced by M. A. K. Halliday's

functional approach to language (e.g. Halliday 1973), which in turn hasconnexions with the Prague School of linguists. Halliday's frameworkemphasises the social functions of language and the thematic andinformational structure of speech and writing. Also important in Britain

were Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) at the University ofBirmingham, whodeveloped a model for the description of teacher-pupil talk, based on a

hierarchy of discourse units. Other similar work has dealt with doctorpatient interaction, service encounters, interviews, debates and businessnegotiations, as well as monologues. Novel work in the British traditionhas also been done on intonation in discourse. The British work hasprincipally followed structural-linguistic criteria, on the basis of theisolation of units, and sets of rules defining well-formed sequences ofdiscourse.


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American discourse analysis has been dominated by work within the

ethnomethodological tradition, which emphasises the research method of closeobservation of groups of people communicating in natural setting examines typesof speech event such as storytelling, greeting rituals and verbal duels in differentcultural and social settings (e.g. Gumperz and Hymes 1972). What is often calledconversation analysis within the American tradition can also be included under the

general heading of discourse analysis. In conversational analysis, the emphasis isnot upon building structural models but on the close observation of the behaviourof participants in talk and on patterns which recur over a wide range of naturaldata. The work of Goffman (1976; 1979), and Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) isimportant in the study of conversational norms, turn-taking and other aspects ofspoken interaction. Alongside the conversation analysts, working within thesociolinguistic tradition, Labov's investigations of oral storytelling have alsocontributed to a long history of interest in narrative discourse. The American work

has produced a large number of descriptions of discourse types, as well as insightsinto the social constraints of politeness and face-preserving phenomena in talk,overlapping with British work in pragmatics. Also relevant to the development ofdiscourse analysis as a whole is the work of text grammarians, working mostly withwritten language


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The term 'discourse analysis' has come to be used with a widerange of meanings which cover a wide range of activities. It isused to describe activities at the intersection of disciplines asdiverse as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, philosophicallinguistics and computational linguistics. Scholars workingcentrally in these different disciplines tend to concentrate on

different aspects of discourse. Sociolinguists are particularlyconcerned with the structure of social interaction manifestedin conversation, and their descriptions emphasise features ofsocial context which are particularly amenable to sociologicalclassification. They are concerned with generalising across

'real' instances of language in use, and typically work withtranscribed spoken data.


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y Psycholinguists are particularly concerned with issues related

to language comprehension. They typically employ a tightmethodology derived from experimental psychology, whichinvestigates problems of comprehension in short constructedtexts or sequences of written sentences. Philosophicallinguists, and formal linguists, are particularly concerned with

semantic relationships between constructed pairs of sentencesand with their syntactic realisations. They are concerned, too,with relationships between sentences and the world in terms ofwhether or not sentences are used to make statements which

can be assigned truth-values. They typically investigate suchrelationships between constructed sentences attributed toarchetypal speakers addressing archetypal hearers in(minimally specified) archetypal contexts.


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Computational linguistsworking in this field areparticularly concerned with producing models ofdiscourse processing and are constrained, by theirmethodology, to working with short texts constructed in

highly limited contexts. It must be obvious that at thisrelatively early stage in the evolution of discourseanalysis, there is often rather little in common betweenthe various approaches except the discipline which theyall, to varying degrees, call upon: linguistics (Yule,Brown 1983).

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