Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Discourse Analysis and its Discontents 31‘deconstruction’, typically reveal a rather considerable centering onthemselves have taken on a bizarre totemic status in various academicfields.Discourse analysis and its offspringDiscourse analysis is sometimes differentiated from conversationalanalysis; while the latter aims to assess how conversation ‘works’, theformer may involve more structural analysis (see also below). It may alsobe applied to written samples, although some use the term ‘text analysis’for this. As Stubbs (1983b) pointed out, early on, there is a good deal ofoverlap, not to say imprecision, in these terms. (Consider, by way ofcomparison, the common ground often trodden by the social psychologyof language, sociolinguistics and the sociology of language.) Stubbsargued for discourse analysis as the avenue for studying classroominteraction, and cited an increasing dissatisfaction with traditionalpsychological work based upon experimental manipulation; later, Stubbs(1986) provided a discussion of language and education in whichdiscourse analysis figured prominently (perhaps too prominently; seeViv Edwards, 1987). The thrust was given even more force by Potter andWetherell (1987), who argued that discourse analysis should be at thecenter of the whole social-psychological enterprise: they point out thatsocial life is, after all, largely a matter of discourse. Part of theirargument, however, was also to dismiss some of the traditional emphasesin the area (e.g. attitudes, particularly as elicited via questionnaires), andthis clearly struck a chord. Antaki (1988), for example, observed that theirwork could ‘rescue’ social psychology from its current laboratoryorientated‘sterility’ (see also Billig, 1988; Smith, 1988). Harré and Gillett(1994) and Harré and Stearns (1995) also discuss a new ‘discursive’psychology, meant to largely replace existing experimental paradigms. Ina review essay, Giles and Coupland (1989) offered a further assessment.While agreeing about the potentially significant role for discourseanalysis within social psychology, they cautioned against elevating ittoo highly, or too independently, over other worthwhile approaches. Andindeed, we should on principle be chary about new waves, and not beoverly quick to discard existing methods and insights; eclectic perspectives,ones that stress methodological triangulation, are almost alwayspreferable.A parallel development to the one advocated above has been thatwhich led from ‘ethnomethodology’ to ‘conversation analysis’, where thelatter obviously converges and often overlaps with discourse analysis.