Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Discourse Analysis and its Discontents 33(2003) makes the reasonable claim that conversation analysis can provediagnostically useful in some studies of aphasia; this can, of course, onlyoccur with a base knowledge of the talk of ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ people(see also Čmejrková & Prevignano, 2003). While this may be a goodexample of the usefulness of conversational-analytic procedures, it alsohighlights potential shortcomings.Conversation analysis has been applied in all sorts of settings, but it isclearly of greater potential use in situations that can draw upon reflectivestudy: more applicable, then, in clinical speech analyses than in (say)emergency telephone calls to police or fire departments. (Speech analystsof various stripes very much enjoy getting to grips with dramatic ‘realworld’exchanges.) Even scholarly insights into doctor-patient or lawyerclientintercourse are likely to allow for less contemplative analysis. Toput it another way: the reams of conversational-analytic literature are notlikely to come into play in the immediacy of important and/or highlyemotional settings; they may allow (as Lesser implies, for example) somecomparative insights when time permits. But consider this: when timepermits, we are all pretty good at figuring out what conversations reallymean. We have been learning all about this, all about reading (orlistening) between the lines, from a very early age. We typically do notemploy our more or less automatic skills here with the jargon ofacademic speech analysis, but this does not seem to have hindered usvery much. Now, one could argue that a formalization of our interpretativeexercises might be very useful in-depth analyses, perhaps,presented back to us in ways that refine and improve our skills. This istheoretically so, but since conversation analysis, like its sister subdisciplines,has increasingly become a rarefied parlor game for enthusiasts,we ought not to bank upon revelation any time soon.In a further iteration, ‘critical discourse analysis’ (CDA) has become avery popular format for the analysis of speech and language. Blommaert(2005) tells us that it is the most ‘visible’ of the current approaches to thestudy of language in society. There are, of course, others: anthropologicallinguistics, sociolinguistics, the sociology/social psychology of languageand other more traditional avenues of enquiry. But since CDA is a fieldwhose main arenas are those of ‘political discourse, media, advertisement,ideology, racism [and] institutional discourse’ (Blommaert, 2005:21), it has clearly positioned itself to be timely and relevant. It is notideologically neutral, of course. Concerned with real problems in the realworld, more specifically with the illumination and redress of socialinequality, it was ‘perceived by many as liberating, because it wasupfront about its own, explicitly left-wing, political commitment’