An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

Table 3.3 Four vocabulary learning strands
Complete the table by putting the following activities into the appropriate 
strand. Be prepared to justify your choices by referring to the criteria in Column 2.
What strands do these activities fit into?
• 10 minute writing. (The learners write for 10 minutes each day on very easy 
topics. The best learner is the one who writes the most.)
• 4/3/2 (The learners give the same talk to three different learners one after the 
other having 4 minutes for the first delivery, 3 minutes for the second and 
2 minutes for the third.)
• Communication activities.
• Communication activities with written input.
• Direct learning.
• Direct teaching of vocabulary.
• Intensive reading.
• Linked skills. (For example, read about a topic, then talk about it and then write 
about it.)
• Listening to easy input.
• Listening to stories.
• Prepared writing.
• Reading easy graded readers.
• Reading graded readers.
• Rehearsed tasks.
• Repeated reading.
• Speed reading.
• Training in vocabulary strategies.

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Discourse Analysis
Michael McCarthy
University of Nottingham
Christian Matthiessen
Macquarie University
Diana Slade
University of Technology, Sydney
What is Discourse Analysis?
Life is a constant flow of discourse – of language functioning in one of the many 
contexts that together make up a culture. Consider an ordinary day. It will, very 
likely, start with discourse (for example, greeting members of the household and 
some item of news from the radio, TV, world wide web or printed newspaper) before 
individuals rush off to go to work or school. The day then continues with a variety 
of discourse in these institutions: discussing plans at a business meeting, writing 
an undergraduate psychology essay in the university library, ordering lunch at 
a fast food outlet. (The day may, of course, include contexts that are not part of 
daily life, both private ones, such as a consultation with a medical specialist, and 
public ones, such as the inaugural speech by a newly elected official.) As the day 
outside the home draws to a close, the members of the household come together 
again, quite possibly sitting down for a joint meal with enough time to review the 
day and dream about the future.
If you try to document, in a ‘discourse diary’, the flow of discourse over a 
few days, you will get a good sense of the extent to which life is ‘made up of’ 
discourse, and of the extraordinary range of contexts in which you engage in 
communication. This will also give a good indication of the diverse demands on 
language faced by language learners: learning how to engage in discourse is one 
of the most important goals in language learning and teaching. This means that 
the study of discourse is absolutely central to the concerns of applied linguistics; 
and as a language student or language teacher it is very helpful to ‘develop an ear’ 
for discourse – to learn to attend to the different strands of patterning in discourse 
and to focus on those contexts and linguistic strategies that are most immediately 
relevant.
Because of its pervasiveness in life, discourse is studied in a number of different 
disciplines (see below). In the field of applied linguistics, the most relevant body 
of work is that which has come to be known as ‘discourse analysis’ (or ‘text 
linguistics’). The discourse analyst studies texts, whether spoken or written, 
whether long or short, and is interested in the relationship between texts and 
the contexts in which they arise and operate. Discourse
analysts always look 
at real texts – and in this they differ significantly from formal (as opposed to 
functional) grammarians and philosophers of language, since these scholars tend 
to work with invented (constructed) examples. In addition, discourse analysts 
study language independently of the notion of the sentence, typically studying 
longer passages of text, whereas grammarians traditionally do not work beyond 
the written sentence. In other words, discourse analysts work with ‘utterances’ 
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54 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
(sequences of words written or spoken in specific contexts), whereas grammarians 
tend to work with ‘sentences’ (sequences of words conforming, or not, to the rules 
of grammar for the construction of phrases, clauses, etc.). Discourse analysts focus 
on the following questions when analysing texts:
• Who are the participants in the discourse, that is, the writer and reader(s), the 
speaker(s) and listener(s)? What is their relationship? Is it one between equals? 
Are there differences in power or knowledge between the participants? What 
are their goals? (A formal grammarian does not usually take any of these factors 
into account when working with out-of-context sentences.)
• How do we know what writers and speakers mean? More specifically, discourse 
analysts ask ‘What does this piece of language mean in this context?’ and ‘What 
does the speaker/writer mean by this piece of language?’ What factors enable 
us to interpret the text? What do we need to know about the context? What 
clues are there in the surrounding text which will enable us to apprehend the 
meaning? (In contrast, a formal grammarian can ask the question ‘What does 
this sentence mean?’, and a lexicologist can ask ‘What does this word mean?’, 
independently of context.)
The important position that discourse analysis occupies in applied linguistics has 
come about because it enables applied linguists to analyse and understand real 
language data, for example, texts written by first and second language learners, or 
recordings of the spoken output of second language learners, or of the interaction 
between teachers and learners or among learners themselves in classrooms. It also 
enables us to understand better the kinds of discourse that language learners are 
exposed to outside the classroom: the language of service encounters in shops, 
banks, restaurants, etc., the language of newspapers, the language of everyday 
informal conversation. In addition, such analyses can assist language teachers and 
materials writers to evaluate language course books in terms of how closely they 
approximate authentic language, or what needs to be modified when authentic 
texts are brought into the classroom. Language testing can also gain a great deal 
from looking at real language use as a source of criteria for the evaluation of test 
performances.
Speaking and Writing
Discourse analysis is the analysis of language in its social context. Discourse 
analysts are just as interested in the analysis of spoken discourse as they are in 
the analysis of written discourse. When the focus in linguistics was primarily 
on written language and restricted to the study of isolated sentences, spoken 
language was seen as formless and ungrammatical and written language as 
highly structured and organized. Beattie (1983) wrote: ‘Spontaneous speech is 
unlike written text. It contains many mistakes, sentences are unusually brief 
and indeed the whole fabric of verbal expression is riddled with hesitations 
and silences’ (Beattie, 1983: 33). However, research on the analysis of spoken 
discourse (Halliday, 1985; Eggins and Slade, 1997; McCarthy, 1998) shows that 
spoken English does have a consistent and describable structure and that in 
many respects the language patterning is the same as written English. Halliday 
(1985: 77) provides an explanation for the myth of the ‘formlessness’ of spoken 
language, arguing that it derives from the analysis of written transcriptions of 
conversation, with all their pauses, repetitions and false starts. He contends that 

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55
Discourse Analysis
an author’s first draft, with its crossings-out and re-writings, would look just as 
ramshackle. Beneath its surface ‘imperfections’ (which are an essential part of its 
dynamic flexibility) spoken language exhibits a highly elaborate organization, 
and is grammatically intricate, though in a way which is quite different from the 
language which we read and write.
One way of approaching differences between speaking and writing is to plot 
individual texts along scales or dimensions. Figure 4.1 maps different kinds of 
spoken and written texts along such a scale. At one end of the scale, we have 
the most informal, concrete, interactions and, at the other, the most formal and 
abstract interactions.
Figure 4.1 The cline between spoken and written discourse.
At the most formal end of the formality continuum, there are the most 
dense written texts, such as academic articles, which are planned, collated and 
redrafted many times. At the other, are the most informal, spontaneous spoken 
interactions, with turn-taking, constantly shifting topics, overlapping speech and 
frequent interruptions. It is to these informal interactions that the label ‘casual 
conversation’ is applied. In the middle of the scales are the informal, written texts 
(such as email and letters to friends) and the formal, spoken texts (such as service 
encounters, job interview or a public speech).
Academic texts are usually written in a detached and formal style (detachment 
or distancing oneself from the reader may be seen in the use of
impersonal 
pronouns and passive voices, an absence of the pronoun you and an absence of 
affective/emotional vocabulary). Chatting with a friend over coffee, on the other 
hand, is usually a highly involved activity, with the pronouns I and you much 
in evidence, along with affective vocabulary. We have to hedge these statements 
with the word usually, however, as the characteristics of all types of discourse are 
variable to some degree. For example, chat between strangers may be much more 
distant and uninvolved personally, a kind of ritual where subjects such as the 
weather are acceptable, but where personal and intimate topics are not.
Not only is the formality of the vocabulary usually different between spoken 
and written discourse but the amount of content that the words carry also differs, 
that is, spoken and written discourse usually have different lexical
densities. 
Lexical density in a text is the rate of occurrence of lexical items (so-called ‘content 
words’, such as, sun, confuse, tiny) as against grammatical items (for example, he,