Abstract
This book provides a detailed account of the major theories in discourse studies and their applications in language education. The book’s target audiences are upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers interested in applied linguistics, TESOL and language education. The book is composed of ten chapters. The first chapter serves as a general introduction and each of the following nine chapters discusses an approach related to discourse studies. We will briefly summarize each chapter and then give some comments.
Chapter 1 is the introduction and foundation of the book. It defines and distinguishes several terms, i.e. discourse, discourse analysis and discourse studies. This first chapter concludes with an outline which provides readers with a framework of the main ideas of the book. Chapter 2 introduces Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and some theories related to register. A short text written by a pupil is carefully chosen to elaborate the lexicogrammatical specifications of registers. This example guarantees a clearer understanding. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with cohesion, coherence and thematic development, which involves how a text is held together in terms of structure and function. How cohesion is achieved in language education is covered in Chapter 3, though not in detail. Meanwhile, in Chapter 4, the author points out the difficulties for learners to achieve thematic development and the significance of different themes in language learning. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on discourse in pragmatics. Chapter 5 is devoted to the speech act theory that studies how language is used to perform communicative acts. Chapter 6 explains Grice’s (1989) concept of indirect speech act and the cooperative principle (CP) in detail and discusses the phenomena of politeness. Chapter 7 focuses on conversation analysis (CA), an approach to spoken interaction. What is immediately striking in the chapter is that examples are presented nearly everywhere, which promises the readers a better understanding of CA. Chapter 8 focuses on genre analysis, which studies the language in terms of different recurrent stages in specific contexts. Chapter 9 analyses discourse from the perspective of corpus linguistics. In Application to pedagogy, numerous applications of corpus linguistics to language education are presented. Finally, Chapter 10 centres on critical discourse analysis (CDA) and interprets the term discourse from a social perspective. How SFL and corpus linguistics are used in CDA is also discussed. As the author argues at the end of the chapter, CDA is illuminating for pedagogy in that it helps develop learners’ critical language awareness.
In summary, this book is of great value to students and researchers in the fields of discourse studies, applied linguistics and language education. It is significant in many aspects. The most obvious feature of this book is that, as its title suggests, it attempts to shed light on English language education from the perspective of discourse analysis. The book covers a broad range of approaches in discourse analysis, which broadens the vision of readers who are interested in the area. Another strength of the book is that it presents numerous carefully chosen illustrations and examples, which may help its readers understand the theories and approaches more easily. In addition, the author critiques the theories and approaches and discusses their drawbacks, which gives readers a clearer picture of the field. Last, questions for discussion at the end of each chapter highlight the important points of the chapter and stimulate its readers to examine the topics.
Of course, the book is not without its limitations. First, the section Application to pedagogy in each chapter attempts to highlight how to apply the theories and approaches in language education. However, it sometimes fails to present hands-on applications. For instance, in Chapter 2 the Application to pedagogy section provides a quick discussion of the influence of Halliday’s theory on pedagogy but fails to exemplify its applications in language education. In those of Chapters 3 and 4, though many examples are presented to emphasize the importance of cohesion and coherence, there is no practical interpretation on how to help the learners achieve cohesion and coherence in their writing or speech. In that of Chapter 6, an e-mail written by a Chinese student is explored, which attempts to help the readers understand the CP. While this may help its readers become more aware of which aspects of the e-mail do not obey the CP, the readers may still not be clear about what characteristics an e-mail that obeys the CP should display. Thus, it may be more useful to the readers if the section shows how to apply the CP and politeness to pedagogy.
Second, some parts of the book might be better structured. For example, in Chapter 1, Section 1.5 discusses various approaches to discourse studies and Section 1.7 deals with discourse studies from the perspective of language in its contexts of use. It seems a little out of order to insert Section 1.6 in between, which centres on discourse analysis in informal and institutional fields. Another example is in Chapter 9. Sections 9.9 and 9.10 introduce small corpora and learner corpora. It might have been better if they had been discussed immediately after the definitions of corpus and corpus linguistics at the beginning of the chapter.