Abstract
As an innovative attempt in the fields of discourse studies and applied linguistics, Linking Discourse Studies to Professional Practice explores how the research findings of discourse studies could be best put into professional practice. It will serve as an inspiring reference work and practical guide for researchers in applied linguistics.
The volume consists of 14 chapters. In the introductory chapter, Grujicic-Alatriste provides a theoretical background and a ‘Framework for Application’, which specifies how to apply research findings from discourse studies using outreach tools and feedback tools. Outreach tools, used for researchers to establish contact with stakeholders, include basic reports, simplified data set printouts, short data printouts, short written guides and manuals. Feedback tools, used for eliciting feedback from professionals, range from surveys, interviews, questionnaires, open discussion sessions and opinion-based sessions to short handouts with samples of discourse and recorded segments or playback.
Workplace and business settings are viewed from a conversation analysis (CA) perspective. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the segment of repair. Investigating video-recorded service encounters at a Danish university international office help desk, Hazel (Chapter 2) points out that the sequences of misalignment between institutional position and linguistic repertoire of staff members can undermine their institutional identity as competent institutional workers. Examining other-initiated repair in international business meetings, Suh (Chapter 3) underlines the significance of maintaining the structural integrity of a repair sequence in order to resolve misunderstandings and miscommunication. In Chapter 4, Wagner applies CA to the study of an interpersonal dispute mediated at a local community mediation center. He finds that asymmetrical knowledge can be highlighted by a disputant and must be managed by the mediator and disputants in order to maintain progressivity. In Chapter 5, Pochon-Berger, Pekarek Doehler and König carry out a case study on au pair girls’ sojourn in a host family. Integrating CA with narrative interpretation, they find that storytelling at the margins of work is a pervasive practice for the participants to gain mutual knowledge and share expectations about work-related conduct. Focusing on talk-in-interaction in managerial meetings, Pälli and Lehtinen (Chapter 6) adopt ethnomethodological CA to depict how managers apply their knowledge of genres to professional work.
Educational settings are examined through CA and genre analysis. In Chapter 7, Grujicic-Alatriste presents a genre analysis of student writings in the argumentative letter genre, finding that unsuccessful student writings often have the following problems: missing steps, out of order steps or repeated moves. Guided by Vygotskyan sociocultural theory, Kahn (Chapter 8) applies CA to study the speaking turns of second-language learners in fulfilling classroom tasks, and confirms Vygotsky’s claim that teaching and learning activity is a dynamic, relational and gradual process. In Chapter 9, Davitti deploys interpretation and multimodal CA to discuss the role of interpreters in interpreter-mediated parent–teacher meetings, showing that interpreters serve as coordinators and intercultural mediators.
Private and public settings are studied from a more general discourse-analytic perspective with an emphasis on interpretation of findings. Based on the framework of interactional sociolinguistics, Chapter 10 (Johnson) examines the discourse of one Midwestern American family to explore how the identity of an adult child (one who no longer lives at home) is constructed during family interactions. Chapter 11 (Cochrane) applies Bamberg’s model of positioning to the study of the narrative accounts of disabled people to show that the disabled participants are willing to talk about their experiences with able-bodied people to correct their misunderstandings about disabilities.
Government and media settings are explored through critical discourse analysis (CDA). In Chapter 12, Farka analyzes the discourse of one city’s council meetings, revealing that citizens have limited access to legislative processes and are unable to voice their opinions in the decision-making process. In Chapter 13, Xia and Wang incorporate an ethnographic approach to CDA to investigate Chinese translations of English news, and demonstrate that news is manipulated via translation to illustrate the beliefs and stances of the institution. In Chapter 14, Frantz uses a modified CDA methodology to analyze same-sex marriage reportage in the United States. The study concludes that media language reflects the social, political and cultural context.
The central theme of the book is to link discourse studies to professional practice. The ‘Framework of Application’ established by the editor offers implications for the contributors of each chapter to launch their research findings into professional settings and help solve real-world problems. For example, the pre-emptive strike strategy and embedded medium repair strategy mentioned in Chapter 2 can be adopted by human resource managers and researchers working in an international organization to avoid explicit medium repair sequences during the communication. Chapter 7 advocates a more practical way of composition teaching to help students improve writing performance rather than pass an examination. The discursive practices such as the use of humor and justifying choices to defend the adult identity discussed in Chapter 10 give insights into family counselors, therapists and family members to better solve problems of family relations. It can also be seen from Chapter 13 that news institutions and general readers should raise awareness that news and media are power-dominated.
Also, this book takes a multi-method and multidisciplinary approach to discourse studies, including not only the general methods of conversation analysis, discourse analysis and genre analysis, but also more elaborated ways informed by ethnography, critical discourse analysis and sociocultural theory. Unfortunately, this book fails to adopt corpus-driven or corpus-based methods. With computer programs facilitating the analysis of extensive language databases, corpus-based analysis provides a powerful data-driven tool to supplement qualitative analysis. Therefore, it is suggested that corpus-based analysis can be applied in discourse studies to provide more reliable findings.
Overall, this book makes a worthwhile theoretical and methodological contribution to the field of discourse studies and offers implications for relevant professional practice.