Discourse Analysis

The Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach, specifically the textual metafunction, has been tried to be applied in teaching writing to English as a Foreign Language. SFL is chosen as an alternative application in language teaching since linguistics is the study of language that seeks how language works. Traditionally textual metafunction has often been neglected in language teaching, where sentences have been created, manipulated, and assessed in isolation. In EFL writing classroom, we find that learners often write paragraphs that consist of sentences which do not seem to connect together into cohesive devices. Thinking of this, I started to seek an alternative approach to help the students improve their writings, that is how to develop ideas so that the texts the students produce will run “smoothly” and “hang together” logically. It means that the sentences in their writings are well organized and developed coherently. Besides, the ideas will not jump from one idea to other ideas. This paper attempts to depict how to apply textual metafunction in EFL writing and how thematic patterns, which involves the relationship between clauses based on the information contained in themes and rhemes, can achieve cohesion in EFL learners’ text. It is assumed that the thematic patterns specify its usefulness as a discourse tool for adding students in writing their paragraph into cohesive text. The result shows that thematic patterns is one way of achieving cohesion in text since it involves connecting sentences together in a way which moves the text from the Given to the New. In short, the thematic pattern of texts is needed to analyze their own text to check for thematic flow in order to get a good cohesive text.

The title of this research is coherence analysis of the students’  writings: a case study of the fourth semester students of English Department, Faculty of Language and Letter Dian Nuswantoro University.  This analysis is conducted to know the coherence of students’ writings that are made by the fourth semester students in writings class. The study of this research is descriptive qualitative, which includes a simple quantitative study. The subject of this research is the students’ writings by twenty students in Faculty of Language and letters Dian Nuswantoro University, in Academic years 2003/2004.The result of the data reveals that all the texts which have been analyzed are coherent and the content was relevant to the topic “unforgettable experience”. There were only four texts showing that the content was not relevant to the topic sentence. Most of the students employed the thematic progression of theme reiteration or constant theme pattern in their writing

In previous work, we have argued that a narrative-analytic perspective that looks into the development of a story beyond its opening and closing and that brings in contextual, in particular ethnographic, perspectives can enhance the focus of a CA approach (see Georgakopoulou 2010). In this chapter, we are further advancing this line of inquiry by investigating the narrative-interactional patterns of joke telling in the conversational data of a group of older Greek Cypriot women. This case study looks closely at a sexually-explicit joke narrated in a casual, peer-group conversation. The analytical frameworks employed include conversation analysis and small stories research, as a paradigm for the analysis of stories and identities-in-interaction, which is aimed at uncovering the interconnections amongst three layers of analysis: ways of telling, sites, tellers. The analysis shows that sexually explicit jokes are oriented to as a marked/taboo topic in the specific group and they implicate issues of entitlement and regulation of tellership rights. The tellers navigate entitlement issues -about who has the right to tell what kinds of jokes, to whom and when- through the sequential organisation of the interaction, on the one hand, which includes elaborate as opposed to economic opening and response sequences. On the other, participants negotiate entitlement norms through the ways in which they position themselves vis-à-vis the original tellers of their jokes, the characters in the jokes, their interlocutors and previous and projected re-tellings of the joke. We finally focus on the use of the self- and other- categorisation ‘widow’ as a device for legitimizing telling rights for an ‘indecent’ joke, particularly in the opening of a joke-telling sequence. We show how the specific choices in the ways of telling the joke connect with the sites of the jokes’ taleworld and telling as well as with their tellers in their complex capacities as older widowed women, friends, tellers, and recipients of other jokes.

The classroom is not a world to itself and classroom discourse cannot be captured in the text, the sounds, or the pictures recorded in a transcript. In the world beyond the classroom, the personal dispositions of students and teachers accumulated over a lifetime and some times longer, the power that they exert and resist in their most mundane of actions, the institutional constraints and affordances of school and public policy are contingent interactions of social life that cannot be entextualized in a transcript, and yet the classroom is the empirical location in which these social patterns and political warrants exist and are transformed. In this essay, I review qualitative research conducted on classroom interaction which foregrounds social context and the means by which dominant power and ideology is reproduced, resisted, or transformed in the classroom. Focusing on language classrooms, I begin by examining transcripts of classroom discourse to understand what they show, what they imply, and what they omit. I then go beyond the transcript to review the qualitative methods adopted in case studies, narrative inquiry, grounded theory, and classroom ethnography to describe and understand the dialectic between the local practice of classroom interaction and the temporal, spatial, and political horizons beyond the immediate occasion of talk.

В статье рассматриваются проблемы национального (этнокультурного) дискурса в средствах массовой информации Приволжского федерального округа. Проанализирована тональность публикуемых материалов, рассмотрены их структурные и содержательные особенности.

As “Asia’s World City”, Hong Kong is a place where ‘faces’ from all parts of the globe come to work, study, and play together, and HKU is its most international university. It is an ideal location then for this conference which highlights the rich diversity of approaches to understanding English and the range of contexts in which it is taught, studied and used around the world. This conference will bring together academics, researchers, practitioners and research students to share their research and practical ideas on the analysis, description and teaching of English in a city with a rich cultural heritage, stunning natural scenery and a buzzing street and night life.

O texto “Análises do Discurso: aplicações à representação da mulher brasileira em Portugal” pretende fazer uma análise das representações da mulher brasileira em Portugal, recorrendo a um corpo empírico constituído pela revista Time, por uma peça de um Jornal da TVI (Televisão Independente) e por uma peça do programa de humor
“Contra-Informação” (RTP). O uso do Magazine Time justificava-se pela necessidade de contextualizar todo o alcance do problema de xenofobia contra a mulher brasileira surgido em Portugal. Por outro lado, o uso do texto escrito também serve para documentar um ensaio de aplicação da análise crítica do discurso (normalmente
identificado como discurso escrito) à imagem. Através da análise do léxico e das unidades do texto ( no caso do texto) e dos planos (no caso da imagem) pretende desmontar-se os pressupostos ideológicos que estão por detrás deste tipo de representação. Ao mesmo tempo, procura analisar o papel do humor na crítica ao Telejornalismo português e demonstrar que quer o Telejornalismo quer o humor
desenvolvem estratégias de legitimação do poder, mesmo que estas surjam à revelia da intenção do autor. Mesmo a aparente crítica humorística pode ocultar a referência para universos de conformismo ingénuo, que se traduzem em representações estereotipadas.

Unadaptable Roma and Decent Majority? News Discourse After the 2011 Violent Incidents in the North Part of the Czech Republic.
The paper analyses the news discourse on Roma minority during the violent incidents and the following anti-Roma protests in the north part of the Czech Republic in 2011. It focuses on news reports relating to the Roma in three most-read Czech newspapers between August 8, 2011 and September 8, 2011. The study adheres to the discourse analysis and is undertaken in three stages. In first step we introduce a general characterization of the news and the context of the unrests as presented by the media. This is followed by the analysis of the extent to which the media emphasize the ethnicity and generalize the “Roma” criminality. In third step a dichotomy in relation to the majority and the Roma minority (us vs. them) is analysed. The analysis points to systematic „othering“ and stereotyping of Roma minority in the selected newspapers. Results show that the media emphasized the ethnicity of Roma actors involved in the attacks and generalized given incidents as continuing „Roma“ criminality. Moreover, the newspapers tended to present the situation either as „the last drop“ of the tensions between two groups (majority population and Roma minority) or as a consequence of the problems with the criminality of „unadaptable“ citizens, meaning the Roma. These discursive practices can lead to deepening of racial stereotypes in the society, but they can also contribute to the formation of favourable discoursive opportunity structure, hence favourable context for parties of the far right, which are characteristic of their nationalistic, racist and xenophobic rhetoric and actions.

Based on archival fieldwork conducted in Maputo in summer 2014, this paper explores the rhetorical use of sex work in official Mozambican independence discourses. In the post-1975 struggle to construct a viable socialist nation in the face of external destabilisation efforts, women sex workers came to embody the twin enemies of imperialism and capitalism for ruling party FRELIMO. Grandiose denouncements of their activities filled column inches and echoed around public rallies, with the women in question cast as both stooges and victims of neocolonial endeavour. 

While the socioeconomic status of women sex workers in the anticolonial context has been given prominence in feminist histories of Mozambique, the role of sex work as a rhetorical and discursive touchstone has remained all but absent from scholarly analyses. With this paper, I aim to bring a new perspective on Mozambican sexual politics to light by recentring sex work as the linchpin of gendered discourses during and after the country's anticolonial struggle. Both speech and silence will be examined as I seek to establish whose voices reverberate around the echo chamber of the woman sex worker’s body, and whose are manifestly absent.

The lifestyle migration is a socio-cultural and spatial phenomenon that as of recently is of particular relevance in mountain and lake regions of southern Chile. This paper considers that the discourse phenomenon is a central element in the construction of reality and place, and thus focuses on examining how migrants’ narratives shape the imaginary of a place, frame the daily practices and create life projects. By applying the method of “Critical and Complex Discourse Analysis” (ACCD, in Spanish), we offer a reading of the various utopian visions from which the dreams and aspirations of new inhabitants of southern Chile emerge.

Este artigo apresenta a síntese de uma pesquisa em fase inicial que busca identificar como os principais gêneros do discurso jornalístico impresso são apresentados em jornais diários. Aqui serão apresentadas uma base teórica e a metodologia que se está desenvolvendo para aplicar os princípios do design de notícias aos elementos do discurso jornalístico da atualidade. Hoje, os jornais impressos, influenciado pelas transformações tecnológicas de impressão e pela internet, procuram adaptar suas enunciações aos hábitos de leitura atuais. Assim, o design apresenta-se como elemento de organização que articula conteúdos para atrair e conduzir o leitor neste percurso.

Recent data appear to demonstrate the weakening of the Arab newspapers versus strengthening of the digital media. However, this weakening is less extensive than the corresponding erosion of Western newspapers in their own markets. This study examines the question of how Arab newspapers see themselves. A content and discourse analysis of articles in seven newspapers of different characteristics and distribution zones indicates an ambivalent attitude towards the Arab newspaper: On the one hand, many articles and reports express a positive attitude towards the newspapers and a hostile attitude to the Internet, but, on the other hand, more than a quarter of the articles expressed a negative attitude towards the newspapers and most of the articles admitted that Arab newspapers are in crisis. Based on this finding, the reporters and editors of the Arab newspapers can be seen as an interpretive community, which structures its identity. The shared discourse that they produce around the topic of newspapers’ status is a marker of how they see themselves as journalists.