Republic of the Philippines

Commission on Higher Education

CHRIST THE KING COLLEGE
Calbayog City

Graduate Studies
MASTER OF ARTS IN EDUCATION MAJOR IN ENGLISH
Final Examination in ENGLISH 203
Oral and Written Discourse in Language Education

Name: MARFER JOY S. SALUDAR

Instructor: MS. HELEN RAMIREZ

Discuss briefly the following:

1. Discourse Data
In linguistics, discourse refers to a unit of language longer than a
single sentence. More broadly, discourse is the use of spoken or written
language in a social context. “Discourse is the way in which language is
used socially to convey broad historical meanings. It is the language
identified by the social conditions of its use, by who is using it and under
what conditions. Language can never be 'neutral' because it bridges our
personal and social worlds." Discourse cannot be confined to sentential
boundaries. It is something that goes beyond the limits of sentence. In
another words discourse is 'any coherent succession of sentences, spoken
or written' (Matthews, 2005:100). Discourse analysis deals language in use:
written text of all kinds and spoken data. It received attention in different
disciplines in the 1960s and early 1970s, including linguistics, semiotics,
anthropology, psychology and sociology.

2. Approaches to Discourse

3. Ethnography of Communication
The ethnography of communication (EOC), formerly called the
ethnography of speaking, is the analysis of communication within the wider
context of the social and cultural practices and beliefs of the members of
a particular culture or speech community. It is a method of discourse
analysis in linguistics that draws on the anthropological field of
ethnography. Unlike ethnography proper, though, EOC takes into account
both the communicative form, which may include but is not limited to
spoken language, and its function within the given culture.
 General aims of this qualitative research method include being able to
discern which communication acts and/or codes are important to different
groups, what types of meanings groups apply to different communication
events, and how group members learn these codes, in order to provide
insight into particular communities. This additional insight may be used to
enhance communication with group members, make sense of group
members’ decisions, and distinguish groups from one another, among
other things. Dell Hymes proposed the ethnography of communication as
an approach towards analyzing patterns of language use within speech
communities, in order to provide support for his idea of communicative
competence, which itself was a reaction to Noam Chomsky's distinction
between linguistic competence and linguistic performance.

Originally coined "ethnography of speaking" in Dell Hymes' eponymous

1962 paper, it was redefined in his 1964 paper, Introduction: Toward
Ethnographies of Communication to accommodate for the non-vocal and
non-verbal characteristics of communication, although most EOC
researchers still tend to focus upon speaking as it is generally considered "to
be a prominent - even primordial - means of communication.”

4. Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in
which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech
act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other
approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and
anthropology. Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is
conventional or "coded" in a given language, pragmatics studies how the
transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic
knowledge (e.g., grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener, but
also on the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about
those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors. In this
respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome
apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, time, etc.
of an utterance. The ability to understand another speaker's intended
meaning is called pragmatic competence.

The word pragmatics derives via Latin pragmaticus from the Greek
πραγματικός (pragmatikos), meaning amongst others "fit for action", which
comes from πρᾶγμα (pragma), "deed, act", and that from πράσσω
(prassō), "to do, to act, to pass over, to practise, to achieve".

5. Conversation Analysis
 Conversation analysis is an approach to the study of social interaction and
talk-in-interaction that, although rooted in the sociological study of
everyday life, has exerted significant influence across the humanities and
social sciences including linguistics. Drawing on recordings (both audio and
video) naturalistic interaction (unscripted, non-elicited, etc.) conversation
analysts attempt to describe the stable practices and underlying normative
organizations of interaction by moving back and forth between the close
study of singular instances and the analysis of patterns exhibited across
collections of cases. Four important domains of research within
conversation analysis are turn-taking, repair, action formation and
ascription, and action sequencing.

6. Dialogic and Monologic Discourse

7. Speech Genres
8. Discourse and Cognition
9. Discourse Structure and Coherence
10. Computational Linguistics