Week 1:

Chapter 11: Discourse Analysis.

What is discourse analysis?

 Discourse analysis is sometimes defined as the analysis of language

'beyond the sentence’.
 Discourse analysis is thus the study of language in use; it is looking at how
language is used by society and making deductions based on observed
actions. We have looked at how individual elements of language work
(phonetics, phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics), but we have
not looked at language on a larger scale.

Interpreting Discourse

 Every language user is capable of understanding ungrammatical, ‘broken’

language for example:

“My borns was in Spain but I was happy very there. My livings in now in
the Germany, also I happy very. I like to live in America one day but is
very expensive. Maybe save and move then.”

 The processes we use to interpret the text, how we achieve the

interpretation and our understanding of it are what is studied in the field
of discourse analysis.

Cohesion

 Cohesion is the link that exists between elements of text; the internal
connections between elements within the text. Cohesion is seen through
cohesive ties, and some of the most easy-to-identify cohesive ties are
pronouns.

“Where is Sara?”

“I haven’t seen her.”

Coherence

 While cohesion is concerned with the internal connections between

elements in the text, coherence is about the text fitting in with the
external world. Cohesion comes from the text while coherence comes
from the author/reader.

“The phone is ringing”

“I’m in the Bath”

Social Factors

 On top of the knowledge of linguistic forms and their relation to each

other, we also need to consider the societal factors.
 Just as you would converse differently with your best friend of 10 years
versus how you would talk to your lecturer, you would also have a
different style from when you are giving a presentation compared to
when you are at home.
 Relationships between speaker/writer and listener/reader, social status,
age, ethnicity, setting and topic are some factors that have an impact on
meaning.

Conversation Analysis (NB!!!!)

 One of the most popular branches of discourse analysis is conversation

analysis (CA). A conversation is usually defined as a type of talk exchange
in which speakers take turns. When one is talking, they are said to hold
the floor.

Turn-Taking:

 There are many techniques for taking turns in conversations ranging from
the exceedingly rude to the very polite.

For example, cutting someone off would be labelled as rude, while not
indicating your willingness to take the floor could be called shyness.
  One of the most common tactics in turn-taking is called holding the floor.
This is when the speaker is very long-winded, declines to pass the floor to
someone else and avoids the use of completion points.

The Cooperative Principle

Conversations require cooperation between participants' understanding:

 Knowing when it is your turn

 Recognising when your turn is finished,
 Passing the floor over to someone else,
 Listening to that person and responding to the content of their message
when the floor is inevitably passed back to you

Paul Grice was a philosopher who identified the individual rules we follow in
order to be cooperative speakers. These are known as Grice’s Maxims which
combine to form the cooperative principle.

Grice’s Four Maxims for effective communication:

 The Quantity Maxim: Make your contribution as informative as is

required, but not more or less than is required.
 The Quality Maxim: Do not say that which you believe to be false or for
which you lack adequate evidence.
 The Relation Maxim: Be relevant.
 The Manner Maxim: Be clear, brief and orderly.

Grice's Maxims

 Hedges:

These are words or phrases used to indicate that the speaker is not
entirely sure of the veracity of their statements.

Your parents ask if you completed the chores set out for you and you,
desperately wanting to go out, reply with “Yeah, mostly.” This is a hedge.

 Implicatures:

The maxim of relation states that an answer must be relevant to a

question.
 Therefore sometimes we understand a context even if it seems
unrelated:

Anderson: Are you coming to the show tonight?

José: I have to practise.

 Schemas and Scripts:

A schema is your conventional knowledge structure that exists in your

memory.

There are multiple schemata (schemas) in every person’s mind. If you hear
about something happening in an aquarium, you do not need to have aquarium
explained to you as you know what it is; you access your aquarium schema and
use that to understand the story you are hearing.

Activity 1:

Review the following video and find why the conversations are not following
any of the above principles:

 TheOurTownShow1. 2013. Rude Conversation. Video. [Online]

Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-PmTJHLtPE
[Accessed: 12 October 2022]

Communicate with your peers and lecturer on what you think the answer
may be.
 Week 3:
Chapter 13: First Language Acquisition
&
Chapter 14: Second Language Acquisition/Learning

Part 1: First Language Acquisition

What is language acquisition?

 Language acquisition is a process that starts in the womb. For language

acquisition to take place, it is important for several factors to be present
in the first two to three years of life.
 First Language Acquisition refers to the learning of one's home language.

The Acquisition Schedule

 All humans, regardless of the language they speak and the culture they
are from, learn language in a very similar way.
 We all meet the same milestones at roughly the same time and age.
 This is because all these processes are tied to the maturation of the
infant’s brain, which has a consistent timeline for most humans.
 Children are processing language from inside the womb already.
 From inside the womb, they start learning the cadence of the language
they are being exposed to. After birth, the child continues with listening
and analysing the sounds.
 This listening and evaluating never stops but it is accompanied by the
production of speech sounds from as early as a few weeks.
 This process is not a conscious process in that the parents sit the child
down and explicitly teach the child the language; instead, the child listens
to and produces language and is corrected as needed.
 Therefore, acquiring language is more of a trial-and-error exercise where
you learn from experience.
 It is important to note that the child is not only learning from copying
adults; they create their own forms and constructions which they then
test out.
  This can be seen when trying to correct a child’s speech: they usually do
not respond to the corrections and continue using the incorrect form until
they choose to start using the correct form.
 So, while parents may try to get their child to talk how the parents think
they should, the most important thing for the child’s language acquisition
is interacting with them using language.

The Acquisition Schedule: Stage 1: Cooing

 The first stage is from birth until six months and is called cooing.
 It is when a child starts producing basic vowel sounds such as [i] or [u].
 By four months, the child is bringing the back of the tongue into contact
with the velum (soft palate right at the back of the mouth), producing
sounds like [k] and [g].
 During this time, studies have shown that children can tell the difference
between some basic vowels, as well as the velar consonants mentioned
above.

The Acquisition Schedule: Stage 2: Babbling

 The second stage is from six to 12 months and involves the combination
of the sounds above.
 This stage is known as ‘babbling’ and is characterised by phrases such as
ga-ga-ga or ba-ba-ba or ma-ma-ma.
 As the child ages through this phase, the babbling becomes more
complex, with a combination of sounds such as ba-ga-ma-da and the
intonation patterns start closely resembling the intonation patterns of
the language being learnt.
 This is a type of language called ‘pre-language’ and is often used by
parents to start teaching their children about conversations; the parents
treat the child’s babbling as a contribution in the conversation and
respond to the child as if they are part of the conversation.

The Acquisition Schedule: Stage 3: The one-word Stage

 This stage is from 12 to 18 months of age. It is when the child starts to

produce utterances that are understandable as part of a specific
language.
  These utterances are usually one words, but the word is usually serving as
a unit of meaning.

For example, at this stage, most children will produce forms like dog,
cat and cup. However, they will also produce forms like Wassat? which
means “What’s that?” Because the child is producing two words as one
form, it is technically incorrect to call this a ‘one-word’ stage.

 Therefore, this stage is better known as the holophrastic stage, as

‘holophrastic’ means a single form functioning as a phrase or sentence.
 Children usually extend the meanings of these holophrastic terms as well.

For example, Samantha can be used to refer to a child’s older sister, it

can also be used to ask where she is when pointing at her empty bed
and saying Samantha?

The Acquisition Schedule: Stage 4: The two-word Stage

 This stage usually occurs around 18 to 22 months but is less strict on

timelines than the other stages.
 This is due to the amorphous nature of what constitutes as two words
versus one.
 It is once the child’s vocabulary is made up of more than 50 words and
they are using a variety of combinations of words.
 These can include phrases like baby chair, daddy sleep and cat naughty.
The meanings of these utterances are reliant on context and can change
accordingly.

For example, daddy sleep can either be a question (“Is daddy sleeping?”), a
statement (“Daddy is sleeping”) or a response to the question “Where is
daddy?” (“He is sleeping”). This is the stage in which a child learns how
conversations work.

 Their contributions are treated as part of the conversation and by

getting the confirmation that their contribution was understood, they
start learning the skills required for conversations.
 The Acquisition Schedule: Stage 5: Telegraphic Speech
 The next stage is a simplified version of the full speech the child is on
their way to obtaining.
 This stage is characterised by short, simple phrases that show some
sentence-building ability.
For example, it would be normal for a child to produce an utterance like
“This cat all wet” in this stage.

 Most of the words contained in telegraphic speech are lexical morphemes;

there are very few functional morphemes.
 This is reminiscent of how telegraphs are written, resulting in the name
for the stage.
 The child will start including some basic grammatical inflections and
simple prepositions such as on or in in this stage as well.
 By two and a half, the child will be rapidly expanding their lexicon, with
the result that by three years of age they know hundreds of words and
are pronouncing the words in the same way as adults.

Part 2:Second Language Acquisition/Learning

What is second language acquisition/learning?

 There is a big difference between acquisition and learning. Acquisition is

the act of picking up the language through the process of being exposed
to it and using it regularly.
 On the other hand, learning is a conscious process in which you explicitly
learn the grammar rules, pronunciation and have vocabulary lists.
 Acquisition is usually a process where you gain communicative competence,
while learning usually results in a lower level of communicative
competence.

Grammatical competence: Knowing the rules and structures that govern the
language

Sociolinguistic competence: Knowing how to use the language appropriately in

different contexts

Strategic competence: Knowing how to use different strategies to communicate

your message if you are experiencing some difficulties.

Consideration points of SLL

 Your success in learning a second language is usually determined by

acquisition barriers and affective factors.
  Acquisition barriers are the physical impediments that make learning a
language more labor intensive.
 This would be the language-learning center in the brain shutting down
after the critical period, and your age and cognitive abilities in general.
 Affective factors are the emotional factors that determine how
successful you will be in learning a language.
 It is going to be a lot more difficult to learn the language. This also
applies for exhaustion, embarrassment, dull textbooks and boring
classrooms.
 Methods for Second-Language Learning
 There are many methods that are used to learn a second language.
 The first is the grammar-translation method, which is the most widely
used. This method emphasises vocabulary lists and grammar rules, and the
written language is emphasised rather than the spoken.
 The second method is called the audiolingual method and involves the
student drilling in the structure of the language being learned,
progressing from simple to more complex structures. This method
emphasises the spoken over the written.
 The third method has become very popular as it emphasises
communicative rather than linguistic competence. It involves many
different forms of having the students interact with each other in the
language. This method focuses more on the function of the language
rather than the form.

Focusing on the learner

 As the years have progressed, research has focused more on the learner
than the process.
 One of the best examples of this is the acceptance of ‘mistakes’ in
second-language learning.
 Usually, when the process is emphasised, the learner is expected to make
no mistakes after memorising the structure, words and grammar rules of
the language.
 Recently, however, these mistakes are not considered to be problematic
but, rather, expected outcomes.
 These ‘mistakes’ provide an understanding of the active learning process.
Possible Errors

 One of the most common causes of these mistakes is a phenomenon called

transfer. This is when a second-language learner brings structures or
sounds from their first language into the second language.
 When the structure from the first language matches the second, it is
called positive transfer. When it does not match, it is negative transfer.
 Sometimes, errors cannot be pinpointed as belonging to either the first
or second language. This is what is called interlanguage. This is an in-
between system with few elements from the first language and the
second language, but it has rules of its own.
 It is the basis of all L2 (second language) production. When the
interlanguage stops incorporating new terms and does not move any closer
to the structures of the L2, it is called fossilisation. When this happens,
the learner’s language learning has stopped and they will not progress any
further, preventing them from becoming fluent in the language.
 One of the biggest reasons for fossilisation is motivation. If the learner
is not motivated to learn the language, they will probably never be fluent.
 There are two types of motivation: instrumental and integrative. The
first is when you are using the language with a specific goal in mind. It
could be because you need to pass the language in order to matriculate, or
you need it for business.
 Instrumental motivation usually does not indicate any sort of social
interaction in the language.
 Integrative motivation is the want to use the language in the society
itself: you want to use it to integrate into the community and use the
language in social settings. This form of motivation is usually more helpful
when aiming for fluency.
 The biggest indicator if someone is going to be fluent in their second
language is the amount of input and output they expose themselves to.
 In order to be fluent, it is important that the learner practices and uses
the language regularly. They need to hear the language being used, and
they need to produce the language themselves.
  The first instance of input that a learner will usually experience is
foreigner talk. This is when a native speaker uses simplified language for
the learner.

 Once the learner becomes more comfortable with the language, they will
engage in negotiated input. This is when the learner will ask for
clarification and pay active attention when conversing with native or
fluent speakers of the language.

Part 3: Critical Learning Period

What is the critical period?

 The critical learning period, in the context of linguistics, refers to a

specific window of time during a person's early life when language
acquisition is most efficient and effective. This period is typically
associated with childhood and adolescence, and it is characterised by the
brain's heightened ability to acquire and master language skills.
 Genie, often referred to as the "wild child," is a well-known case study in
the field of linguistics and psychology. Genie was a young girl who
experienced extreme social isolation and deprivation during her early
years, particularly in terms of language exposure and interaction. Her
case highlighted the critical learning period for language acquisition.
 Genie's experience demonstrated that without adequate exposure to
language and interaction during the critical period, a person may struggle
to develop language skills later in life. Her case raised questions about
the existence of a critical period for language acquisition and whether
there is an optimal window for acquiring linguistic abilities. While Genie
made some progress in language development after her rescue, her case
underscored the importance of early language exposure and interaction in
the development of linguistic competence. It also stimulated research
into the critical periods for language acquisition in the broader field of
linguistics and child development.