Seminar 2. Discourse Analysis of the text
As a teacher of English language learners, you will sometimes want to be able to analyze discourse at the sentence level. This lesson discusses reasons and strategies for discourse analysis in oral and written language.
What Is Discourse?
As an ELL teacher, Emma loves watching her students acquire language and gain more facility with communication. Recently, Emma has been thinking more about how she can analyze her students' discourse, or overall communication skills. Emma knows that it is one thing to listen to her students informally, but to really analyze their discourse will help her assess exactly what they are capable of and think through what her next teaching steps might be. Emma is especially curious about how her students communicate complex ideas and thoughts; she knows most of them can construct a solid English sentence, but she wants to understand what happens when they put multiple sentences together.
How Sentences Come Together
Emma knows that when a student pieces multiple sentences together in English, their overall goal should be coherence, or overall comprehensibility and consistency of what they are trying to say. In other words, each sentence should relate logically, as well as stylistically, to the one before it.
Oral Language
Much of Emma's thought about sentence relationships has to do with oral language, or how students speak to each other. When she wants to find out how her students do in conversations or interview tasks, she knows she needs to understand how fluently and with what level of organization they can speak multiple sentences in a row.
Written Language
Emma also understands that it is important to assess and analyze her students' discourse in written language. Some of her students can only write a couple of English sentences, while others are writing whole essays. Their structure, flow and coherence are of interest to Emma as she works with discourse analysis.
Differences Between Spoken & Written Language
Emma understands that there are many differences between spoken and written discourse, and she wants her students to understand the significance of these distinctions. On the one hand, written language is almost always more formal than oral language, and it is in written language that students are expected to adhere more explicitly to rules and external structures. On the other hand, in oral language, speed and fluency are more important, as is spontaneity. The student's capacity to rapidly follow one sentence with another will make a big difference in their oral discourse success.
Analyzing Discourse for Coherence
Emma uses different strategies to analyze her students' discourse in oral and written language.
Oral Language
To analyze students' oral language, Emma finds the following strategies helpful:
11 Ways to Improve Your Students' Oral Language Skills
Encourage conversation. ...
Model syntactic structure. ...
Maintain eye contact. ...
Remind students to speak loudly and articulate clearly. ...
Explain the subtleties of tone. ...
Attend to listening skills. ...
Incorporate a “question of the day.”
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