Textbook Suggestions; intro

[Victoria L. Bergvall]

In response to the query about textbook suggestions, I can recommend Teun
van Dijk's (Sage, 1997) two-part edited series: _Discourse as Structure and
Process_, and _Discourse as Social Interaction_. I used them last spring in
my grad Discourse Analysis course (along with various other readings), and
the students liked them very much. The first volume of papers is formalist,
the second social in orientation, as the titles suggest, and thus offer a
wide range of authors and ideas of what discourse analysis is. I am also
looking forward to seeing what Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski do for
discourse analysis, analogous to their _Sociolinguistics_ reader (St.
Martin's, 1997). My undergrads (not linguistics majors) didn't like their
socio reader, but I think my grad students will this next term.

I am interested in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), so usually
incorporate some of that perspective in both undergrad and grad survey
courses. I have found provocative and useful articles in, e.g.,
Caldas-Coulthard and Coulthard, eds., _Texts and Practices: Readings in
CDA_ (Routledge, 1997), Coulthard, ed. (Routledge, 1994) _Advances in
Written Text Analysis_ and (1992) _Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis_,
among others.

Another book that looks very interesting, but that I haven't used as a
course text yet, is Tony Bex's (Routledge, 1996) _Variety in Written
English: Texts in Society, Societies in Text_. And of course, Deborah
Cameron's (Routledge, 1995) _Verbah Hygiene_ is excellent to use as one
part of a longer course in discourse in society.

I have more problems with finding suitable undergrad texts. I teach a
course called "Texts and Their Contexts" (which I conceive of as an
undergrad DA course, with some history and CDA thrown in). I have had a
very hard time finding the right texts to use for that. I've used Ronald
Carter, et al.'s (Routledge, 1997) _Working with Texts: A core book for
language analysis_, but find resistance to its British examples from my
solidly American Midwestern students. And though I like the Open University
series, and used Janet Maybin and Neil Mercer's (Routledge, 1996) _Using
English: from conversation to canon_, it wasn't quite the right book for my
purposes either. So I am still looking for the right combination there, and
welcome other suggestions.

+++
A very brief intro to myself: I'm Vicky Bergvall, Associate Professor of
Linguistics at Michigan Technological University. I wrote my diss. in the
Chomskian syntax paradigm, but I find so many more interesting and
important questions these days in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.
As noted above, I have done work in the vein of Critical Discourse
Analysis, but regard the center of my work these days as examining gender
variation in language, for example using CDA to critique sociobiologists'
and their popularizers' "explanations" of variation in language use (what I
call the "men grunt and hunt and women gossip and gather" vein of
explanation). I'm also beginning a new research project comparing
face-to-face with computer-mediated discourse, e.g., examining the use of
questions and cohesion patterns.

_______________________________________________________________
              Victoria L. Bergvall
Department of Humanities    Associate Professor of Linguistics
Michigan Tech University    Office phone: (906) 487-3260
1400 Townsend Drive         Fax: (906) 487-3559
Houghton, MI 49931-1295     Internet: vbergval at mtu.edu
_______________________________________________________________