16.2452, Review: Textbooks/Discourse Analysis: Gee (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2452. Mon Aug 22 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2452, Review: Textbooks/Discourse Analysis: Gee (2005)

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1)
Date: 19-Aug-2005
From: Patricia Zoltan < patricia.zoltan at adelaide.edu.au >
Subject: An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 22:28:00
From: Patricia Zoltan < patricia.zoltan at adelaide.edu.au >
Subject: An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method 
 

AUTHOR: Gee, James Paul
TITLE: An Introduction to Discourse Analysis
SUBTITLE: Theory and Method
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-710.html 

Patricia Zoltan, Centre for Learning and Professional Development,  
The University of Adelaide, South Australia

INTRODUCTION

James Paul Gee's An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (2005) is the 
second, revised edition of the author's 1999 volume with the same 
title. Gee integrates theories of language, learning, and social practice 
in his book, which is a useful resource for students, researchers and a 
general audience because it is easy to follow and written in a highly 
accessible and enjoyable style. The author's work on language takes 
a socio-cognitive and socio-cultural approach incorporating 
perspectives from a number of fields including applied linguistics, 
psychology, education, anthropology and communication. 'An 
Introduction to Discourse Analysis' covers both a theory and a method 
of research, which are showcased through several examples in the 
newly added chapters (Chapter 9,10,11). There are 11 chapters in 
the book. Chapter 1 is the Introduction, Chapter 2-6 provide theories, 
Chapter 7 sketches out the method to discourse analysis while 
Chapter 8 gives more linguistic details. Chapter 9-11 give examples of 
discourse analysis to demonstrate in practice a few of the tools 
discussed in the book.

SUMMARY

Chapter 1: Introduction
The first chapter, as the title indicates, is an introduction to the book 
where the author lays down the foundation for the further chapters. 
According to Gee language is not only to be seen as a tool to 
communicate information but also to support social activities, social 
identities and affiliations within cultures and institutions. As the author 
claims in the first chapter, his book is an introduction to one approach 
to discourse analysis among many others and it aims at balancing talk 
about the mind, social interactions and talk about society and 
institutions. Gee also offers a specific method to investigate all these 
by offering several tools of inquiry or as the author calls them "thinking 
devices". In the introduction the author also explains what he means 
by Discourse (with a block capital "D") and discourse (with lower 
case "d"). Gee defines discourse (with a little "d") as "language-in-
use", i.e. language used on site through which activities and identities 
are enacted but according to the author activities are not just enacted 
through language, therefore Discourse (with a big "D") is a much 
wider concept where non-language elements also influence 
individuals. So, the author argues that language must be analysed as 
it is fully integrated with all the elements that appear in social practice.

Chapter 2: Building tasks
"Language has a magical property", claims the author in Chapter 2, 
because when we speak or write we can design and build what we 
have to say as it is suitable to a particular situation. In other words, we 
create the situation but the situation also influences us in terms of how 
we speak. Gee identifies seven "building tasks", i.e. areas of reality 
that we construct when we speak or write, because we use language 
to make things significant (building task 1), as we give them meaning 
or value. Language is also used when we want to get recognised in a 
certain kind of activity (building task 2) or in other words, through 
language certain activities get enacted. Building task 3 is to form an 
identity through language. For example we all have various 
professional, social and private roles and we speak and write as these 
identities require us to do. We also use language to signal our 
relationships (building task 4) that we have or would want to have: 
e.g. listener, speaker or reader. Language is also used to convey a 
perspective on the nature of distribution of goods, or politics (building 
task 5), where language is being communicated as to what is taken 
as "correct", "good", "appropriate" or "the way things ought to be'. We 
also use language to render certain things connected (building task 6) 
and last but not least language can privilege or disprivilege specific 
sign systems or ways of knowing, e.g. English over other languages, 
or technical language over everyday language use. Sign systems and 
ways of knowing constitute "building task 7". To demonstrate how 
these building tasks operate in reality, Chapter 2 provides a valuable 
example of discourse analysis to uncover the seven building blocks on 
a small piece of data taken from a larger corpus.

Chapter 3: Tools of inquiry and discourses
This section of the book deals with the tools of inquiry that are 
relevant in building identities and activities and also for recognising 
identities and activities that others build. These tools are social 
languages, discourses, intertextuality and conversations. With the 
author's terminology, social languages are varieties of the same 
language used in different settings among certain groups. People use 
not only language but other elements outside of the realm of language 
in order to engage themselves in activities. We have to speak 
the "right way" if we want to get accepted in a particular group. 
Therefore as mentioned above, Gee differentiates between discourse 
(with a "little d") and Discourse (with a "big D"). Intertextuality is a sort 
of cross reference to words said or written while by conversations the 
author means something else in addition to intertextuality. When we 
talk and write we often do not just relate to someone else's words but 
to themes or motifs that are the focus of a certain social group. These 
themes and motifs play an important role in how language is 
interpreted. For example, current social conversations these days are 
terrorism or global warming. Conversation with a "big C" refers to a 
debate according to the author.

Also in Chapter 3 the author further describes the "big D" Discourse. 
The two main points of Discourse analysis are, who we are speaking 
or writing to and what we are doing. For example one might project a 
different identity at a formal dinner party as opposed to a casual family 
dinner. The key to Discourses according to Professor Gee 
is "recognition". We are recognised by others as particular identities or 
types who are engaged in a particular type of activity because we 
know how we can perform in different situations by attuning our words 
and actions. New Discourses emerge as old ones die out. The author 
illustrates his points through a lot of valuable and enjoyable examples. 
At the end of Chapter 3 a useful box also provides a brief set of points 
about Discourses.

Chapter 4: Social languages, conversations and intertextuality
This section of the book further develops the previously explained 
tools of inquiry: "social languages", "intertextuality" 
and "conversations". The author argues in the previous chapter that 
when we analyse language-in-use, we need to study more than just 
language alone, we need to focus on Discourses with all the added 
elements also described in the previous chapter. Chapter 4 introduces 
the idea of social languages in more detail. The starting point for this 
is the "who is doing what" when something is communicated but as the 
author makes it quite clear "social languages" are different from 
Discourses. The term "social languages" is used to designate the role 
of language in Discourses, while Discourses as the author 
emphasises throughout his book, involve much more than just 
language and these additional elements must also be examined when 
we analyse Discourses, for example, among other things, values, 
themes and motifs. Professor Gee also argues that each social 
language has its own distinctive grammars that he calls "grammar 1" 
and "grammar 2". The former one is the traditional set of units like 
nouns, verbs, phrases, etc while the latter grammar is the set of rules 
by which grammatical units, like nouns and verbs create patterns, 
which with another term from linguistics we can call "collocational 
patterns". Through several illustrative examples the author brings the 
above mentioned points home. Chapter 4 ends with a box of 
questions the discourse analyst can ask about a piece of language.

Chapter 5: Situated meanings and discourse models
The author argues in Chapter 5 that meanings of words are not 
general but words have specific meanings in different contexts of use 
and also they vary across certain social and cultural groups. Through 
analysing several everyday life examples Gee demonstrates how 
specific meanings function in various contexts. Chapter 5 also gives 
an overview of the human mind, how it works as a rule-following and a 
pattern-recognising device and also how children learn to 
contextualise meanings of words. In this chapter the readers also get 
a good introduction on "cultural models", models the author himself 
tends to call Discourses (with a "big D"). The author argues that 
meaning is an active and also a social process. Through many good 
everyday examples Gee provides his readers with a wide range of 
illustrative cases. Chapter 5 ends with a box of commonly asked 
questions in discourse analysis.

Chapter 6: Discourse models
This chapter deals with discourse models in more depth, i.e. the 
unconscious theories all of us hold to make sense of the world. 
Discourse models are important tools of inquiry as they mediate 
between the micro-level interactions and the macro-level of 
institutions. The author encourages his readers to look beyond 
examples from their own culture and brings in language-in-action 
examples from other cultures, e.g. Mexican, in order to figure out 
situated meanings. Through analysing everyday examples that come 
from his own research, the author demonstrates how Discourse 
models and social class are connected, how social and political issues 
are implicated in the study of Discourse models. It also gets proven 
that people can have allegiance to competing and conflicting 
Discourse models, e.g. one powerful social group can influence a less 
powerful group through Discourse models. The question of validity 
also gets to be mentioned in this chapter, which is examined in more 
detail in Chapter 7.

Chapter 7: Discourse analysis
In Chapter 7 the author integrates all those tools of inquiry that he 
discussed in the previous sections of the book and also 
introduces "reflexivity" as the "magical property" of language, which he 
briefly mentioned at the outset of Chapter 2. By "reflexivity" the author 
means how language creates as well as reflects the contexts in which 
it is used. In Chapter 7 more details are also discussed about the 
previously analysed seven building tasks that are used in order to 
build situations by using language. An entire sub-point is devoted to 
transcripts in Chapter 7. As discourse analysis is based on the details 
of speech or writing, the issue of transcripts is fairly important. The 
author provides several examples of transcript analysis in this section. 
At the end of Chapter 7 the author summarises the components of 
an "ideal" discourse analysis as: convergence, agreement, coverage 
and linguistic details. A detailed description of all these components as 
well as twenty-six essential questions about the seven building tasks 
are provided in Chapter 7 for discourse analysis. The author 
encourages the analyst to use the 26 questions in order to establish 
situated meanings but he also warns his readers that the method he 
developed in this book is not intended at all as a set of rules that must 
be rigorously followed. Professor Gee offers Chapter 9, 10 and 11 as 
illustrative examples of how his method of discourse analysis works 
but before these chapters he talks about processing and organising 
language in Chapter 8.

Chapter 8: Processing and organising language
This section deals with some aspects of how language is planned and 
produced. Discourse analysis, the author claims, is a reciprocal and cyclical 
process where the analyst focuses on the structure of a piece of 
language and the situated meanings it is attempting to build about 
identities and relationships, and in general about the world. The 
author further explains that speech is produced in small "spurts", i.e. 
speech units that we need to analyse. In Chapter 8 Gee deals with a 
few technical details about the structure of sentences and of 
discourse. Through several everyday examples (e.g. story fragments 
told by children) the author shows how his methods work. The next 
three chapters of his book provide more examples of discourse 
analysis.

Chapter 9: Sample of discourse analysis
This chapter deals with data analysis in order to exemplify some of the 
tools of inquiry the author discussed in his book. The author states at 
the beginning of this chapter that he by no means attempts any full 
discourse analysis, rather he simply wants to give some examples 
relevant to some of the points that he raised in previous chapters of 
his book. The data he uses in Chapter 9 comes from interviews his 
research team recorded with American middle-school teenagers. 
These interviews take on a specific form. First the students were 
asked about their lives ("life-part" of interview) and then about societal 
issues ("society part" of interview). Detailed analyses are provided on 
certain fragments of the interviews in Chapter 9.

Chapter 10: Sample of discourse analysis 2
This section of the book offers a case study by taking a closer look at 
one of the students in the research cohort, the girl they 
named "Sandra". Certain parts of her interview are transcribed and 
analysed in Chapter 9 by using building task 6 and 7,  "connection 
building" and "sign systems and knowledge", respectively. This 
chapter allows the reader some insights again how Gee's approach 
and method to discourse analysis works in reality.

Chapter 11: Sample of discourse analysis 3
For the final sample of discourse analysis the author turns back to 
some data that he discussed in Chapter 2. Gee's intention here again 
is to show some of the sorts of questions that can be used in 
analysing data with his building tasks and tools of inquiry he 
developed. 

Following Chapter 11 a useful Appendix can be found in the book 
about grammar in communication, A1 about clauses and participants: 
the experiential function, A2 about grammatical relations: the 
interpersonal function, A3 about ordering: the textual function, A4 
about relating clauses: the logical function and A5 about cohesion.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

James Paul Gee's An Introduction to Discourse Analysis is a unique 
volume in the wide range of professional literature on discourse 
analysis, because while it is written with great professional expertise, it 
is also a highly enjoyable read that can reach out to a wide audience. 
>From undergraduate students to fellow colleagues and researchers 
this volume has a lot to offer. The book presents the author's 
approach and method in a clear and concise way. The main merits of 
the book are its many real life examples and the "hands-on" advice 
the author gives to discourse analysts in a way that is equally valuable 
to the novice and the expert analysts alike. Finally there is one more 
point that needs to be mentioned again as the biggest appeal of this 
book, namely the author's refreshing style and good sense of humour, 
which makes reading and learning so enjoyable. There is no doubt 
that James Paul Gee's 'An Introduction to Discourse Analysis' will 
appear on lists of recommended textbooks worldwide and students 
and lecturers will use it for their courses. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Patricia Zoltan teaches workshop sessions in the area of academic 
literacy at the University of Adelaide and as a doctoral candidate of 
the same university researches academic writing. Patricia's research 
interests lie in the area of discourse analysis, language awareness 
and genre-specific writing.





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