Helen Strong

MSc English Language Teaching Management

Discourse Analysis

The question

Explain what is meant by a Speech Act. Collect 25 examples of Directives (use notes or recordings). Now analyse your mini-corpus with reference to the directness or indirectness with which the Speech Act is conveyed. Explain if, how and why politeness is conveyed and the implications that this may have for learners of English.

The extract

When we say something, we are doing something. Although it is physically possible to utter words without actually saying anything, it has been argued* that people generally do not speak for the sake of it, but in order to perform a function, be it to give another person information, or to request information, to promise to do something, to give a warning or a piece of advice or an opinion, or to spur another person into action. The list goes on.

The problem experienced by foreign language learners is not only in learning the words, pronunciation and grammar required to recognise and perform these functions, but also the nature of the cultural and lexical norms attached to them. Knowledge of how to use a language involves mastery of a system of rules, and if these rules have not been innately learned at a young age, they must be acquired a priori later in life; rules which are not only explicitly lexical, phonological and morphological, but which also involve the social, cultural and conventional undercurrents implicit in the colourful make up of languages.

This paper is concerned with Speech Acts, i.e. what we do when we speak, and in particular the Speech Act known as a Directive. The paper will begin with a background and description of Speech Acts and Directives, then move on to study a corpus of 25 Directives which have been collected through fieldwork by the author. The Directives will be categorised in a way that aims to bring some order to this vast area, analysed in terms of politeness and directness, and finally an attempt will be made to draw some conclusions which could be helpful for both teachers and learners of English as a Foreign Language.

*For example, by Channell (1994:29) "Language only has meanings by virtue of its use."

Back to the essay titles.