Mighty Digests # 11: WOOD & KROGER, Doing Discourse Analysis

(Book: Wood, L.A. & Kroger. R.O. (2000). Doing Discourse Analysis: Methods for Studying Action in Talk and Text. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.) [Chapters 4-6]

In my opinion, some of the most interesting parts of these three chapters are:

1. The focus of DA is language in use (not abstract): “discourse refers to the words that were spoken, to the text that was written”. (p. 55)
2. The importance of details and fidelity in the data for DA. (p. 56)
3. An interesting statement about fictional discourse: “Fictional discourse (e.g., novels, plays, films) deserve attention, because it is naturally occurring in that its production is not instigated by the researcher. […] There are interesting parallels between fictional works and everyday conversation (Tanne, 1989).” (p. 58)
4. The “undue emphasis to the nonverbal”. (p. 59) Discourse analysts reject the opposing of the verbal and the nonverbal, and they consider them interrelated.
5. Discourse is always situated.
6. “We often seem to be asking participants to do our job rather than to speak in relation to their own experience.” (p. 73)
7. Relative importance of sample size and lack of random sampling.
8. Transcripts are not the data: the data are the recordings themselves.
9. The researcher makes the transcript!
10. It is important to identify a brief part to be accurately analyzed.