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Hints of the epistemological foundation of discourse analysis (DA) come early and fast in Words and Minds; although, Mercer doesn't actually mention DA until Chapter 4.
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I like the empowering stance that Mercer assumes when he asserts that nothing is fixed in language, including our interpretations. There is that bleak worldview that regards language as just some rhetorical bludgeon wielded by politicians, professors, partisan media outlets, and other powerful elites. "Fortunately," Mercer assures us, listeners and readers have their own powers of perception and "knowledge resources." Through dialogue and asking questions, we get to decide our own interpretation of "powerful" texts (p. 82).
That vision may strike some readers as a little too rosy or idealistic. I believe it is possible, but it carries a huge educational imperative. I've long been interested in the field of critical literacies and the work of organizations like the Center for Media Literacy (CML). CML publishes a "toolkit" based on Five Key Questions that Can Change the World. These are very similar to the questions Mercer lists on page 82.
My nascent understanding of DA is it's a methodological tradition that, when done well, informs and improves our communication skills. I detect some social justice imperatives here, DA as route to improving living and work conditions (such as in classrooms, my area of interest). I shared my thoughts with a more advanced DA student, who said, "Well, now you are getting into critical discourse analysis." Is that where I'm going? I have no idea.
Mercer acknowledges that his claim that language provides insight into how people think may seem "dubious" because "thinking" is not observable (p. 16). But the analysis of "interthinking," as Mercer calls it, is possible, and it's a lot easier than the work of some psychological researchers who focus on interior thought processes.
Interthinking occurs through dialog between people, and we can systematically and rigorously draw inferences from "whatever information we can" (p. 16). Concepts to look at and analyze closely include: context (a "mental phenomenon," any available information that people bring to a situation), physical artifacts (the material context), conversational ground rules for different kinds of talk (generally tacit and culturally specific), and frames of reference (past cultural experiences, perspectives, world views).
Part of the rigor and high standards of DA emanate from its tangible products -- the transcripts. In the preface Mercer tells us that when presenting transcripts in the book, he used a modified format, not the standardized Jeffersonian. I had started asking questions about the "analytical abstractions" of DA and its intended audience in my last week's reflection, and I continue to wonder about the implications for audience when using Jeffersonian transcription.
If readers of a Jeffersonian transcript already know the symbols or are provided a detailed key, they can almost "hear" the text (Evers, 2011), but it seems that only experienced transcriptionists and conversation/discourse analysts would ever willingly attempt to read such a transcript. At first glance, these documents are quite off-putting, almost like another language, and couldn't that be a barrier to reaching the audience whose communication skills you are hoping to improve?
Even Mercer refers to the products -- the transcripts -- of conversation analysis as having "a dauntingly technical quality" (p. 57). I agree, so I guess I'm wondering about presentation of findings, and if it's common for analysts to carefully consider the desired target audience and modify their transcripts accordingly prior to publication, as did Mercer.
I'm also thinking about connections between DA and literary theory, and I will try to post those thoughts soon. [See What is the discourse analysis and literary criticism connection?]
References:
References:
Evers, J. C. (2011). From the past into the future. How technological developments change our ways of data collection, transcription and analysis. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1). Retrieved from http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/viewArticle/1636
Mercer, N. (2000). Words and minds: how we use language to think together. New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library.
A few thoughts - not all DA/CA researchers care about improving communication skills. A lot of them are "just" interested in learning more about language and what it does. There's no requirement that research be practically or ethically useful - though most of us in an applied field like education find it part of our very nature to what to "improve" things. But the idea that the findings COULD be empowering is what draws me to DA, yes - the more we understand about how language works, the more we can figure out how to change ourselves and maybe the world around us. But that is idealistic and the more I do research the more I wonder if that ever actually happens..but I digress.
ReplyDeleteThe Jeffersonian transcripts are for a DA/CA audience, but keep in mind that is, for a lot of DA/CA researchers, the intellectual community we are speaking to. If you want to talk to the practitioners, then you would report your findings in a different way (probably without the Jeffersonian notations.) Education is a strange field of research because so many of us were practitioners who have turned into researchers yet who still want to be relevant to practitioners...and that's a daunting task.