Linking Discourse Studies to Professional Practice

Lubie Grujicic-Alatriste, Lubie Grujicic-Alatriste

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783094097
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book examines how discourse analysts could best disseminate their research findings in real world settings. Each chapter presents a study of spoken or written discourse with authors putting forward a plan for how to engage professional practice in their work, using this volume's Framework for Application. Techniques used include Conversation Analysis in combination with other methods, Genre Analysis in combination with other methods, and Critical Discourse Analysis. Contributions are loosely grouped by setting and include the following: workplace and business settings; education settings; private and public settings; and government and media settings. The volume aims to link the end of research and the onset of praxis by helping analysts to move forward with ideas for dissemination, collaboration and even intervention.The book will be of interest to all researchers conducting discourse analysis in professional settings.

1	Framework for Application of Research Findings: An Introduction
	Lubie Grujicic-Alatriste

This volume aims to assist analysts whose discourse research findings are amenable to the application in their places of practice, in reaching out to stakeholders, disseminating their findings and if possible negotiating future research, collaborative projects, intervention and ultimately change. Specifically, the contributors are interested in the practicalities of how one goes from considering to doing application in their field of study. The Framework for Application was created in order to offer clear steps for the dissemination of findings and tools for generating stakeholders’ feedback in the places of practice. Stakeholders are in this volume all parties involved in research pro-cesses, from participants and clients to institutions and lay people. Each chapter uses the framework as a point of reference, reporting different levels of engagement with it due to the volume’s diverse settings. Some authors are already well engaged in reaching out to the places of practice, while others are at the initial stages. In those chapters where the author is both the ana-lyst and the practitioner, the dissemination is by the very nature of this duality more immediate. The variability in the level of engagement with the framework and the position of authors towards ‘the impact’ their work may have – from raising awareness to intervention – illustrates a realistic range of success on the application continuum.

Arriving at Application in This Volume

The need to make application more central to applied linguistics and studies of language in the real world is not new. In his contribution to AILA titled ‘Some current trends in applied linguistics’, Bygate contends that the field [of applied linguistics] is at the point of needing to ask a range of ques-tions, including the following: ‘What happens to the results of our research’ (Bygate, 2004: 18). Bygate’s question refers to the research done in education, but the same question, we feel, is still relevant a decade later to most domains of applied linguistics (here meant in the broad sense of the term and clarified a little later in this chapter). Although not all the research in the many fields of applied linguistics is directly amenable to application in the real world of practice, a fair amount of it could be and perhaps should be. We would like to suggest that doing application where it seems natural or possible is a healthy step forward for the field as a whole.

To provide a background to Bygate’s question, we presume that most readers are familiar with the tendency in our field’s many domains to con-clude research in academic journals, in books or in masters or doctoral dis-sertations by stating that the reported research findings may have potential for application. This in itself is neither strange nor irrelevant. However, even a random attempt to follow up and see what has happened to those often important published findings seems to be, more frequently than not, nothing specific. In other words, the recommendations for practical applications, or the stated implications for application, have a tendency to be more represen-tative of rhetorical devices than of actual proposals with realistic expecta-tions. Although some percentage of classroom-based research may eventually find its way into practical application such as textbooks and graduate courses on methodology, and by extension the actual classrooms, as might health and social service related studies, many other types of research may not. This is truly a loss for the existing completed analysis which, if dealing with world communication problems or language use, may be useful in places other than academia. Similarly, it is seen as a loss for the researchers who could broaden their work’s domain and impact if they were to find ways to apply their findings in the world of practice. Finally, instances of ground-breaking discourse work which could have significant applications – such as research of the type performed by Heritage and Robinson (2011), but within current practices – if the researchers are not part of a larger and more promi-nent group that is already doing application and intervention (e.g. Antaki, 2011a), may remain dormant rather than actively directed towards applica-tion. Thus, more spotlight on the issue of the next step for many research studies can be a positive and needed present initiative.

On a discipline level, the relative absence of stronger focus on applica-tion seems to reflect a still predominant theoretical preoccupation with its many applied areas. When considering applied sciences in general, the goal is ‘not [to] merely study [a phenomenon], but to intervene, and to propose directions for change’ (Bygate, 2004: 18). Thus, applied linguistics, as a social science, might need to provide more, or perhaps something else in addition to theory, basic research and pure knowledge (Knapp & Antos, 2011). There is no question that theory is both one of the goals of, and the necessity for furthering, the discipline, but there may be a need for more earnestly considering broader applications of theory and practice outside the academy. Reaching out into the world of practice has the potential to expand our understanding of the relationships that we commonly enter when col-lecting data in real-life settings and to open new areas of research and collaboration.

When reflecting on applied fields of language study in particular, the question of relevance is hard to ignore. To echo Bygate, the temptation for some may be to wonder ‘what is so special about studying language within the real world problems if the only [ultimate] purpose is to use it as a stimulus for academic reflection’ (Bygate, 2005: 570, emphasis mine). This is not to say that academic reflection is not welcome. It is and it will always be a part of what we do. But adding application to reflection may make our field more versatile and visible, as well as useful to the people outside it. Without a stronger and perhaps more frequent engagement of application (and by extension praxis), we might remain, in many ways, a predominantly theo-retical discipline. This theoretical insularity could result in missing out on further scientific and research developments facilitated by focusing on more setting-based application.

Including real-world people and their views in our research, as Bygate suggested a decade ago (2004), continues to be pertinent and relevant today. Those real people we need to include are teachers, students, practitioners, clients, lay persons – all those who are stakeholders in the practical world. This is because ‘without real world input, the researcher develops a trajec-tory simply in terms of what resonates with the academy: applied in terms of what it focuses on, but without the commitment to the external endorsement of the problems it explores’ (Bygate, 2004: 18, emphasis mine). This particular point is noted in the present collection as the research placed within the framework of dissemination is already completed and available for applica-tion. The issue Bygate raises, though, about outside endorsement is consid-ered relevant in those areas of study that engage real-life language use, including ours. But while we acknowledge this external endorsement we also address the challenges that come with trying to achieve it. It is the challenges that we encountered that have confirmed to us the need for a more formal way of beginning the road to application – hence the Framework for Application.

The concerns with external endorsement coupled with the real-life hur-dles when doing application have led us to espouse a very transparent approach towards our own processes and to report on the obstacles and chal-lenges we have faced while putting this collection together. This, we feel, will help other analysts understand what to expect when starting out with their own projects based on similar aspirations.

Challenges and the need for a framework

Specifically in this collection, we discovered that addressing application, however much desired on our part, was neither simple nor straightforward. In part, this is because the researchers and analysts who are contributors to this volume (although we can imagine this pertaining to others in the world of scholarship) had minimal or no training or instruction in how to orient their work towards application. Some may find this surprising for ‘applied linguists’, but in fact upon reflection we realised that it was to be expected. The graduate and doctoral courses the contributors had taken, and now their current work environments, have not focused, and are not typically focusing, on application per se. This realisation concurs with the observations of other analysts who have pointed out that the focus for most researchers is just the narrow domain of their own sub-field of their own methodology, having the publication of their work in a research journal as the end goal (although a worthy one at that, but not ‘applied’ enough). Particularly relevant is the observation that ‘newer generations for whom narrow specialization has become the norm, [find it] increasingly difficult to see the wide-ranging prac-ticalities and possibilities of the field’ (Candlin & Sarangi, 2004a: 7). The same will probably ring true with many readers of this collection. It is the ‘wide-ranging practicalities and possibilities’ that we wish this volume to bring to the fore and to make central to the readership.

But how one comes to the ‘wide-ranging possibilities’ may be a fair ques-tion here. In our case, we initially thought the most obvious way to begin with ‘practicalities’ was to start with the dissemination of our research find-ings by reaching out to practitioners and other parties in the original research settings, if they are still there and reachable, that is, with the information about the completion of the research studies. For many contributors, this was no longer an option, so the very first step, which is the identification of the places for outreach, became an obstacle. It appeared hard for many to begin to reorient their thinking and their work towards application. We con-cluded that even at this early stage, a set of tools was needed in order to plan the sharing of findings and to assist in collecting the feedback. These initial challenges resulted in the creation of the Framework for Application, a con-crete set of steps and tools for the application of findings.

Next, it was apparent that an understanding of institutional practices and the goals of the stakeholders was needed because practicalities, in part, depend on the intimate connection with the values, procedures and knowl-edge base of those with whom we seek to explore those purposes (Cicourel, 2003). If the analyst conducted her or his work without such connections with the places of practice, then revisiting, reaching out or offering to share feedback might not be immediately feasible, or could be significantly more challenging. A bridge was clearly needed in order to assist the crossing over from a pure analyst role to a collaborative role at the places of practice. The Framework for Application was constructed with an intent to address the above-presented needs and concerns. It facilitates the top-down model of application (or a model that is researcher/analyst initiated not practitioners and stakeholders initiated), because it was the most obvious starting point for the already completed and ready-for-dissemination studies featured in this volume. Since the movement towards collaboration with professional prac-tice favours a bottom-up approach, we are aware that our choices may be seen as an excuse for more analysts’ ready-made answers to [their] perceived problems in real settings (Candlin & Sarangi, 2004a; Edwards, 2010). Such concerns are valid and should not be disregarded, but in this volume we firmly support the necessity of the ‘the first step’ for all those analysts who have completed their analysis but have nowhere to go with the findings. We offer that blueprint in our own chapters.

Additionally, the aforementioned initial contact with the places of prac-tice is regarded as a direct opportunity that might lead to the ‘external endorsement of applicability’ (Bygate, 2004) or, further down the road, an external identification of real-life issues that need researching so that praxis could ensue. The latter is in some ways a continuation of the first effort (the initiation of contact with practice), because in the natural order of things the analysts first need to reach out to the places of practice, establish relation-ships by sharing their data and interest, and then start negotiating future projects that would be externally endorsed and validated. Thus, we contend that any volume that engages application must, from the onset, acknowledge these complexities and the challenges lying ahead. It may not be sufficient, it seems, to ‘just’ promote application; one needs to know how to go about doing it. This we see as the main aim of the present volume.

A note on terminology in this volume

Implicit in the focus on application are questions about the definition and scope of applied linguistics, so they are addressed here, although by no means in any extensive way. Since Corder (1973), the discussions about applied linguistics have abounded and many scholars have engaged the topic with passion and expertise (see Brumfit, 1997; Bygate, 2004, 2005; Cook, 2003; Crystal, 1981, 2003; Davies, 1999; Gass & Makoni, 2004; Grabe, 2004; Grabe & Kaplan, 1992; Hall et al., 2011; Knapp & Antos, 2011; Myers, 2005; Sealy & Carter, 2004; Simpson, 2011; Widdowson, 1979, 2000). The most widely cited definition of applied linguistics comes from Brumfit, who described it as ‘the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world prob-lems in which language is a central issue’ (in Brumfit et al., 1995: 27). This definition appears broad enough to encompass diverse engagements of the areas he outlined. However, this very array of issues has also been seen as having ramifications, the main one being that ‘practically everything in life poses a problem in which language is central’ (Simpson, 2011). Or, to borrow Greg Myers’ words, ‘It is hard to think of any “real-world” problems that do not have a crucial component of language use’ (Myers, 2005: 527). By all indications, these debates are just as relevant today as they were a few decades back and seem sure to continue.

With strict regard to terminology, there have been different interpreta-tions of the meaning of ‘applied’ in applied linguistics, and there have been suggestions that we should use two terms, ‘linguistics applied’ and ‘applied linguistics’, in order to facilitate the notion of application (e.g. Roberts, 2003; Widdowson, 2000). Furthermore, there have been discussions relat-ing to the domains and classification of areas of applied linguistics, most frequently with an eye to the place of discourse analysis in it – see, for example, Edwards (2010), for an overview and criticism of discourse analy-sis, or Widdowson (2004), for critical issues in the context of discourse analysis.

Also noted here are some more recent movements towards divisions within discourse analysis, the obvious one being the argument for the exclu-sion of conversation analysis (CA) from discourse analysis (e.g. Stivers & Sidnell, 2013), the questioning of the role of CA in linguistics (Fox et al., 2013), and suggestions for the separation of discourse analysis from applied linguistics. Some discussions go as far as suggesting that perhaps the term ‘discourse analysis’ has outlived itself (see Cook, 2011: 440).

Without a doubt, these are weighty topics and we recognise their impor-tance. We do not mean to simplify, minimise or otherwise render irrelevant arguments relating to the purpose, scope and divisions of applied linguistics. Instead, we feel that more recent publications (e.g. The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics by Simpson, 2011) engage these issues with great focus and expertise. While we acknowledge both the continuous presence of the above-mentioned debates and their significance for the field of applied linguistics and its future, as the title of this volume suggests, we are not directly inter-ested in pursuing or recapitulating the existing discussions, debates, reviews of terminology or inner divisions. Rather, we are interested in offering ways to answer the question of ‘what next’ to do with research findings. Simultaneously, we are committed to providing concrete examples as to what can and should happen next.

We hope that our approach will not weaken but rather strengthen the prospects of future work within the area of applied linguistics and discourse studies. Discourse studies is the term espoused in this volume to refer to studies of spoken and written discourse, in line with Bhatia, Flowerdew and Jones (2008) and their refreshingly inclusive collection entitled Advances in Discourse Studies. The inclusive stance creates the potential to move beyond the debates on what applied linguistics, or discourse analysis, is or is not, and to focus on what it does, ‘with whom [it] does the doing, for what purpose, and with what anticipated outcomes and impacts’ (Candlin & Sarangi, 2004a: 2). In short, the inclusive stance could aid the application movement across the entire field.

To summarise, the first section of Chapter 1 provides an informative overview of the developmental stages of the present volume. It also intro-duces and justifies the need for the Framework for Application with the intention of helping the readers understand the rationale for putting this collection together.

All Roads Lead to Application

As it has been well established, the movement towards application grew stronger at the turn of the millennium, ranging from calls and theoretical suggestions for change to the actual attempts to engage real-life settings, and even initiate intervention, action and change in the places of professional practice. Many voices have been raised and different agendas have been put forward. The following review is neither exhaustive nor is it meant to be. It specifically discusses the ideas as they relate to this volume’s theme.

The tides of change towards application and real language use within the field of applied linguistics can be traced back to Brown and Yule’s (1983) ground-breaking statement that ‘the analysis of discourse is necessarily the analysis of language use’, where use is really the focus. At around the same time, Stubbs (1983) noted that linguistics had left the study of language use in specific areas such as education, medicine, law, forensics, etc., to other disciplines. This, in his view, was in need of redress. In his discussion, he identified issues that are still relevant today to application, applied linguistics and practice. Among them are the relationship between the analysts and practitioners and their perceptions of each other. These relationships, accord-ing to Stubbs (1983), can affect the way application can be approached and carried out. His stand thus signalled a more outward-looking perspective that advocated for the analysts needing to engage views other than those of their own within the broader world of language use.

The possibility of going into other places to gather data (e.g. business, law, medicine), was realised by quite a few researchers within the domain of CA. A shift from ‘ordinary conversation’ to institutional conversation occurred almost at the same time as did the work of Stubbs, Brown and Yule. Strides were evidenced in the work of Atkinson and Drew (‘Order in court’, 1979), doctor–patient interaction (Heath, 1981, 1986), and news interviews (Clayman, 1988, 2013; Clayman & Whalen, 1988; Drew & Heritage, 1992a; Greatbatch, 1988). Since then, there has been an ever-growing range of set-tings where analysts were collecting and describing data. Listed here are only some research domains and types of data: emergency calls, medical issues presented from the doctors’ and patients’ p...