Scribd
Upload
36 views2 pages

Discourse Analysis a Resource Book for Students Wr

Uploaded by

Zeba Sadia
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
36 views2 pages

Discourse Analysis a Resource Book for Students Wr

Uploaded by

Zeba Sadia
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

Book Reviews 385

Jones, Rodney H. (2012). Discourse Analysis: A Resource Book for Students. London &
New York: Routledge. 229 pages

Rodney Jones’ Discourse Analysis: A Resource Book for Students is another in


the Routledge English Language Introduction Series. Like other volumes in the
series, this book assumes no prior knowledge of the topic and is built around
four sections: Introduction, Development, Exploration, and Extension. Each
section contains ten subsections, or strands, dealing with concepts central to
the field of discourse analysis. Organized cyclically, these ten concepts recur
in each of the four sections, taking students deeper and deeper into the vari-
ous strands, until in Section Four, students are reading passages from seminal
works in the study of discourse. This format allows for a versatile syllabus de-
sign that students can profit from when guided by a knowledgeable instructor.
In the first section, “Introduction: Key topics in the study of discourse analy-
sis,” Jones introduces key concepts such as discourse vs. discourses, discourse
communities, text, texture and intertextuality, discourse and ideology, strate-
gic interaction and face, the ethnography of communication, and mediated
and multimodal discourse analysis. Each of these topics is dealt with briefly
(3–4 pages) and in non-technical language. Together, they provide a brief over-
view of the field. However, in some cases, for example the section on mediated
discourse analysis, the summary is so brief as to be without anything of sub-
stance for students to grasp on to.
Jones introduces the second section, “Development: Approaches to dis-
course analysis,” by identifying three ways of looking at discourse: discourse
as text, discourse as action, and discourse as ideology. In this section, he ac-
quaints the reader with Halliday and Hasan’s notion of cohesion, Gee’s cultural
models, Swales’ genre and move analysis, Austin’s theory of speech acts, Grice’s
cooperative principle, Schegloff’s conversation analysis and returns to Hymes’
Ethnography of Communication. He traces the evolution of cigarette warning
labels to illustrate how texts can reflect and reinforce power relations and ide-
ologies. A good part of this section is devoted to mediation and multimodality,
leading to brief mentions of Kress and van Leeuwen’s grammar of visual design
and Scollon and Scollon’s nexis analysis. The section ends with several pages
devoted to procedures for corpus-assisted analysis of discourse.
Section Three, “Exploration: Analysing discourse,” further develops each of
the ten strands and includes ample examples to illustrate each topic. Useful ac-
tivities follow each subsection, giving students hands-on experience using the
various tools introduced. The final section, “Extension: Readings in discourse
analysis,” contains short excerpts from classics in the field of discourse analy-
sis and related areas. There are passages from structural linguist Zellig Harris
© Thom Huebner, 2019 | doi:10.1163/26659077-02203007
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing cc-by-nc License at the time
of publication Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2019 01:15:10PM
via free access
386 book reviews

and applied linguists Henry Widdowson and James Paul Gee. A section from
Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion in English and one from psychologist David Ru-
melhart on story schema are included. Other classics in this section are from
John Swales and Vijay K. Bhatia (genre analysis), Norman Fairclough (intertex-
tuality), James Paul Gee (ideology), John Austin (speech acts), Emanuel Sche-
gloff and Harvey Sacks (conversation analysis), Deborah Tannen and Cynthia
Wallat (frame analysis), Dell Hymes and Muriel Saville-Troike (ethnography
of communication), Ron Scollon (nexis analysis), Gunther Kress and Theo
van Leeuwen (visual design), Sigrid Norris (multimodality) and Paul Baker
and Tony McEnery (corpus-assisted discourse analysis) Students are guided
through these short excerpts of original works with commentary from Jones
and discussion questions after each piece.
The book also contains a list of further readings for each of the ten strands
in addition to an extensive list of references. There are both an “Author Index”
and a “Glossarial Index,” but they appear to have been completed in haste and
are not as thorough as one might desire. The book has a very useful companion
website with extra resources for teachers and students. https://routledgetext
books.com/textbooks/_author/9780415610001-jones/.
This book has many strengths, especially when used in the hands of an in-
structor conversant in the many approaches to the analysis of discourse who
can guide students from the introductory section to the extended readings in
the last section. The author’s preferences for mediated discourse and espe-
cially for Scollon and Scollon’s nexis analysis is apparent, though of all of the
approaches covered in the book, this one is the least transparent. The unusual
cyclical format allows the possibility to use the book in a non-linear fashion,
and indeed, given the uneven coverage of the various strands, the sometimes
unexpected ordering of strands within sections and the occasional lack of
transitions between strands, the instructor may well choose to do so.

Thom Huebner, Ph.D.


Professor Emeritus, San Jose State University
Thom.Huebner@sjsu.edu

manusya 22 (2019) 375-386


Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2019 01:15:10PM
via free access

You might also like

pFad - Phonifier reborn

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


Alternative Proxies:

Alternative Proxy

pFad Proxy

pFad v3 Proxy

pFad v4 Proxy