Discourse analysis

Introduction Discourse is all around us: as McCarthy, et al. (2002: 55) so succinctly put it: ‘Life is a constant flow of discourse – of language functioning in one of the many contexts that together make up a culture.’ In an obvious, though nevertheless taken-for-granted, way, language is intrinsic to the creation and maintenance of the institutions and practices that we may wish to investigate as educational researchers; hence the importance of discourse analysis, and its critical contribution to our analytical toolkit. But discourse analysis is a teeming field, as Taylor (2001, p10) suggests that any budding researcher who has attempted a literature search on the topic will attest, made up of a variety of disciplinary fields, all of which take a specific view of what discourse and discourse analysis means. In this chapter, an overview of the provenance of what has come to be termed discourse analysis will be outlined. As it is not possible to deal with all of these in detail, a selection of fields, their theoretical backgrounds and methodological concerns will be discussed. Research methods are rarely, if ever, independent of some epistemological stance (Gee, 2005, p6), and so this direction is taken in order to illustrate how the findings a researcher might arrive at by using a particular discourse analytic approach are inextricably linked to the theory that underlies their method.