his collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism.
Investigating English Discourse is a collection of essays that address the discourse of "English" as a subject of teaching and learning. Ronald Carter draws on recent applied linguistic work in the discourse analysis of English to link theory with practice. Written in a clear, accessible manner, Carter includes examples from advertisements, poetry, jokes and public notices. Topics include grammar, correctness and standard English, critical language awareness and literacy, language and creativity, and discourse theory.
This landmark text is the first introduction to concepts and issues in
critical discourse analysis for educational researchers. The central
premise is that critical discourse analysis must be conducted
"systematically," which means conducting inquiry into the ways in which
language form and function correlate with social practices. Bringing
together the work of New Literacy Studies, situated literacy, critical
discourse theory and analysis with theories of learning, the text is
distinctive in providing not just useful analytic accounts of discourse
in classroom and other settings, but going on to identify ways in which
these forms of language are connected to theories of learning.
From The author's summary: I set out in this book to explore how the notion of point of view is relevant to the stylistic analysis of dramatic texts. My reasons for doing this stemmed from the fact that, although viewpoint has largely been disregarded in the criticism of drama, some dramatic texts exhibit discourse architectures that are at least as complex as prose fiction narratives. This in itself suggests that point of view is relevant to the analysis of dramatic texts too, though, as I have shown, even in those dramatic texts exhibiting more prototypical discourse structures point of view effects can arise.
This volume presents interdisciplinary and international contributions to relevant issues debated in the Social Sciences, specifically in the field of Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis. It also marks two celebrations. The first is the existence for about thirty years now of CDA and its forerunner Critical Linguistics. The second is the end of a six year research centre financed by the Wittgenstein Prize, awarded in 1996 to the first editor, RuthWodak, of the present volume, by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF).
