This book provides an introduction to the basic principles of discourse research and provides practical research strategies for doing discourse analyses in the social sciences. The book includes guidance on developing a research question, selecting data and analyzing it, and presenting your results. The author has extensive practical experience in the field of discourse research and shows throughout how the methods suggested are compatible with numerous research questions and problems in sociology, cultural, political and social studies and related disciplines.

Literacy researchers at all stages of their careers are designing and developing innovative new methods for analyzing data in a range of spaces in and out of school. Directly connected with evolving themes in literacy research, theory, instruction, and practices—especially in the areas of digital technologies, gaming, and web-based research; discourse analysis; and arts-based research—this much-needed text is the first to capture these new directions in one volume.

The papers brought together in this volume illustrate how spoken corpora (be they native or learner corpora) can provide insights into various aspects of errors and disfluencies such as pauses and discourse markers. They show, among others, that such phenomena can be influenced by factors like gender, age or genre, and that they can correlate with, e.g., informativeness and syntactic complexity. Crucially, they also demonstrate that items which are often dismissed as mere disfluencies can fulfil important functions and thus play an essential role in the management of spoken discourse.

This book focuses on aspects of variation and change in language use in spoken and written discourse on the basis of corpus analyses, providing new descriptive insights, and new methods of utilising small specialized corpora for the description of language variation and change. The sixteen contributions included in this volume represent a variety of diverse views and approaches, but all share the common goal of throwing light on a crucial dimension of discourse: the dialogic interactivity between the spoken and written.

A Genre Analysis of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” and Its Use in the Asian EFL Classroom

In this paper, the author discusses the particular discourse features of Dr. Martin Luther King's historic speech, "I Have a Dream," delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., in 1963. The paper first begins with a brief description of the context, including the location, temporal setting, and the social and cultural circumstances in which the speech was delivered. Second, the author provides a discourse analysis of the specific literary and rhetorical discourse features that are unique to Dr. King's speech. The analysis focuses on genre, linguisitic structure and cohesion within the text.