The importance of Classroom Discourse Analysis for English language teachers.

We live and communicate with the world around us with language. Language, in fact never lives in isolation; when we see a piece of language, it is not realized as isolated sounds, words, or sentences, it is realized in text. We are surrounded by texts, in our homes we might listen to a radio text, newspapers, books, novels, or text messages in our cell phones. All these pieces of text are an inevitable part of our daily lives, which either we receive and produce. Apparently the average American is produces 3000 messages per day, including phone calls, meetings and conversations. We may call the process of producing such as discourse. Put it simply, discourse is a language – either in written or spoken form – that is used for a communicative purpose in real life (Scott Thornbury, 2005: 6). A distinction between discourse and a text is that a discourse is the process whereas the text is the product.

As a language teacher, we need to be able to engage our learners with a variety of English text such as pop songs, newspaper, movie, websites, and so forth. If this is done, not only the learners are more exposed to a variety of discourses, they are also likely to be more motivated to learn since the language that they get is authentic as opposed to the inauthentic classroom books. Limiting the language only to what is available in classroom books, on the other hand, can be very demotivating. It provided little, if any, intrinsic motivation for learners to want to read or listen to them.

The classroom discourse itself is in fact rich in language: the dialogues between teachers and students, the turn-takings, the greetings, meta-languages, and more. The analysis of such authentic language in classrooms is called Classroom Discourse Analysis (CDA).

Armed with the knowledge of what CDA is, we may now realize how important it is to study classroom discourse analysis. Stubbs (1976) has this to say, “Ultimately, the classroom dialogue between teachers and pupils is the educational process, or, at least, the major part of it”. In other words, the education extends into a form of transactional process in teacher-student dialogues when, say, the student comes late to the class and the teacher refuses to let the student enter the classroom for educational purposes. According to Stubbs, it’s the teacher that holds the key of a better education. Other factors such as children’s language, IQ, social class and home background are merely external factors. In short, Classroom discourse analysis enables us to realize education in action.

Teachers in their classroom always have a range of available options; they make minute by minute classroom decisions as what is thought to be the best. For instance, when a late comer arrives, a teacher can decide whether to let him come in or not. In terms of classroom activities, teachers can select what is best to, say, teach the present perfect tense. Should it start with a reading text with examples of the language item in use or to elicit the tense from learners and explain in detail afterwards? All of these decisions come from teachers’ own assumption and belief about teaching, and largely the education itself. Different teachers have different assumptions and by studying CDA, we are able to accurately interpret and identify what those assumptions are from the classroom activities that the teachers carry out.

In conclusion, language teachers need Classroom Discourse Analysis as a tool to improve their own teaching and most importantly the education of their own students in general. Through CDA we may be able to interpret teachers’ assumption and belief about teaching from the activities chosen. And hopefully, these interpretations may in turn give us a great contribution to the knowledge of teaching, and better education in general.