Teaching the Spoken Language

Those familiar with the work of Gillian Brown and George Yule on Discourse Analysis might be expecting a book which deals with the applications of such analysis to teaching English. Insofar as this is true, the title of the book is misleading : discourse analysis is an ambiguous term which has been used to refer to (i) conversational analysis, or (ii) the process of producing language as opposed to ’text’, the product (cf Robinson, 1980). Brown and Yule opt for the latter definition i.e. p. 57 &dquo;discourse is text interpreted in context&dquo;. Thus, the arguments in this book could well hold for written language, especially those