Discourse Awareness And Language Teaching/learning Of Speech Acts

Abstract

In a previous study day, I drew attention to the role and importance of discourse awareness in language teaching/learning, dealing with written discourse and putting emphasis on discourse grammar and discourse devices that create cohesion. In the same line of thought, I would like to put emphasis on the role of discourse awareness in teaching/learning spoken language. Spoken discourse analysis is a very vast subject which examines aspects of spoken language such as speech acts, discourse intonation patterns, conversation analysis, adjacency pairs, turn taking, transactional and interactional talk as well as genres and types of spoken discourse such as storytelling, anecdotes, jokes, gossip, media, political speech and many other genres. Each of these constitutes a whole area of discourse analysis and academic research. Because of this vastness in the field, the present paper examines only one of these topics, which is speech acts, to illustrate the importance of developing discourse awareness in the teaching/learning of the speaking skill.