DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

The third strand of discourse analysis has been sufficiently aired to require little further comment, except to note that the targets of analysis will not be restricted to either

finished or professional products. Drafts, plans, revisions and rehearsals of genres central to a discourse community are grist to the mill, as are comparisons of processes. and products

between apprentice and expert members, and the use of 'specialist informants' (Selinker, 1979) to throw light on those processes and products (see Part III for further discussion

of the 'specialist informant' issue).

4. METHODOLOGY

A final strand is methodology, which as Figure 2 shows, is here seen as being configured in terms of language-learning tasks. While the specification of task itself will be

considered in the following subsection, the place of task can be seen as central to the framework. Tasks are seen as having communicative outcomes, just as genres are seen as having communicative purposes and discourse communities communicative goals. A task-driven methodology thus keeps an appropriate focus on rhetorical action and communicative effectiveness, however much the means to those communicative ends may involve, in various ways and to variable extents, the analysis and discussion of text and situation, and the teaching and practice of form. The actual devising of suitable tasks is shown in the figure as being moderated on the one side by considerations of genre and on the other by what we know of first or second language-learning processes.

This role of genre in task-construction would appear to need some justification as it is by no means universally accepted. Hutchinson and Waters (1987) also assign task a central place in their materials construction model. As they say:

The model acts as a vehicle which leads the learners to the point where they are able to carry out the task. The language and content are drawn from the input and are selected according to what the learners will need in order to do the task.

(Hutchinson and Waters, 1987:109)

However, in terms of Figure 2, Hutchinson and Waters look only downward for the criteria that will determine the nature and nurture of the task — they look to what we know of the language-learning process in the classroom (Chaudron, 1988). While this may be appropriate enough for the beginning stages, it is less than clear that it is, on the one hand, sufficient and, on the other, necessary for situations in which students are already having to cope with the exigencies of an English-speaking world outside the classroom.

The danger of ignoring genre is precisely the danger of ignoring communicative purpose.

Indeed, as I have confessed elsewhere (Swales, 1985c), this is a lesson that I have learnt the hard way. I used to teach an EAP course for students entering the largely English-medium Faculty of Law at the University of Khartoum in Sudan. One of the main genres that

I used were Sudanese case reports, and for this choice I could put forward an elaborate justification. The case reports were relatively short authentic documents; they had certain similarities to the narratives the students had read in their English lessons at school; they introduced in a relatively easy-paced way useful Criminal Law vocabulary; they were situated within Sudanese culture; they had a consistent rhetorical structure consisting of front matter, narrative and judgment; and they were relatively easy to exploit for

methodological activities. They thus formed, or so I thought, an excellent basis for a first series of reading comprehension units. However, the comprehension tasks I invited the students to undertake were misconceived because they were designed to help the students to understand the stories. It was only when I attended classes given by a

Criminal Law professor that I belatedly came to realize that the reading strategy required in legal education was not to understand — and retain the gist of — a narrative, but to spot the crucial fact on which the decision (rightly or wrongly) rested. The problem-solving law professor's questions were quite different to my own. Because I had failed to appreciate the role of the genre in its environment, the reading strategies I was teaching, however well-founded in terms of ESL methodology, were probably doing the students more harm than good.

4.2 Towards a concept of task

At the end of the last section I revealed something of the slowness with which I had come to realize that pedagogical text and pedagogical task need to be inter-related. Prior to that I had concurred with Hutchinson and Waters that task was central to

methodology. More generally, the centrality of task is a widely accepted position.

Crookes (1986b) in a major cross-disciplinary review opens his summary section with the following conclusions:

It has been shown that the category 'task', as used by researchers generally, is widely applicable and has psychological reality. Much, if not most, of human activity, whether in employment or in the classroom can be seen as a series of tasks — some having a communicative aspect, others not.

(Crookes, 1986b:32)

In an earlier section Crookes had discussed a paper by Swaffar, Arens and Morgan ( 1982), in which the authors accounted for the research failure to show convincingly that one language teaching method is better than another in terms of the fact there are many shared classroom practices that cut across methods. Most of the real differences that exist,

differ-.

ences perceivable by language teachers as they reflect upon the pragmatics of their classrooms, reside in the nature of the tasks and their arrangements. 'By their tasks you shall know them.'

Even if there is growing consensus that task is an important concept in language learning

— indeed task-based learning has already become abbreviated to TBL (Samuda and Madden, 1985) — there is little agreement how task might be appropriately defined.

Long (1985) and Coleman (1987) consider task as broadly equivalent to activity, and even for whose who wish to restrict the context to language teaching, there is an often expressed wish to generalize the notion of task. Here is Breen:

Throughout the paper, the notion of 'task' is used in a broad sense to refer to any structural language learning endeavor which has a particular objective, appropriate content, a specified working procedure, and a range of outcomes for those who undertake the task. 'Task' is therefore assumed to refer to a range of workplans which have the overall purpose of facilitating language learning —from the simple and brief exercise type to more complex and lengthy activities such as group problem-solving simulations and decision-making.

(Breen, 1987:23)

Although the distinction that Breen goes on to make between aswork plan and task-in-process will be seen to be important, the above characterization runs counter to one widely held assumption in TBL: that of enablement or support. If the 'simple and brief exercise type' is seen as an end in itself, as it might well be in a structural syllabus, then it does not reflect a task-based approach. However, if it is so structured as to operate as directly facilitative of an encompassing 'real' task, as means to that end, then it will be task-based (Edge and Samuda, 1983; Samuda and Madden, 1985; Hutchinson and Waters, 1987). Breen's characterization lacks structure because it does not assume that all language activities are to be related to tasks.

The most elaborate of available definitions of language-learning task is that of Candlin ( 1987):

One of a set of differentiated, sequenceable problem-posing activities involving learners and teachers in some joint selection from a range of varied cognitive and communicative procedures

applied to existing and new knowledge in the collective exploration and pursuance of foreseen or emergent goals within a social milieu.

(Candlin, 1987:10)

Candlin immediately goes on to observe that different readers will give variable emphasis to such a definition in the light of their different pedagogical situations and purposes. So be it.

The idea that tasks are 'differentiated' and `sequenceable' is clearly valuable. The fact that tasks can be seen to have beginnings, middles and ends provides an orientation for learners against the often opaque background of a course or syllabus: in addition they provide clear objectives for learners and establish 'landmarks of achievement' (

Hutchinson and Waters, 1987:117). Tasks are clearly `sequenceable' both in practice and theory, although there currently exist considerable doubts as to the validity of the criteria

by which tasks can be ordered (Crookes, 1986b; Kumaravadivelu, 1988). As might be expected, many proponents advocate that tasks should be graded in terms of difficulty or complexity (e.g. Long, 1985; Prabhu, 1985) and in terms of alternating the focus from one that conceives the student as a language user to one that conceives the student as a language learner (Samuda and Madden, 1985; Hutchinson and Waters, 1987). However, at present, the simplicity or the complexity of a task, or the variable need to focus on content or form are not easily predictable in advance and perhaps — and perhaps valuably — never will be. As Breen observes, 'pre-designed tasks are little more than idealized plans for learner work' (1987:38). The task-inprocess phenomena are not only full of surprises, both good and bad, but equally importantly the study of those

phenomena builds up case law in our trial-and-error efforts to discover appropriate sequences of tasks.

Candlin also considers tasks to be 'problem-posing activities'. While task-based communicative language teaching has often emphasized the artful construction of

activities that place the learners in a fragmented or disorganized communicative world so that they have to exchange information and otherwise co-operate in order to put that world to rights, I do not believe that 'problem-posing' should as such be criterial for task-status. There seem to me to be several kinds of task that are not problematic in the sense that I believe Candlin to be alluding to. If students have to come up with an answer to a question for which they have been given the relevant information, then I do not see that necessarily this should be considered as a problem. Not all questions are problems. More usefully, or so I believe, the activity needs to be goal-directed for assignation of task status.

The Candlin working definition then suggests that the activity should in various ways be jointly constructed by teachers and learners. This properly reflects the well-known concern of Candlin and other colleagues at the University of Lancaster to divest the instructor of much of his or her institutionally-given authority. Although the advocacy of joint-planning and class negotiation is surely admirable, and may well be a valuable concomitant of TBL, again I believe that it is unwise to consider it as a necessary condition for a suitable language-learning task. Occasions will surely arise when instructors may feel the need for unilateral action, particularly when a task-sequence is going wrong and a

repair-type task seems warranted. In a similar way, I would question the need for the exploration and furtherance of goals to be 'collective', for this would suggest that individual or self-access or out-of-class activities are somehow not to be considered as tasks but merely have some lesser preparatory status. My final comment relates to the final phrase 'within a social milieu'. As far as I can see the phrase is ambiguous. Does ' social' here mean 'socializing', that is, does it refer to a preferred type of classroom dynamic? Or is it to be taken to mean that the goals are to be constructed within an actual or simulated operational environment? Or both?

I have given some attention to Candlin's definition partly because he enjoins his readers to do so and partly because it is the best available prototype. My commentary has been negative only in the qualified sense that it has required me to consider an alternative suitable for the genre-based approach advocated in this book. In that context, I suggest that we might think of task as:

One of a set of differentiated, sequenceable goal-directed activities drawing upon a range of cognitive and communicative procedures

relatable to the acquisition of pre-genre and genre skills appropriate to a foreseen or emerging sociorhetorical situation.

In the above definition I have, as expected, removed some of the typical characteristics of task-based approaches (negotiated, collective, gap-using) that I do not consider sufficiently criterial to be worth building in. Further, I have — evasively enough — proposed that the activities be relatable to genre acquisition. It would, on the one hand, be premature to claim that the activities and their associated procedures are conducive to genre skills; on the other, relatable allows the task-designer some freedom to experiment with various kinds of analysis and to explore unusual combinations of texts and tasks. I

have also placed the task context within a sociorhetorical situation. On some occasions the sociorhetorical situation will in fact be represented by a discourse community, as when the class (including the instructor) meets the criteria established in Chapter 2.

These occasions are more likely to occur with disciplinary specific, advanced groups, or in team-teaching situations (Johns and Dudley-Evans, 1980) or in adjunct classes of various kinds (Johns, 1988a; Shih, 1986). On other occasions, heterogeneity requires the construction of sociorhetorical situations for tasks to which individual participants can differentially contribute and in which their engagement may be more or less temporary.

The following section, by presenting an actual teaching situation, will I trust, illustrate some of these concluding observations.

4.3 A pedagogical illustration

At the beginning of this chapter on tasks I suggested some major access routes whereby an instructor may create appropriate instructional activities. These routes are not ordered in any particular way; for example, there is no presumption that exploring discourse communities should precede analyzing genres or that genre analysis should precede the devising of tasks — which is why in Figure 2 the links between the levels have been characterized by double-ended arrows. Sometimes texts present the best immediate opportunity for development, sometimes tasks and sometimes the sociorhetorical situation; at other times it may seem most advantageous to pursue several access routes simultaneously.

I dare say something of this messy non-algorithmic nature of the materials design process will come across in the course fragment presented and discussed below. The fragment comes from a course entitled `Dissertation, Thesis and Prospectus Writing for Non-Native Speakers'. The course draws an NNS population who have had at least 18 months' graduate experience of studying within an English-medium environment. The participants may come from all the disciplines offered at a major university except rarely from Engineering, for whom an alternative course in Technical Communication is advised.

It was in fact quite early in my first experience with the course that I came to realize that many students were having problems with an area of rhetorical activity that I had not hitherto considered of much significance. This area came to be known as 'Academic Communications' and includes such genres as memos to dissertation committee members, request letters to academics working elsewhere, and application letters for fellowships, assistantships, travel funds and so on. The NNS graduate students, with very few exceptions, said that producing such documents was new to them, and confessed to a limited sense of what their audiences might expect in communications of these kinds. In consequence, their level of confidence was lower in this area than in their more formal or official writing, and they revealed particular anxieties about organization and

phraseology.

Although I was initially surprised by these findings, I soon came to see that the general sociorhetorical setting was indeed likely to be problematic. For one thing, there was a conspicuous absence of easily available role models. None of the textbooks, writing manuals or departmental guidelines available discussed how to write memos or request letters. For another, one-to-one communications between students and their perceived superiors were likely to be particularly reflective of the cultural norms that fashion levels of formality and respect across diverse national academic milieux. Thus, even if the students recognized that in the US they could be more to the point and more direct than in their various

home academic cultures, this did not mean to say that they were either comfortable about or competent in doing things the American way. Thirdly, it was easy enough to recognize the perils of avoidance strategies. Here was a group of students who were at a crucial stage in their apprenticeships of the disciplinary-specific discourse communities they mostly planned to participate in as their primary career goals. These international communities had become strongly anglophone in their communicative networks, and if the students did not take advantage now of the opportunities provided by mentoring and the English-medium environment they might end up being part of what Baldauf (1986)

has described as 'the lost generation' of researchers with inadequate English rhetorical skills.

Thus, it seemed to me that a sociorhetorical situation worth incorporating into the materials had become established — alongside more `expected' elements such as

organizing the prospectus, handling the literature, negotiating knowledge claims, and so on. The manner in which matters proceeded is perhaps best indicated by the introductory comments in the actual course materials for 'Academic Communications'.

This section of the course concerns academic correspondence. In particular it deals with the following situations:

H Requests

HH Follow-ups [II Memos [V Submissions

I have based the section on fragments of my own personal correspondence. I therefore do not know how typical the correspondence is — or how generalizable are my own

reactions to communications from others. But I do genuinely. believe the following things:

a) The fact that I have been an active correspondent for many years has greatly helped my own research career.

b) The more a person engages in such correspondence the more easily and the more quickly that person can correspond.

c) Established researchers are in general happy to correspond with graduate students as long as their interest is aroused and maintained.

I am interested in developing my understanding of this unresearched topic. Please share your experiences with me as fully as you can.

H would like to acknowledge the most useful comments and criticisms made by participants in the ESP Reading Seminar, Fall 1987.

As I imagine readers will have recognized, the tone of the above is somewhat calculated.

It is designed to present the instructor, despite surface considerations to the contrary (e.g.

teaching ESL!), as comparable to the departmental faculty the students engage with as they go about the business of their research. It advocates communicative activity as being valuable in itself as well as for the membership benefits it may bring. On the other hand, it enters a plea for assistance and enlightenment, ostensibly as a means of

developing knowledge, and tacitly as a methodological device for encouraging

discussion and comparison among students so dispersed that they are only likely to come in contact through their participation in this particular course. Finally, the introduction ends with an acknowledgement, thus signifying the value of collaboration and the

discussion and comparison among students so dispersed that they are only likely to come in contact through their participation in this particular course. Finally, the introduction ends with an acknowledgement, thus signifying the value of collaboration and the