In this piece from What Writing Does and How It Does It Barton introduces the audience to linguistics that focuses on the social in general and to rich feature discourse analysis in particular. As she explains it, discourse analysis looks at "how specific features of language contribute to the interpretation of texts in their various contexts" (57). Rich feature analysis take a specific feature, chosen for its "interestingness" or likelyhood of proving significant to understanding the structure and function of that feature in a particular context, and codes a representative sample of texts in order to analyze and draw conclusions from the data. Discourse analysis tends to be qualitative with quantitative "verification" (usually through coding).
Though Barton does tip her hat to the complicated nature of academic discourse (65), still she seems to privilege the "epistemic stance" of those she identifies as experienced writers (which in the case of her study refers to experienced academics writing for a general academic audience). While she criticizes the work of her students as overly general, which motivates her 1993 study, she does not comment on the stance of experienced writers, whose stance toward the making of knowledge she identifies as "oppositional, the product of contrast and competition" (74). My belief [look, an evidential!] that she (possibly unknowingly) privileges this perspective is furthered when she fails to recognize a complication in her frustration with the work or writers who place the privy of knowledge in "general society" (74). Meanwhile, she terms experienced writers as part of an "academic community" without commenting on how the notion of community founded on opposition and conflict is a sort of complex situation. In many ways I realize this quarrel is not quite fair; for one thing, I'm charging Barton with not paying attention to something that is one of my declared projects, not hers. Second, she claims that her study is a way of helping educators understand the foundational difference between positions of what she names experienced and inexperienced writers, and I think this is clearly an important project for composition as well as any field that struggles with student writing (likely all of them).
Though she may do so in the extended articles on the topic, I also wish she's have thought about, or at least mentioned the difficulty in selecting pieces from experienced writers who had time and exigency to write their works, but choosing as representative of inexperienced writers whatever they produced during proficiency exams which were most likely timed and in response to often unconvincing prompts. Also, in critique of what I called "social science-y," Barton uses terms like the context of "academic discourse," and "analyze," and "representative" that are portrayed as valueless, but which I think carry much ideological and constructed weight.
But again, the tone of the book is very textbook-y, and textbooks being meant to introduce and inform (if not indoctrinate) I can see how Barton may not have felt this chapter as being the right space for posing many of these questions. And, the chapter does do a great job of introducing discourse analysis as a genre and its many iterations. She describes structure and function (terms I was not familiar with in this context prior to reading) in manageable and accessible ways and the examples are quite illustrative (see 62-3).
I find among the most useful citations to the chapter's intent that of Thomas Huckin (1992) whose procedure for discourse analysis she reproduces on pages 65-66:
1. selecting an initial corpus
2. identifying salient patterns
3. determinging "interestingness"
4. selecting a study corpus
5. verifying the pattern
6. developing a functional-rhetorical analysis
I also found some interesting citations relative to my own project on pages 65 and 67.
Hope this has been somewhat helpful...
Though Barton does tip her hat to the complicated nature of academic discourse (65), still she seems to privilege the "epistemic stance" of those she identifies as experienced writers (which in the case of her study refers to experienced academics writing for a general academic audience). While she criticizes the work of her students as overly general, which motivates her 1993 study, she does not comment on the stance of experienced writers, whose stance toward the making of knowledge she identifies as "oppositional, the product of contrast and competition" (74). My belief [look, an evidential!] that she (possibly unknowingly) privileges this perspective is furthered when she fails to recognize a complication in her frustration with the work or writers who place the privy of knowledge in "general society" (74). Meanwhile, she terms experienced writers as part of an "academic community" without commenting on how the notion of community founded on opposition and conflict is a sort of complex situation. In many ways I realize this quarrel is not quite fair; for one thing, I'm charging Barton with not paying attention to something that is one of my declared projects, not hers. Second, she claims that her study is a way of helping educators understand the foundational difference between positions of what she names experienced and inexperienced writers, and I think this is clearly an important project for composition as well as any field that struggles with student writing (likely all of them).
Though she may do so in the extended articles on the topic, I also wish she's have thought about, or at least mentioned the difficulty in selecting pieces from experienced writers who had time and exigency to write their works, but choosing as representative of inexperienced writers whatever they produced during proficiency exams which were most likely timed and in response to often unconvincing prompts. Also, in critique of what I called "social science-y," Barton uses terms like the context of "academic discourse," and "analyze," and "representative" that are portrayed as valueless, but which I think carry much ideological and constructed weight.
But again, the tone of the book is very textbook-y, and textbooks being meant to introduce and inform (if not indoctrinate) I can see how Barton may not have felt this chapter as being the right space for posing many of these questions. And, the chapter does do a great job of introducing discourse analysis as a genre and its many iterations. She describes structure and function (terms I was not familiar with in this context prior to reading) in manageable and accessible ways and the examples are quite illustrative (see 62-3).
I find among the most useful citations to the chapter's intent that of Thomas Huckin (1992) whose procedure for discourse analysis she reproduces on pages 65-66:
1. selecting an initial corpus
2. identifying salient patterns
3. determinging "interestingness"
4. selecting a study corpus
5. verifying the pattern
6. developing a functional-rhetorical analysis
I also found some interesting citations relative to my own project on pages 65 and 67.
Hope this has been somewhat helpful...
I'd like to hear about how this approach applies to some of the research you are doing (as you mention at the end of your entry).
I agree with you Rachael on the limitations you pointed out in Barton's corpus of data and her analysis and inferences. However, I was intrigued by the fact that compositionists are becoming more and more interdisciplinary. Discourse analysis is purely a linguistic concept and I had had a lot of them in my linguistic course. Not only this, almost all the research methods/approaches collected in What Writing Does and How are borrowed or appropriated from other disciplines except may be process approach Prior discusses. This may be a move towards extending our disciplinary horizon or complicating already critical status of the discipline??.........