James Gee: D/discourse analysis
According to James Gee, there are two kinds of discourse to be analyzed: Discourse and
discourse. Discourse (large ‘D’) refers to ways of being in the world. Discourses involve
particular ways of talking, acting, thinking, believing, dressing, reading, writing,
gesturing, moving, and so on. We talk, act, think, etc. differently when we are ‘in’
different Discourses (or Discourse Communities as we refer to them in our class). When
a woman is being a soldier (acting out of or responding to the world from within the
soldier Discourse), she will speak, dress, act, etc. more or less differently from when she
is being a mother, a neighbor, a student, etc.
We all belong to multiple Discourses, although any two people will tend to belong to
different combinations of Discourses and, often, to different versions of Discourses. For
example, to be a teenager (in the teenager Discourse) in the USA will involve a different
way of being to some extent from being a teenager in Toowoomba, Australia. Being a
Mexican will take a very different form for a lawyer living in Polanco (a wealthy suburb
in Mexico City) than for a farm laborer living in rural Tabasco.
The particular Discourses we belong to as individuals shape our identities and create
social positions (or perspectives) from which we are called or invited to speak, act, dress,
think, read, write, move, gesture, and so on. Many of the Discourses we belong to are
those we have been recruited to without being aware of it, and which we have not chosen
to join. In some cases it may be very difficult, if not impossible, to participate effectively
in a particular Discourse if it does not cohere well with the other Discourses we belong to
and are proficient in.
Gee distinguishes between primary and secondary Discourses. A person’s primary
Discourse is what they are socialized into within their face-to-face kinship group (their
family). Our primary Discourse shapes our initial ways of speaking, our “normal” ways
of acting, views, values, beliefs, experiences and our first social identity. Secondary
Discourses socialize people outside of their immediate family groups, within institutions
(social structures) and other forms of social groupings and social practice. Secondary
Discourses require communication with non-intimates, and expect members to act in
ways that are conventionalized (everyone to behave in a similar, conventional manner
(Examples: The U.S. Armed Forces; Prison/Jail; School).
When Gee talks about discourse (small d) he means stretches or pieces of language that
make sense. The key point here is that these stretches of language do not make sense in
their own right, but only through their location within a Discourse. A stretch of language
that makes sense in one Discourse may make no sense within another Discourse, or may
mean something entirely different within a different Discourse. To speak or write in the
manner of one Discourse could even get us into trouble, or make us the subject of scorn
or rejection, if spoken (or written) in the context of a different Discourse.
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Gunther Kress on discourse as “systematically-organized modes” of talking, reading, and
writing
According to Kress, social institutions, groupings, and networks have their own specific
meanings and values. In addition, they each articulate these values and meanings in
systematic ways: they have organized their language and developed systematic ways of
communicating, transmitting, regulating, and governing the values and meanings that
operate within the particular institution or grouping. Kress calls these “systematicallyorganized modes” of talking, reading, and writing discourses.
Here’s Kress:
Discourses are systematically-organized sets of statements which give expression
to the meanings and values of an institution. Beyond that, they define, describe,
and delimit what it is possible to say and not possible to say (and by extension
what it is possible to do and not to do) with respect to the area of concern of that
institution. A discourse provides a set of possible statements about a given area,
and organizes and gives structure to the manner in which a particular topic,
object, process is to be talked about. In that it provides descriptions, rules,
permissions, and prohibitions of social and individual actions. (Kress 6-7)
In other words, people who share membership within a network or institution built
around an ideal of sustainable development (such as environmentalists) will talk about
resources, responsibility, and the future quite differently from executives of logging
companies or from loggers themselves. Not only will they talk differently about such
things, they will also see and live them differently. Some things loggers see will be
invisible to environmentalists and vice versa. A thought that one group things may,
literally, be unthinkable to the other.
Membership in particular discourses (discourse communities) shapes what we can do, be,
think, value and so on, and plays a powerful rule in constituting who and what we are
(and are not). At the same time that discourses enable us to be someone (or other) and
something (or other), they close other possibilities off from us. Moreover, they do this in
ways that naturalize their particular orientation toward and perspective on social life.
They make their meanings and values seem natural and inevitable to their members,
when they are really socially constructed and contingent (or as determined by the group).
By making their values and meanings seem natural, however, discourses (discourse
communities) make it difficult (if not virtually impossible) for their members to
contemplate trying to get outside of them and consider other ways of doing and being.
When we analyze discourse (or a discourse community) from this perspective we try to
understand what discourse(s) a person is coming from when they talk or write about
something. We ask: what discourse(s) is informing and defining what they say about this
aspect of the world? How is this likely to shape what they understand and do (and do not
understand and do not do) in the world? How can we as researchers can we detect the
operation of a particular discourse? Kress offers three questions that may be of some
help:
1. Why is this topic being written / spoken about?
2. How (in what ways) is this topic being written / spoken about?
3. What other ways of writing / speaking about this topic are there? (In order to
answer this question about a particular discourse, we need knowledge of other discourses,
to help us identify in what ways a given discourse is different from (or not like) other
discourses. To answer this question we must draw upon our own available knowledge
and experience. Alternatively, we may have to seek information about other possible
ways through conducting primary research (interviews, questionnaires, surveys) or
academic research (reading relevant source materials).
Lankshear, Colin and Michele Knobel. “Discourse Analysis.” A Handbook for Teacher
Research: From Design to Implementation. New York: Open University Press,
2004. 291-8. Print.