Discourse Analysis: A Resource Book for Students

Citation

Jones, R. H. (2024). Discourse Analysis: A Resource Book for Students (3rd ed.). Routledge.

Chapter Summary

The book belongs to the Routledge English Language Introductions, a series that assumes no prior knowledge and combines an overview with activities, study questions, sample analyses and commentaries. This third edition (2024, about 260–275 pages) is organized as a grid: four sections, each of ten units, cross-referenced so that unit 1 of every section belongs to strand 1, and so on. Section A (Introduction) presents key topics; Section B (Development) deepens them through particular approaches; Section C (Exploration) gives analysis tasks on real data and is more open-ended; and Section D (Extension) shows discourse analysts at work, summarizing published studies in each area. The "How to use this book" section explains that the book can be read vertically, section by section, or horizontally, following one strand from A to D. Strand 1 is a general introduction; Strands 2–4 deal with written discourse; Strands 5–7 focus on spoken discourse and interactive written discourse; and Strands 8–10 cover mediated, multimodal and corpus-assisted analysis.

Strand 1: What is discourse analysis? (A1; B1 Three ways of looking at discourse; C1 Doing discourse analysis: first steps; D1 The little texts in our lives)

An introduction to the field and to three ways of defining discourse, including Gee's distinction between small-d discourse and capital-D Discourses, followed by first analysis steps and studies of everyday short texts such as signs.

Strands 2–4: Texts and texture; Texts and their social functions; Discourse and ideology

Strand 2 (B2 Cohesion, coherence and intertextuality; C2 Analysing texture; D2 Texture: Old and new) works from Halliday and Hasan's account of cohesive ties; one exploration analyses a marine rescue group's posts about a stranded animal. Strand 3 (B3 All the right moves; C3 Analysing genres; D3 Online genres and discourse communities) introduces genre analysis through Swales's moves and discourse communities and applies it to digital genres such as tweets, Instagram posts and YouTube tutorials. Strand 4 (B4 Constructing reality; C4 Competing Discourses; D4 Ideologies in discourse) treats how texts construct reality and carry ideology, including cultural models.

Strands 5–7: Spoken discourse; Strategic interaction; Context, culture and communication

Strand 5 (B5 The texture of talk; C5 Analysing speech acts; D5 Conversations in online "dating" and "grooming") covers the analysis of talk and speech acts, including direct and indirect acts, compliments, refusals and consent. Strand 6 (B6 Negotiating relationships and activities; C6 Conversational strategies online; D6 "Coaching" and "bragging": Positioning and politeness in discourse) deals with framing, positioning and politeness, with explorations of messaging apps and emojis and a study of the #humblebrag hashtag. Strand 7 (B7 The SPEAKING model; C7 Analysing contexts; D7 Ethnographic approaches to discourse analysis) introduces Hymes's ethnography of speaking and earlier models of context such as Firth's and Halliday's; D7 summarizes Moeketsi's study of a South African courtroom.

Strands 8–10: Mediated, multimodal and corpus-assisted discourse analysis

Strand 8 (B8 Mediation; C8 Doing mediated discourse analysis; D8 Discourse and action) presents mediated discourse analysis and its roots in socio-cultural theory; D8 includes Lamb's study of tourists and sea turtles in Hawai'i. Strand 9 (B9 Modes, meaning and action; C9 Analysing multimodality; D9 Identity, stereotypes, and multimodal discourse analysis) draws on Kress and van Leeuwen's grammar of visual design. Strand 10 (B10 Procedures for corpus-assisted discourse analysis; C10 Analysing corpora; D10 Corpus-assisted discourse analysis) demonstrates word lists and collocations on a corpus of Taylor Swift's lyrics, with a recommendation to download a tool such as AntConc.

Key Concepts

Strand 1

• Discourse and Discourses: language in use, and the wider socially recognized ways of being and acting it helps enact.

Strands 2–4: Written discourse

• Cohesion and coherence: the linguistic ties that link a text, and the sense readers make of it.
• Intertextuality: the ways texts draw on and refer to other texts.
• Moves and discourse communities: the functional stages of a genre, and the groups whose expert members maintain it.
• Ideology and cultural models: taken-for-granted theories about the world that texts reproduce.

Strands 5–7: Interaction and context

• Speech acts: utterances as actions, often performed indirectly.
• Framing, positioning and politeness: how participants signal what they are doing and manage relationships.
• The SPEAKING model: Hymes's checklist of the components of a speech event.

Strands 8–10: Mediation, modes and corpora

• Mediated action: discourse as a tool people use in concrete social actions.
• Multimodality: meaning made by images, layout and other modes as well as language.
• Collocation and frequency: corpus measures that reveal patterns across many texts.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Flexible structure. The A–D by 1–10 grid lets a course read the book section by section or follow one strand from basic idea to published research; the cross-referencing ("see unit B7") makes the links explicit.
• Analysis on real, current data. Section C works through real examples, many from digital communication: social media posts, messaging apps, emojis, hashtags, song lyrics. The publisher notes that this edition adds more diverse examples from a wider range of countries and material from TikTok and other recent platforms.
• Coverage beyond traditional approaches. Alongside cohesion, genre, speech acts and the ethnography of speaking, the book gives full strands to mediated discourse analysis, multimodality and corpus-assisted analysis, the last with a worked corpus study.
• Research in view. Section D summarizes published studies (courtroom interpreting, ecotourism, self-praise on social media) so students see how the tools are used in actual research. Online support material adds activities, summaries and links.

Limitations

• Short units. Forty units in about 260 pages means each idea gets a few pages; students who need a full method, for example conversation analysis transcription or a complete critical discourse analysis framework, will need specialist books.
• Fragmented if read carelessly. Because each topic is spread over four sections, a reader who jumps around can lose the thread. The book's own advice, to read vertically or horizontally by strand, needs to be followed deliberately.
• Section D now summarizes rather than reprints. The publisher describes the final section as revised to highlight recent research through case studies, and the units summarize published articles; students who want the original readings must find them through the references.

Where It Fits in the Course

Jones and Paltridge are the two introductions on the discourse analysis list. Paltridge's Discourse Analysis: An Introduction is a survey with one chapter per approach, exercises and answers; Jones covers similar ground in task-based units and adds mediated discourse analysis and more digital data. Use Jones for a course built around hands-on analysis, and Paltridge for continuous explanations; many students will benefit from reading the matching chapter in one alongside the strand in the other.

Johnstone and Andrus's Discourse Analysis is a next step organized around one heuristic for how texts are shaped by and shape the world, with research project suggestions. Gee's An Introduction to Discourse Analysis develops one theory and method in depth, building on the Discourse concept met in Strand 1. Schiffrin's Approaches to Discourse compares six frameworks on the same data for students who must choose and justify one, and Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis gives the theory behind Strand 4's work on ideology.

How to Use This Book

The book suits first- and second-year students of English language, linguistics, communication or media in a first discourse analysis module, and assumes no previous linguistics.

• For a semester course: take Strand 1 in full (A1–D1), then work strand by strand, reading the A unit, the B unit and the C tasks each week, and choosing D units as reading for seminars.
• For a quick overview: read all of Section A first, then return to B and C for the strands that matter to your project.
• Core strands for most courses: 1–7. Strands 8–10 are best chosen by interest: 8 for ethnographic and action-based projects, 9 for images and social media, 10 for corpus work (download a corpus tool before starting C10).

Do the Section C activities with your own data where possible, and use the online support material for further activities and summaries. When a Section D study matches your interests, follow the reference to the original article and compare its method with the unit's summary.