What is discourse analysis?

week 7 slide 2 chapter 3

The broader approach to the study of discourse of which CDA is a
variety – is used within a range of disciplines outside linguistics
Corpus week 7 slide 7 chapter 3 A corpus is “a large collection of
authentic texts that have been gathered in electronic form according to a
specific set of criteria”
Approaches:
Problem-based approach week 7 slide 15 chapter 3
starts by identifying a social problem with a semiotic aspect
• practical and useful
• needs to be applied with a great deal of critical awareness
• CDA has been criticized for claiming to address social problems, since
the impact it can
have on those problems is limited.
Argument-centered approach week 7 slide 15 chapter 3
tarts by proposing a new argument and mixes elements from
conceptual and empirical research
• Aims to put forward a theoretical argument on the basis of carefully
selected evidence
drawn from a variety of texts
• is exploratory in nature
Annotation or mark-up week 7 slide 29 chapter 3
the process of adding information about the texts to the texts themselves.
• This information is generally known as metadata, data about data
• Generally done using XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language)
• Texts can be annotated at different levels:
• Documentary
• Structural
• Linguistic
Levels of annotation week 7 slide 30 chapter 3
1. Documentary annotation
2. Structural annotation
3. Linguistic annotation

Quality Assessment week 7 slide 47 chapter 3

is a term frequently used in a professional context to describe the step in
the translation process that involves the counting and classification of
translation errors.
Method of Quality Assessment week 7 slide 51 chapter 3
1. Error typology
2. Ranking
3. Eye tracking
4. Traditional research instruments such as surveys
5. Automatic Evaluation Metrics (AEMS)
Process
Research
Unit of analysis (week 9-part 1 slide 12 chapter 4)
1. Problem indicator
2. The strategy
3. The attention unit
4. A temporal unit
Problem indicator (week 9-part 1 slide 12 chapter 4)
the most common units of analysis in process research
temporal unit (week 9 part 1 slide 12 chapter 4)
entails dividing process indicators (such as text production, deletions,
insertions) into units delimited by pauses of specified lengths.
Introspection (week 9 part 1 slide 14 chapter 4)
self-observation and reporting
Verbal reports (week 9-part 1 slide 14 chapter 4)
talking about thoughts
think aloud protocol (week 9-part 1 slide 14 chapter 4)
verbal reports can be produced concurrently or retrospectively
how to transcribe data (week 9-part 1 slide 19 chapter 4)
key stroke logging (week 9-part 2 slide 22 chapter 4) important
involves the use of a special software program that records all keys
pressed on the keyboard, as well as mouse movements and pauses
between key presses during a text production task.
Macro and micro level (week 9-part 2 slide 23 chapter 4)
Macro level keystroke logging tools record:
• Total task time
• Time spent in the orientation, drafting or subsequent revision
Micro-level keystroke logging tools record:
• Pauses, their frequency, duration and positioning
• The number and length of text production units
• The number, nature and timing of revision actions
Eye tracking (week 9-part 2 slide 26 chapter 4)
the process of recording the point of gaze of a person and the
movement of the eyes from one point to another
Complementary methods (week 9-part 2 slide 36 chapter 4)
1. Contextual inquiry
2. personality profiling
3. Physiological measurements
Contextual inquiry (week 9-part 2 slide 37 chapter 4)
ethnographic technique where researchers observe and
interview participants in their natural working environment

The big five (week 9-part 2 slide 39 chapter 4)

Most tests work off more or less detailed scales that test these five traits:
1 . Neuroticism
2. Extraversion
3. openness to experiences
4. Agreeableness
5. Conscientiousness
Compare between questionnaire and interview strength and weakness
(week 10 and 11-part 1 slide 5 ,6,29 and 30 chapter 5)
Questionnaire strength
1. Offer a means of collecting structured data on a large scale
2. Consume less time than individual interviews
3. Structured nature of the data makes analysis easier
4. Possibility of acquiring large amounts of quantitative data allows
for generalizations to be made about the larger population
Questionnaire weakness
Easy to get the design and administration of a questionnaire wrong
1. Not the best instruments for collecting explanatory data unless
followed up by more in-depth interviews
2. Tendency towards socially desirable answers is culture-dependent:
3. Participants are somewhat constrained in their responses
4. Risk of low response rates
5. Difficult to secure an appropriate sample of participants to enable
researchers to draw conclusions on their research questions
Interview strength
1. is that they give privileged access to a person's thoughts and
opinions about a particular subject, which are difficult to access
through direct observation of behavior.
2. interviews and focus groups are not considered as ways of eliciting
meanings that had been previously 'stored' in the mind of the
interviewee/but as a space where opinions are re constructed rather than
reported, and these are taken as indicative or illustrative of particular
social phenomena.
3. Interviews and focus groups off er insights into what participants
say they believe or do, not into what they actually think or do
Interview weakness
1. Interviews and focus groups are time consuming not only for the
researcher, who needs to conduct, transcribe and analyze them, but
also for the participants.
2. Recruiting relevant participants who are willing to take the time
and who are accessible is one of the big hurdles in this type of
research.
3. interview and focus group studies often rely on small numbers of
participants which do not often constitute representative samples of the
population.
4. This means that results obtained from interviews and focus groups
can rarely be generalized to a wider population.
Types of errors in the survey (week 10 and 11-part 1 slide 7 chapter 5)
1. Coverage error
2. Sampling error
3. Nonresponse error
4. measurement error
Open and closed questions (week 10 and 11-part 1 slide 12 chapter 5)
Open questions
allow participants to write their responses to a question in a text box
closed questions
restrict the possible responses from participants
scale
Likert scale (week 10 and 11-part 1 slide 15 chapter 5)
1. Very common device in questionnaires
2. Offers a series of five, seven or nine responses along a continuum
of strongly agree to strongly disagree'
3. Tendency for respondents to select this mid-point is problematic
for researchers because it limits answers to the research question.
4. If responses are generally spread across the range of strongly
disagree to strongly agree one might conclude that the sample
population are ambivalent
Pilot testing (week 10 and 11-part 1 slide 16 chapter 5) ‫مهم االطالع على‬
‫الساليد‬
questions regarding the appropriateness and comprehensibility of the
wording, the best scale to use, etc. should be considered in detail in
advance of distribution of a questionnaire.
4 types of validity (week 10 and 11-part 1 slide 20 chapter 5)
1. Construct validity
2. Concurrent validity
3. Concurrent validity
4. Convergent validity
Differences between Interview and focus group strength and weakness
(week 10 and 11-part 1 slide 29 and 29 chapter 5)
Weakness
1. Interviews and focus groups are time consuming not only for the
researcher, who needs to conduct, transcribe and analyze them, but
also for the participants.
2. Recruiting relevant participants who are willing to take the time
and who are accessible is one of the big hurdles in this type of
research.
 3. As a result, interview and focus group studies often rely on small
numbers of participants which do not often constitute
representative samples of the population.
4. This means that results obtained from interviews and focus groups
can rarely be generalized to a wider population.
Strength
The main benefit of interviews is that they give privileged access to a
person's thoughts and opinions about a particular subject, which are
difficult to access through direct observation of behavior.
1. interviews and focus groups are not considered as ways of eliciting
meanings that had been previously 'stored' in the mind of the
interviewee/sbut as a space where opinions are re constructed rather than
reported, and these are taken as indicative or illustrative of particular
social phenomena.
2. Interviews and focus groups off er insights into what participants
say they believe or do, not into what they actually think or do
Essay question
The main goal of unstructured interviews (week 10 and 11-part 2 slide 34
chapter 5)
The goal is generally to see the research topic from the perspective of the
interviewee and to understand how and why they come to have this
particular perspective.
Focus group (week 10 and 11-part 2 slide 37 chapter 5) ‫مهم االطالع على‬
‫الساليد‬
Focus groups are groups of typically 6 to 10 participants which are
brought together to engage in a discussion that is 'focused'
Most common sampling (week 10 and 11-part 2 slide 44 chapter 5)
purposive sampling and convenience sampling
coding approaches (week 10 and 11-part 3 slide 57 chapter 5)
There are several approaches to coding qualitative data
1. Thematic analysis
2. content analysis
3. grounded theory.
Semantic analysis ‫غير موجود بالساليدات والكتاب‬
Thematic analysis ‫( يمكن يكون المقصود‬week 10 and 11-part 3 slide 58
chapter 5)
is described as “[a] process of working with raw data to identify and
interpret key ideas or themes
Content analysis (week 10 and 11-part 3 slide 58 chapter 5)
is a broad term used to describe analytical moves which
consist of identifying themes, looking for patterns, making interpretations
and building a theory explanation
Quantitative analysis (week 10 and 11-part 3 slide 64 chapter 5)
'' a way of identifying a specific answer or characteristic. It may be
numeric or alphabetic'
Descriptive and inferential statistics
Descriptive statistics allow us to understand and report our data in terms
of minimum and maximum values, means, medians and modes, standard
deviations, frequencies and distributions.
Inferential statistics (week 12 and 11-part 2 slide 9 chapter 6)
enable you to draw inferences from
the data