A Discourse Approach to Spoken and Written Narratives: Pedagogical Implications for EFL Learners

Recent research on the analysis of spoken discourse (Halliday, 1985, McCarthy, 1998) shows that spoken language also has a consistent structure and in many respects, it does have the language patterns as that of written English. Thus, it proves that both spoken and written language have a describable structure. The aim of this study is to explore some discourse features of both spoken and written English and their pedagogical implication. For this purpose, two texts: a spontaneous speech (recorded and transcribed) and then a short-written poem are analyzed at both micro and macro level of discourse. As both texts have narrative content, Labov’s model of narrative analysis is applied to identify their organizing pattern. Similarities and differences in the discourse features of both texts are also examined. Some pedagogical implications of such an analysis are also suggested to language teachers; so that they can improve students’ language competence skills by adopting discourse-based teaching strategies.