Mohamed first university Academic Year:2015-2016

Faculty of letters and Human sciences Prof,Houda Kably

English studies Departement Discourse Analysis: S 6\linguistics

Student’s name G/ Registration N

Question: Analyze the written discourse given below in an essay comprising at least two
paragraphs in addition to the introduction and conclusion.

Poverty is dirt .let me explain about housekeeping with no money .For breakfast I give
my children grots with no olel or corn bread without eggs and oleo. This does not use up
many dishes .What dishes there are .I wash in cold water and with no soap .Even the
cheapest soap has to be saved for the baby’s diapers .Look at my hands ,so cracked and red.
Once I saved for two months to buy a jar of Vaseline for my hands and the baby’s diaper
rash.When I had saved enough ,I went to buy it and the price had gone up two cents.The
baby and I suffered on .I have to decide every day if I can bear to put my cracked sore hands
into the cold water and strong soap .But you ask ,why not hot water?Fuel costs money; If
you have a wood fire,it costs money .If you burn electrisity ,it costs money .Hot water is a
luxury ,I do not have luxuries.

-Jo Goodvin Parker,”What is Poverty?”

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Mohamed first university Academic Year:2017-2018

Faculty of letters and Human sciences Prof,Houda Kably

English studies Departement S/6: Discourse Analysis

Oujda All groups

Ordinary session

Student’s Name : Registration N :

Question

1.In a well organized and punctuated essay,analyze the written discource given below.

The feminist movement declared that “the personal is political”.Many avtivities,particulary

among more radical organizations, were concentrated in small “consciousness raising”
groups to challenge personal perceptions ,question gendered norms ,and revalue women.
Along this struggle to bring about cultural change, women’s organizations formed to press
for the enactment of public policies to redress entrenched gender inequalities. As indicated,
the National Organization for women (NOW) and other liberal feminist organizations,
pushed the government action to expand access to paid labor markets and assure
reproductive freedom. Later, issues of domestic violence and abuse emerged as additional
concerns of the movement, though these are sometimes treated as separate movements.

( The Consequence of social Movements)

(Eds: Lorenzo Bozi, Marco Giugni, and Katrin UBA,2016)

The argumentative passage extracted from Lorenzo Bozi, Marco Giugni, and Katrin

UBA’s the consequence of social moveemnts, is about women’s organizations and their

struggle to bring cultural change.

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 The writers used certain strategies and steps in order to convey their message. As a

beginning, they started with the topic sentence which is” the feminist movement declared

that the personal is political”. Furthermore, they expressed cohesion and coherence by

organizing ideas and follwing a chronological pattern going from general to specific. That is

to say, the writers first talked about the activities of radical organizations in general then

elaborated specifically on women’s organizations using complex sentences that contain

linking words in order to shift from one idea to another in a smooth way. For example, “As

indicated , the National Organization for women (NOW) and other liberal feminist

organizations, pushed the government action to expand access to paid labor markets and

assure reproductive freedom”. Moreover, in order to define these ideas in sentences

separately, the writer included punctuation. For instance, “Many avtivities,particulary

among more radical organizations, were concentrated in small “consciousness raising”

groups to challenge personal perceptions ,question gendered norms ,and revalue women”.

In the same respect, the writers used many lexical words and vocabulary such as verbs

(concentrate, declare..), adjectives (paid, reproductive..), nouns ( government, women..),

including key words as : feminist, organization. The writers used some figures of language.

For example: ‘’ Later, issues of domestic violence and abuse emerged as additional concerns

of the movement, though these are sometimes treated as separate movements.” We can

feel the serious mood of the writer since it is a political passage in order to inform the reader

about the struggle of those organizations to achieve change..

This is a well fomed passage that bring awareness about what feminist orgaization

brought to the culture and the development of women’s value in society.

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Mohamed first university Academic Year:2016-2017

Faculty of letters and Human sciences

English studies Departement S6 Discourse Analysis

Prof. H. Kably

Student’s name : G: Registration N

Question : Answer ONE of the following two questions :

1. In a well-organized essay, analyze the following written discourse.

Emotional Appeal

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our
misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful
and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence
with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should
ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it
would last thourghout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and
disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the
alienation from the sources of our strength.

-Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder

The impossibility to stay put accompanied with the necessity for change is what
Rachel Carson discusses in this beautifully structured passage. It targets the agony of moving
from childhood to adulthood and losing a lost in between these two phases.

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 What the writer aims at pinpointing through this type of emotional discourse is
affecting the human emotional side through overemphasizing the dream of staying put in
the period of childhood . On the one hand, the writer uses comparison which is in favor fro
childhood to affect the reader’s perception of his present. What any one can feel after
reading this passage is nostalgia. That is to say, to reinforce nostalgic attitudes on the part of
the reader, the writer uses the figure of style which comparison in this case to drive readers
to compare their own lives to that of the past. On the other hand, the use of conditional type
three which refers to impossible conditions that would never take place is suggestive. The
writer says: “. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the
christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of
wonder so indestructible that it would last thourghout life…….” . This aforementioned
conditional sentence describes a situation that can never be achieavable. This is to reinforce
the emotional appeal that the writer wants to engrave on the part of the reader. To read a
sentence that all people wish to realize but are sure they can’t do it would trigger emotions
of nostalgia, pain and agony on the part of the reader.

What we can deduce from this passage is that any discourse is meant to exercise
power over readers and listeners. By focusing on the discurssive structures that are both
explicit and implicit, the writer wants to make a strong attention to the past personality that
each one deserves to go back to it and which is childhood.

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Mohamed first university Academic Year:2017-2018

Faculty of letters and Human sciences

English studies Departement 5/6 Discourse Analysis

Prof. H. Kably

All Groups

Student’s name : Registration N

Make up Exam

Question
1. In a well-organized and punctuated essay, analyze the written discourse given
below.

One characteristic of the majority of Third World countries in which English is a

dominant language is that the wealth that English provides access to is very
inequitably distributed. Such countries have economies which are relatively weak
in the international balance of power, and the gap between them and the west
has been widening in recent decades, despite aid of all kinds. One form of aid
from Britain and the USA (with Canada, Australia and New Zealant playing minor
roles) is support for the promotion of English and related teacher training and
curriculum development activities. English has been marketed as the language of
development, modernity, and scientific and technological advance. It has also
held out a promise which so far has been only marginally fulfillled.

Robert Philllipson(1992) Linguistic Imperialism

Discourse analysis is about decoding the text by perceieving the hypothesis, the
ideological inclanation and the conceptions inside it. It is an attempt to organize the
messages that a text conveys by putting it into its social or historical context. Without fail,

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discourse conceals an objective and has several referents and sources fro whichit derives its
attitudes.

In the text taken from Phillipson Robert’s linguistic Imperialism, the author tries to
show us how well English language is dominnat in some portions of the wolrd by using a
wide range of tools. In the coming paragraph, we will be dealing with these tools which
interdependently contribute to the whole aim of the text.

In the light of analysis, we say that the text is very organized in a manner which
makes the reader ends it smoothly. First of level, we notice that these are merely repition. In
fact, the only dominant words are “ English” and “development”, that is why we can say that
the author intends to put his accent on these two term. The author also refers to the implicit
reason behind inequitability . As we keep reading, we will notice some of the grammatical
cohesion devices. One of those devices is the endophoric reference which is mainly
anaphoros. For instance, he used the objective pronoun “them” to indicate the
underdeveloped countries. He also used “it” to refer to English. With this reference to
sequencing, Robert tends to use a kind of additive tools to support his idea; mainly used
“and” a lot to give us information and reinforce his argument and hypothesis. This text is set
up on an inductive way whereby the writer starts from general ideas to precise. It is an
accumulation of thoughts that together supply the thesis that linguistic imperialism, as a
newly kind of imperialism, has impacted sensitive domains such as economy, science, and
heavily education.

From the foregoing statements, we say that it is fully cohesive and quitely coherent
by virtue of grammatical markers.On the one hand, and through the social knowledge of the
author on the other hand. Discourse is bigger than the text. It is the kind and the way
language is used.

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 Academic Year:2014-2015

Subject: Discourse Analysis

Prof,Houda Kably

Semester VI

Student’s name G/ Registration N

Question : Answer ONE of the following written discourse.

The search for some biological basis for math ability or disability is fraught with logical and
experimental difficulties. Since not all math-underachievers are women,a nd not all women
are mathematics-avoidant, poor performance in math is unlikely to be due to some genetic
or hormonal difference between the sexes. Moreover, no amount of research so far has
unearthed a “mathematical competency”in some tangible, measurable substance in the
body. Since “masculinity”cannot be injected into women to test whether or not it improves
their mathematics, the theories that attribute such ability to genes or hormones must
depend for their proof on circumstatial evidence. So long as about 7 percent of the PhD’s in
mathematics are earned by women, we have to conclude either that these women have
genes, hormones, and brain organization different from those of the rest of us, or that
certain positive experiences in their lives have largely undone the negative fact that they are
female, or both.

___ Sheila Tobia, Overcoming Math Anxiety.

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2. In a well- organized essay, discuss the notion of interaction in both written and spoken
discourses.

The notion of interaction is very fundamental in discourse, be it spoken or written.

Discourse is, by definition, not a one-way production of speech. Our production –as well as

our reception and interpretation of speech is modeled by the interaction of several factors.

Tis interaction is what shifts discourse from being a structure to being a live body that

develops continuously. Interaction shapes discourse in its true forms: spoken and written.

Although several factors-such as the setting, participants, ends, and genres-interact

during the production of a piece of spoken discourse, I will content myself only with the

participants and the physical environment. As far as participants are concerned, the

interaction between interlocutors is governed by a set of “educated guesses” that we aquire

through years of social interaction. We-as speakers or hearers-assess our relation to the

other part on the basis of our and our partner’s socio-econimic status, for example. With this

in mind, we establish and, sometimes, renegotiate our relationship as participants in a

communicative situation. This involves choosing the proper register, the right tone, and the

appropriate topic. We also, for instance, formulate our discourse according to a recipient

design. Far from being a passive recipient, the hearer actively participates in the adjustment

of discourse thourgh other initiated repair. As we move to the physical environment, we

discover that it contributes-in different degrees to the interaction. For instance if you meet a

close friend at his work place , in a caffe, your interaction will, at least to some extent,

includee a waiter-client relation. Indeed, the notion of interaction is powerfully present in

spoken discourse.

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 All in all, interaction proves to be a central concept in discourse. The way participants

interact with one another and with the different textual and contextual elements of a piece

of discourse undoubtedly has dramatic effect on the final product.

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