Discourse Studies

A Multidisciplinary Introduction

Students stated that it was too technical for them. It's more for a doctoral class than for a master's level class.

This updated second edition is an excellent handbook for students. It contains examples, analyses and further reading.

Great overview of discourse analysis and the many perspectives within discourse studies.

This is a fine book on this now established body of literature. Van Dijk offers a broad and intriguing insight in Discourse Studies and this is a worthy companion for any student in this area.

The book is really good for students to support their work with the independent project module especially when analysing data collected from text.

The book represents a comprehensible and encompassing introduction into the field of discourse studies. The main strengths of the book consist in the multidisciplinary approach that it takes in presenting the history and more recent conceptual and methodological developments within discourse analysis as well as the ways in which it combines theoretical texts with concrete analytical examples that illustrate described methodological and theoretical aspects of discourse studies.

This book is a user friendly guide to discourse studies and an essential for any student undertaking a discourse analysis. I recommend it to all my dissertation students adopting the method.

Discourse analysis is the focus of a two-hour session (within a 5-week, 2 hours per week) introducation to qualitative analysis course.

Van Dijk's edited collection is therefore too detailed, in my opinion, to be any more than listed under 'further references' for my course.

This does not reflect the quality of the book - just the format and level of the course I am teaching.

I do particularly like Anita Pomerantz and B. J. Fehr's chapter on conversational analysis, largely because it does provide a step-by-step, accessible introduction to why and how one might undertake a conversational analysis. This is what I need for the kind of course I am teaching.

I might therefore explore making a chapter such as this 'recommended reading'.

I also enjoyed Lazar and Kramarae's chapter on 'Gender and Power in Discourse' and Jiwani and Richardson's chapter on 'Discourse, Ethnicity and Racism'. These chapters provide a) an excellent introduction into these issues but b) also make a strong case for why discourse analysis is a strong and appropriate method for examining these issues. As I am introducing the various qualitative analytical approaches to early stage PhD students, it is important they get a sense of i) for what kinds of research questions / interests a particular approach might be appropriate and ii) a brief introduction to how you undertake this kind of analysis. I might therefore also consider making these two chapters recommended readings for the course next year.