Page 6 - E-Module DA

PREFACE

Acknowledgement

The writing of this book is inspired by the need to provide appropriate books in
the course of Discourse Analysis. This course is an important part of linguistic
study. This course becomes the main subject studied by university students in all
levels, in undergraduate degree, in master degree, and in the doctorate degree. In
addition, Discourse Analysis, which I then wrote as DA in this book is now a
trending method in doing research, especially in qualitative research.
Researchers have been using this method in data analysis, besides the use of
quasi-experimental design.
Our main intention in writing this book is to explore the theoretical background
of DA as a branch of study in linguistics. We attempt as well to examine the

methods used in doing DA and later to give exercises for students in doing DA.
This book can become a good reference for students in doing DA, as additional
sources for doing DA.
During the time we teach this course, we find some interesting cases. Students
find many copied books. They have plenty of books on DA copied from original
books. They can also read many resources about DA from the internet through
free search engines such as Google or Wikipedia. Indeed, they can download a
free e-book from the internet about DA. The problem that we think it is urgent is
that those students find difficulties to understand the theories of DA. Not only
that, several students told me that they had learned DA in their level before such
as in undergraduate program; however, they still do not understand what DA is
exactly. More problems exist when they were asked about what to do in DA. Often
when they had read so many books in DA, problems occurred when the questions
came to “how to do DA?”. What they need besides learning theories is actually
practicing to apply DA in their work, their paper, and also in their research later.
In undergraduate degree, for example, when we explained a little bit about DA
in the class of Introduction to Linguistics as a part of linguistic study, we got the
impression that the students had not got ideas about it. Especially when we

explained that DA requires higher level of thinking as it is about analysis not only
on the sentences, clauses, or phrases, but within the sentences, clauses, or
phrases, students said that the study must be very difficult.
In master degree program when we are usually given the responsibility to
teach the course, students gave a lot comments. One of them is about the
difficulties they encountered when doing DA, especially when they were given the
tasks to analyze spoken discourses. Problems cover when they had to produce
data by recording, transcribing the collected data, and later interpreting the data.
One of the students said, “let’s pray so we can pass this subject”. Another
comment, “I always got dizzy after joining the class DA”. Some students said that
they did not actually know or understand about DA. I asked them again, “what did
you do during the course?”. They said “it was just discussion about theories”. Our
impression is that what they want actually is not only theories and concepts on
DA, but also on practices of doing DA.

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