A PhD thesis is a concentrated piece of research that you must complete within the suggested time frame. It is one of the lengthiest academic writing tasks that often demand a student to meet high-quality writing and research standards. Using multidisciplinary approaches and research methods can make your PhD thesis a masterpiece. Therefore, this article will primarily focus on a multidisciplinary as well as the sociolinguistic approach (discourse analysis) and ways to use it in a PhD dissertation.
Discourse Analysis – A Brief Introduction
Discourse analysis is a broad field of study that imports some of its approaches, theories and methods from other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology and sociology. This term was first coined by linguistics named Zellig Harris in 1952. According to his understanding, it is the process of analysing the connected speech or writing to analyse the meaning of only one sentence at a time. In relatively simple words, discourse analysis is the analysis of discourse. However, the term discourse refers to the ‘language in use’.
In this context, discourse analysis is the process of analysis of the ‘language in use’. Furthermore, the ‘language in use’ refers to the set of preferences, expectations and norms that create a connection between the language and the context. In many places, the term ‘Text’ replaces the term ‘discourse’. The replacement of the word ‘discourse’ with ‘text’ refers to a concept that this analysis is not only concerned with the use of language, but also considers the social and cultural meaning of the language used in the content.
Discourse analysis is a state of the art to know how language shapes reality. It is a research method of analysing the written as well as spoken language in relation to its social context. It aims to understand what a piece of literature means in real-life situations. If someone asks for discourse analysis, it means all you should do is to focus on the effect and purpose of different types of languages. All in all, it is the process of looking at a text beyond the literal meaning of language.
Types Of Discourse Analysis:
The discourse analysis is of various types. This is the reasons that most of the students prefer to hire PhD dissertation writing services to work on it. However, if they are writing on their own, they must know about its different types before applying them to the PhD thesis. These types differ from each other based on the approaches used.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA):
It is an interdisciplinary research approach that uses several theoretical and methodological approaches to study content. It helps in examining literature, surveys and even taking observations for a PhD thesis.
Applied linguistics:
It is the field of study that helps linguistics to understand real-life problems by using multidisciplinary methods, such as education, sociology and psychology. This type of analysis is extremely important for research that aims to solve a social problem.
Rhetorical analysis:
It is a method of studying different texts by dividing them into different parts. It aims to explore the effect of different parts on the overall non-fiction text. It helps in extracting information for conducting a literature review or systematic literature review for a PhD thesis.
Ethnography of communication (EOC):
Another name for ethnography of communication is Ethnography of speaking. It is the type of analysis that studies the communication in the light of the wider context of the cultural and social beliefs of a particular community. If you aim to collect information in the form face-to-face and recorded interviews, EOC is a great choice.
Speech act theory:
It is the concept of understanding a speech by taking into account the actions of the speaker. It explains whether the speaker tries to convey commanding, questioning, asserting, requesting, admonishing, promising, and exclaiming sense while giving a speech. It is only useful for the type of studies that include face-to-face interactions between the participants and interviewers.
Interactional sociolinguistics:
It is the process of examining the social and cultural context of a speech in a face-to-face interaction. It primarily focuses on how people manage social activities and identities when they socially interact with each other. Again, this is effective for extracting information from responses that are collected by the researcher.
Steps To Conduct Discourse Analysis In PhD Thesis:
If you have chosen the most appropriate method for conducting discourse analysis for your PhD dissertation, then you must move on to the next phase, which is to conduct the analysis. The following are some steps that you must review to know ways to conduct this analysis:
- Establish the context: For conducting any type of analysis, you must have a specialised context or goals in mind to get started.
- Collect the data for material analysis: Keeping in mind the goals, you must collect the data from credible sources.
- Code the material: Coding helps categorise the data into different sections to better understand the meaning of a text.
- Examine the structure of the text: Examination of the structure of the text is the first phase of analysis that helps understand the literal meaning of the context.
- Identify cultural references: After knowing the literal meaning of the text, the next step is to examine it in the light of the cultural references.
- Explore linguistic and rhetorical mechanism: At this step, you must review a text with a comprehensive course of study of sentences, ideologies and words used.
- Interpret the data and extract useful consequences: After completing three layers of analysis: categorical analysis, cultural analysis, and linguistic and rhetorical analysis, the last step is to extract information from a selected text.
- Present your findings: The last but not the least step in this analysis is to present your findings in a way that the reader can easily understand.
Final Thought:
In the big picture, for getting a doctoral degree, a PhD scholar must be aware of several techniques, methods and theories. Discourse analysis is not only a qualitative data analysis method, but you can use it to interpret the real-world meaning of any source to be included in a research. Even in different parts of a PhD thesis, you can apply different types of linguistic analysis techniques (types of discourse or linguistic analysis) as explained above. All in all, the steps for conducting discourse analysis are also effective enough to achieve your PhD dissertation goals.
