A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHIES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE
Biography, a type of life writing, has long existed in the history of human being. The famous British biographer Nigel Hamilton [19] defines biography as a creative and non-fiction output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives. A biography narrates the most important facts of someone’s life, his or her childhood, adolescence, military service, wars he or she lived through, educational background, professional life, marriage, children, and most outstanding achievements. It also tells readers anecdotes, memories, trips and dearly cherished moments. It is our most precious legacy to the world and mainly to our family. A biography involves a whole life, building a bridge between generations, bringing us closer to our grandchildren, great grandchildren and future generations, planting in their hearts the pride of belonging. The early days of biographies were evidenced in ancient Assyrian, Babylonian and Mesopotamian society. Ancient Greece and Roman Empire also had biographies for religious purposes. Through the Medieval, then the Renaissance until modern days of history, this literary-historical genre persists. By the 18th century literary biography (works about poets and men of letters) had become an important extension of the genre. The 20th century produced a new sort of biography – one that used the technique of psychoanalysis on the subject. Twentieth-century biographers often sought to make structure a reflection of theme. Biography in a multimedia age often takes various forms from documentary biographies (composed of newsreel clips and photographs), film essays to interview programs. With the advent of cable television, biography became a daily staple of various channels and biographies were offered as part of the programming on channels devoted to a number of special subjects, e.g., history and education.
Nowadays, biography is one of the most popular categories of books. Researchers, teachers, and students all have exposure to this genre to get reference information for their research. A survey on the popularity of biography examined various published biographies of different well-known magazines in America, Britain and Australia came to a conclusion that in recent years, there has been a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. Biographies maintains a great appeal. According to a British poll on reading habits, biography was considered the most popular category of non-fiction book and a genre considerably ahead of contemporary fiction (preferred by 19% percent of readers, compared to 14% for contemporary fiction). James Atlas [1, p.24], a biographer and the editor of the Penguin Lives Series, writes in the New York Times Book Review of a rainy afternoon leisurely spent in a London bookshop, where he was “stunned by the sheer profusion of ‘lives’, as the British people call biographies”. Biographies of Churchill lined an entire back wall, surrounded by shelves of biographies of people unknown or unfamiliar to Atlas. In Vietnam, biography is also a must-have type of reference in most libraries and a lot of people, especially students and researchers, are looking up the genre today.
The need for reading and researching biographies is also increasing. Adult and community education organizations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing.
The introduction of biography to the syllabus of children of all ages has positive educational effects. According to an article entitled “Biography in education”, children learn a lot by reading biographies of great men and women in history. For very young pupils in school, great beings speak out of their times to contribute to the waiting, open souls of the children, strengthening the inner life, giving direction and guidance deep below the threshold of waking consciousness. For teenagers who are striving for self-development, biography is really a gift through which the fruits of history can be brought to the students. Through the life stories of great men and women, they learn from these people the way to seek the path, to climb the heights, to accept failure or to start all over again. And the young soul will respect this insight into the human life-span. Biography is such a valuable teaching resource for teachers who want to provide their students with inspiration and reflection. In education, biography can be given in the form of a story, a drama, or appears in artistic form such as music or poetry to make this genre closer to the students.
However popular biography may be, as well as their importance in different aspects of life, this genre of writing still receives little attention from researchers and linguists. Most research relating to biographies are from historians, scientists and demographers, who utilize the biographical data to analyze the political, social and demographic situations of a particular country at a particular historical period. In the field of linguistics, research work which derives its data from biographies is limited. The fact that little has been known about characteristics of biographical discourse causes difficulties for those who want to compose a biographical writing or those who wish to do research in genre analysis in particular and discourse analysis in general. Therefore, understanding discourse features of this genre turns out to be an effective tool for them, and this is also a task of this study on biographical discourse. Besides, if biographies are even more popular than contemporary fictions and a multitude of people are reading the genre today, exploring the distinctive features of the genre is a necessary task of the linguistic researcher. For these reasons, the researcher made a decision to carry out a study entitled “A Discourse Analysis on Historical Biographies in English and Vietnamese”. It is hoped that with the use of discourse analysis approach, the genre of biography can be comprehensively investigated.
Together with the popularity and importance of this genre of writing, the study is worth conducting as it is expected to provide useful knowledge to enable better understanding of this genre in the light of discourse analysis. Moreover, the findings of the study are presumed to be a potential source for the teaching of writing skills in the genre of biography, which certainly brings benefits to Vietnamese students in writing classes.
The study is carried out with the aim to investigate the discourse features of historical biographies in English and Vietnamese. The findings of the study will be of great help to teachers, learners of English as a foreign language and those who are interested in this genre of writing.
The study is intended to:
– describe the discourse features of historical biographies in English and Vietnamese in terms of discourse structure, linguistic features and cohesive devices;
– find out the similar and different features of historical biographies of the two languages in the above-mentioned aspects; and
– put forward some practical implications for teachers and learners of English as well as for those interested in writing biographies.
To achieve the objectives mentioned above, the study attempted to answer the following research questions:
1. What are the discourse features of English historical biographies (EHBs) and Vietnamese historical biographies (VHBs) in terms of their discourse structure, linguistic features, and cohesive devices?
2. What are the similarities and differences between EHBs and VHBs in terms of the above-mentioned features?
3. What are the suggestions for teachers and students of English as well as for those interested in writing biographies?
This study just investigates historical biographies with the length from 500 to 1500 words. Biographies written in book format or short outline will not be taken into consideration. The average length of the biographies under investigation will facilitate the data collection and data analysis later on. In addition, within the constraint of time and knowledge, the study cannot cover all discourse features of historical biographies in the two languages. Rather, the study is restricted to three aspects: discourse structure, linguistic features and cohesive devices of English and Vietnamese historical biographies collected from reliable sources. Also, the study just focuses on one type of biography, that is, historical biography.
The study is presented in five chapters:
Chapter 1: Introduction
In this chapter, the researcher deals with general issues of the study such as the reason to choose this topic, justification, aims, objectives, and scope of the study. The audience will also find it easy to follow the study through research questions posed in this chapter.
Chapter 2: Literature review
This chapter is an overview of previous related studies and theories employed as the basis for arguments and analysis of the data in the study. This chapter covers such terms as discourse, discourse analysis, genre analysis, coherence and cohesion in discourse, discourse structure, and an overview of biography.
Chapter 3: Methods and Procedures
This chapter demonstrates the setting, participants, and method of data collection as well as the process of data analysis in particular and the procedure of research in general.
Chapter 4: Findings and Discussions
The answers to the research questions will be presented in this chapter. The first part of this chapter describe and compare the discourse structures of English historical biographies (EHBs) and Vietnamese historical biographies (VHBs). The next part indicates the similarities and differences between EHBs and VHBs in terms of linguistic features and cohesive devices. Lastly, some suggestions for the teaching and writing of historical biographies will be given.
Chapter 5: Conclusions & implications
This chapter is a summary of research questions, the procedures employed and the results obtained. In the end, the implications of the findings and limitations of the research will be pointed out. This chapter also includes some suggestions for further research on related issues.
2.1. REVIEW OF PREVIOUS STUDIES
Discourse is a term that has been defined by different linguists worldwide. According to Widdowson [42, p.8], “Discourse is a use of sentences to perform acts of communication which cohere into larger communicative units, ultimately establishing a rhetorical pattern which characterizes the pieces of language as a whole kind of communication”. Cook [7, p.156] views discourse as “a stretch of language perceived to be meaningful unified and purposive”, whereas Nunan [33] asserts that discourse means a stretch of language consisting of several sentences which are perceived as related in some way. The two linguists Kress and Parker hold similar opinion about the definition of discourse. Kress [23] defines discourse as systematically organized sets of statements which give expression to the meanings and values of and institution, and Parker [34] views discourse as interrelated set of texts, and the practice of their production, dissemination, and reception, that bring and option into being.
The borderline between the two terms discourse and text is very complex. Salkie [35] points out that discourse and text are the same term for a stretch of language possibly longer than a sentence whereas Widdowson [42, p.100] argues that “Discourse is a communicative process by means of interaction. Its situational outcome is a change in a state of affairs: information is conveyed, intentions made clear, its linguistic product is text”. Nevertheless, for the sake of simplicity, in this study the two terms are used interchangeably to refer to any stretch of language in use, which is in most cases longer than a single sentence.
Discourse of all kinds has definite structures, and the flexibility of organizations varies from genre to genre. Halliday asserts that discourse structure is a dynamic order determined by the semantic unfolding of the discourse. Hatim and Mason [21, p.173-174] discuss constituents of discourse in terms of element and sequence. Elements and sequences of discourse with their certain rhetorical functions to the whole purpose of a discourse create a stable discourse organization.
Discourse analysis is a broad and complex interdisciplinary field. Brown and Yule [6, p.iii] raises a question about how language users interpret what other language users intend to convey. They state that
“when we ask how it is that we, as language users, make sense of what we read in texts, understand what speakers mean, despite what they say, recognize connected as opposed to jumbled or incoherent discourse, and successful take part in that complex activity called conversation, we are undertaking what is known discourse analysis”.
According to Schiffrin [36, p.5], discourse analysis is “a rapidly growing and evolving field” and “widely recognized as one of the most vast, but also one of the least defined, areas in linguistics”.
There are two main approaches in defining discourse and discourse analysis. Structuralist (or formalist) viewed discourse as a particular unit of language. In many structural approaches, discourse is viewed as a level of structure higher than the sentence or higher than another unit of text. In accordance with McCarthy [31], discourse analysis is a vast area within linguistics, encompassing as it does the analysis of spoken and written language over and above concerns such as the structure of the clause or sentence. Harris [20], the first linguist to use the term discourse analysis, views discourse as the next level in a hierarchy of morphemes, clauses and sentences. However, this view has been criticized by some researchers arguing that the units used by people in their speech cannot always be categorized as sentences, or grammatically correct sentences. People generally produce units that have a semantic and an intonational closure, but not necessarily a syntactic one.
Functionalist defined the study of discourse as “the study of any aspect of language use” [11, p.65]. This is consistent with Brown and Yule [6] stating that the analysis of discourse is necessarily the analysis of language in use. They relate the analysis of language use to the analysis of purposes and functions of language in human life which cannot be separated. Their major concern is to examine how any language produced by man is used to communicate for a purpose in a context which can turn out into a more general and broader analysis of language functions. Coulthard [8, p.7] argues that “discourse does not consist simply of grammatically well-formed utterances or sentences”. This view is supported by Labov [25] claiming that discourse analysis must be concerned with the functional use of language.
The distinction between spoken and written discourse is primarily referred to a difference of mode or channel of communication, in that spoken discourse utilizes sound or the transmitting medium of ‘phonic substance’ and written discourse is visual with graphic substance. Speaking and writing involve different psychological processes and becomes more complex when they are distinguished in terms of linguistic or discoursal features. They are grammatically, lexically, structurally and even functionally different.
Spoken discourse is regarded as typically transient and time-bound that has to be understood immediately. It happens in time and must be therefore produced and processed ‘on line’. There is no going back and changing or restructuring our words as there is in writing (Cook [7]) while written is permanent and retrievable. Written texts may be presented in many ways to serve various purposes of writers: conventions, punctuation rules, layout, paragraphing, lineation, genres, etc. (Brown & Yule [6]). In terms of functions, the two linguists suggest that spoken and written discourse serve various functions:
– The first function is for the establishment and maintenance of human relationship (interactional use).
– The second is for the working out of and transference of information (transactional use).
A. Defining genre
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A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHIES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE
