Discourse in Administrative and Educational Institutions

CARRANZA, ISOLDA E.; CANALE, GERMÁN; LACORTE, MANEL

2nd edition The Routledge Handbook of Hispanic Applied Linguistics

Routledge

Lugar: New York; Año: 2025; p. 295 - 325

Although different lines of research on discourse have tended to emphasize either agency or structure, there is generalized consensus as to the bidirectional influence, and the emphasis in this chapter will be on the connections between the two, with the reminder that there are relatively stable intermediate levels such as social practices, which allow for highly productive insights and articulation with other approaches to communication (e.g. cognitive, ethnographic, socio-political, policy planning, etc.). Focusing more on discourse in institutions than on institutional discourse, this chapter builds on the anthropological argument that ‘the level of social structure may not be studied directly but only observed in its effects on human actors’ (Aull Davies 2008: 22).The restricted scope defined in the preceding paragraphs makes it clear that this chapter does not set out to review the fundamentals of discourse analysis nor the intellectual sources of discourse studies in general. The keen reader can refer to recently edited volumes for this. Handford and Gee (2023) have re-edited a collective volume that covers a wide range of approaches to discourse analysis, research topics and methodological strategies. Caldas-Coulthard and Coulthard (2023) have revisited their edited volume Texts and Practices –originally published in 1996- to offer a look at both classic and new work in the field of (critical) discourse analysis.