Discourse Analysis is becoming increasingly "multimodal", concerned primarily with the interplay of language, image and sound. Video Games allow humans to create, live in and have conversations with new multimodal worlds. In this ground-breaking new textbook, best-selling author and experienced gamer, James Paul Gee, sets out a new theory and method of discourse analysis which applies to language, the real world, science and video games. Rather than analysing the language of video games, this book uses discourse analysis to study games as communicational forms. Gee argues that language, science, games and everyday life are deeply related and each is a series of conversations. Discourse analysis should not be just about language, but about human interactions with the world, with games, and with each other, interactions that make meaning and sustain lives amid risk and complexity. Written in a highly accessible style and drawing on a wide range of video games from World of Warcraft and Chibi-Robo to Tetris, this engaging textbook is essential reading for students in discourse analysis, new media and digital culture.

Discourse analysis considers how language, both spoken and written, enacts social and cultural perspectives and identities. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis examines the field and presents James Paul Gee’s unique integrated approach which incorporates both a theory of language-in-use and a method of research. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis can be used as a stand-alone textbook or ideally used in conjunction with the practical companion title How to do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit. Together they provide the complete resource for students studying discourse analysis. Updated throughout, the fourth edition of this seminal textbook also includes two new chapters: ‘What is Discourse?’ to further understanding of the topic, as well as a new concluding section. A new companion website www.routledge.com/cw/gee features a frequently asked questions section, additional tasks to support understanding, a glossary and free access to journal articles by James Paul Gee. Clearly structured and written in a highly accessible style, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis includes perspectives from a variety of approaches and disciplines, including applied linguistics, education, psychology, anthropology and communication to help students and scholars from a range of backgrounds to formulate their own views on discourse and engage in their own discourse analysis. This is an essential textbook for all advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of discourse analysis.

How to do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit is the essential new book from James Paul Gee, bestselling author of An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. Discourse analysis is widely used in a range of academic subjects, all concerned with how humans make meaning and communicate within and across different social and cultural groups. Using a practical how-to approach, Gee provides the tools necessary to work with discourse analysis, with engaging step-by-step tasks featured throughout the book. Each tool is clearly explained, along with guidance on how to use it, and authentic data is provided for readers to practice using the tools. Readers from all fields will gain both a practical and theoretical background in how to do discourse analysis and knowledge of discourse analysis as a distinctive research methodology. How to do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit is the ideal preparation for future learning in discourse analysis and applied linguistics. It is the companion text to Geeâe(tm)s An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, meant for those interested in learning discourse analysis by doing it.

A practical, `user-friendly' guide to the issues and methods associated with text and discourse analysis. Text and Discourse Analysis: * examines a wide variety of authentic texts including news stories, adverts, novels, official forms, instruction manuals and textbooks * contains numerous practical activities * looks at a range of cohesive devices * concludes by looking at larger patterns in texts, a set of further exercises and a guide for further reading * provides a hands-on guide to an area of growing importance in language study.

The book explores ways in which the formal methods of linguistics can cast light on the structure of verbal interaction, and in particular considers how successive utterances cohere together in continuous spoken discourse. Beginning with an earlier model of discourse analysis elaborated to deal with teacher-pupil interaction in the classroom, it then reviews attempts to extend this model to a variety of discourses such as committee talk, doctor-patient interviews, broadcast discussions and the monologue of lectures. The extension of the original model to other situations has prompted a number of innovations and additional insights which are expounded in a series of contributions linked by complimentary themes. There are contributions on the role of intonation and of kinetics in discourse analysis; explorations of the problems of the analytic category ‘sentence’ and of the problems raised by casual conversation; and there is extended discussion of the structural properties underlying exchanges of utterances. The book moves easily between data and theory, forming a unified whole. It sums up a continuing and lively debate within a common tradition of discourse analysis and may well serve as a programmatic statement for future work in the field.

This multidisciplinary study explores how people make sense of each other's actions.

This book is designed as an introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and gives an overview of the various theories and methods associated with this sociolinguistic approach. It also introduces the reader to the leading figures in CDA and the methods to which they are most closely related. The text aims to provide a comprehensive description of the individual methods, an understanding of the theories to which methods refer and a comparative treatment of each of these methods so that students may be able to determine which is the most appropriate to select for their particular research question. Given the balance between theory and application, plus the intended audience - no previous knowledge of CDA is assumed - Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis should be useful reading for both students and researchers in the fields of linguistics, sociology, social psychology and the social sciences in general.