Discrimination in Text and Discourse

Discussing about discourse is a linguistic term that views language in its social context as well as psycholinguistic; its approach is descriptive rather than prescriptive; as Michael Stubbs (1993, p. 10) noted, “it refers to attempts to study the organization of language … and… larger linguistic units such as conversational exchanges or written texts. ” Primarily, it aims to investigate the language used in social interaction of two or more people in some given situations.
Similarly, discourse studies have been defined by J. Renkema (2004, p. 1) as “the discipline devoted to the investigation of the relationship between form and function in verbal communication” that are both context-based and situation-based. To explain further, the two discourse analyses, the descriptive and critical analysis differentiate types of discourses. Descriptive discourse analysis according to Patrick Doyle (2002, p. 625) “involves mention of characters and their actions;” this means, the action and the character of the person himself provide hint to the meaning of the message.
Critical discourse on the other hand investigates the “effect of power and ideology in the production of meaning” (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, p. 3). Here, the analysis focuses on the “dominance” factor of a given culture that exhibits inequality in a society. These two approaches in discourse analysis are relevant for the explanation and interpretation of a text or verbal discourse and in the study of linguistic as a whole. Understanding of the meaning of a message may come in through the action of character of a person (descriptive and psycholinguistic), or through dominating/discriminating one or two social groups (critical/social context).

Understanding of social context of language leads to understanding many discourses at schools, community, societies, and governments, in order to achieve the purpose of effective communication through the use of language. In the same manner, discourse analysis in the study of language through the use of different theories and model is a powerful tool towards achieving language competency. Kay O’Halloran (2006, p. 1) puts it, “Language studies are thus undergoing a major shift to account fully for meaning-making practices…”