My reflection for the first week readings

Hello everyone,

I started my readings this week with the first two chapters of Wootfit. These chapters are basically important for us to understand the terms “Conversation Analysis (CA)” and “Discourse Analysis (DA)”. For me, all the readings this week are important to convince myself on understanding of the goal of this course. Before registered for THIS COURSE, I thought that “DISCOURSE” Analysis will help me to discover more than “what someone says during an interview”. It will also help me to be able to catch “what someone really means when he or she says something during an interview”. In this respect, Wootfit’s readings have provided me brief definitions of CA and DA, and what the important point during a conversation, such as a telephone call. I can understand these kinds of important points, but I am wondering how I can figure out all time gaps during a phone call. It can be understood if we conduct an interview via Skype or face-to-face because we can record it. Wootfit does not mention this point in these two chapters. Also, the definition of DA hasn’t made sense to me until I read the first chapter of Jorgensen and Philips’ book. In that chapter, Jorgensen and Philips were explaining the purpose of Discourse Analyst in the page 21. I think it was the best way to explain what discourse analysis is.  It was also interesting to me that although it has been claimed that DA is the most widely used social constructionist approaches, there hasn’t had a clear definition of the term, at least I have had difficulty to understand. Hepburn article is a good start for me to have an example of how to organize a paper that is about discourse analysis. I have conducted some research so far. However, I didn’t take emphasizes and other important points taken into account as Hepburn did. I think and I hope the class, including class discussions, and other readings will contribute to my understanding of discourse analysis and how to apply discourse analysis in my field. I am not sure how I performed with my first reflection. Therefore, I will really appreciate for your comments and recommendations to improve my future reflections.

Thanks,