
The practical pressures of language teaching mean that teachers will always, rightly, want to evaluate carefully any descriptive insights before taking them wholly to heart as teaching points.
Discourse analysis is not a method for teaching languages, nor does it claim to be that. But it is my own personal view that discourse analysis has presented us with a fundamentally different way of looking at language compared with sentence dominated models, one in which the traditional elements of grammar, lexis and phonology still have a fundamental part to play, but one which is bigger and more immediately relevant.
What is more, we now know more about what people actually do with language when they speak and write, and no longer have to rely on what textbooks largely based on intuition and sometimes, sadly, on Classical-based notions of what ‘good’ usage is, claim to be the way people speak and write.