Developing pedagogical discourse analysis through project-based tasks

Abstract

This article discusses why pedagogical discourse analysis (PDA) can be seen as the departure point to teach through discourse and how language teachers can efficaciously use it in order to bring discourse analysis into the language classroom. Analyzing both authentic language samples as well as students’ output, PDA aims to highlight either contextualized communication breakdowns, formal and functional language aspects and/or socio-cultural features. To make PDA feasible in language teaching, current discourse-based approaches should be in place. This paper introduces a consolidated approach, named project-based task analysis (PBTA), resulting of the strategic combination of task-based language teaching (TBLT) and project-based learning (PBL). Under PBTA, discourse is the core component of teaching and learning.