ABSTRACT
All discourse analysis that intends to make empirical claims is rooted in specific viewpoints about the relationship between form and function in language, although these are rarely spelled out in discourse analytic work in education. Further, empirically motivated work in discourse is based, in part, on specific analytic techniques for relating form and function in oral and/or written texts. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) involves, beyond relating form and function in language, specific empirical analyses of how such form-function correlations themselves correlate with specific social practices that help constitute the very nature of such practices. Because social practices inherently involve social relationships where issues of solidarity, status, and power are at stake, the flow is bottom-up from work in CDA and are themselves empirical claims. Learning is a type of social interaction in which knowledge is distributed across people and their tools and technologies, dispersed at various sites, and stored in links among people, their minds and bodies, and specific affinity groups. Such a view of learning allows an integration of work in CDA, situated cognition, and sociocultural approaches to language and literacy.
