More narrowly still, applied discourse analysis might imply teaching
something which has been neglected in the past, but about which we now
have·information due to recent research. For example, Brazil et al. (1980)
propose teaching discourse intonation. Or one can teach directly other
interactional skills, such as teaching students to interrupt politely. In
general, discourse analysis is beginning to provide information at the level of
contrastive pragmatics. Different speech communities differ in their rules
for tum-taking, expression of politeness, amounts of talking, use of ritualistic
formulae and the like, and such information is of potential use to the
language learner. Textual conventions similarly vary in different languages:
written Arabic, for example, makes little if any distinction between sentences
and paragraphs, and punctuation conventions therefore differ considerably
between Arabic and English. Detailed contrastive analyses of
specific speech events have begun to appear: for example, Godard (1977)
compares behaviour on the telephone in France and the USA by analysing
sequential rules for openings. On the other hand, such work clearly has a
long way to go before comprehensive contrastive descriptions are available.
It has frequently been pointed out that much of the work on speech act
theory and conversational maxims is western European in its assumptions.
For example, Ochs Keenan (1976) criticises Grice (1975) on these grounds,
showing that not all of Grice 's conversational maxims hold in Malagasy.
The papers in Sinclair (ed., 1980) provide other views on applied discourse
analysis and foreign language teaching.