My Reflections on Units 1 & 2 of Gee: How to do discourse analysis: A toolkit

Unit 1. Language and Language Acquisition


The importance of context in DA: Physical setting in which the communication takes place & everything in it,  body gestures, shared cultural knowledge.
To do DA, we have to see what is old & taken for granted as if it were brand-new. Actually, we should see all the assumption & info speakers leave unsaid, because communication & culture are like icebergs.
- What the speaker says + context = What the speaker mean
-Tools for DA: 1)"fill in gap" is when the listener uses what is said & the context in which it was said t fill or complete what the speaker has said; 2) "Making strange tool"; 3) "the subject tool: why speakers have chosen a specific subject and  what they are saying about it; 4) the "frame problem" (what we know about the context can be true but too limited) that includes falsification; 5) the "doing & not saying tool" (for any conversation, ask not only what the speaker is saying but what he/she is trying to do); 6) the vocabulary tool ask what sorts of words are being used in terms of Germanic words or Latinate ones and how this contributes to the purpose of communicating); 7) the "why this way and not that way" tool ( ask why the speaker built & designed with grammar in the way in which he/sh did and not in some other way; ask how else this could have been said and what the speaker was trying to mean); 8) the "integration" tool (ask how clauses were integrated or packaged into utterances or sentences); 10) the "topic & themes" tool (ask what the topic & theme is for each clause?); 11) the "stanza tool" (look for stanzas and how they cluster into larger blocks of information)  
_ As a strategy to be used in "making strange" tool, having an "insider" which is familiar with the context and an "outsider" who is not, helps to overcome taken-for-granted-ness.
The idea that "context is infinite" make me scared if once I want to pursue DA research because this reminds me of the many ways that infinity in context can lead to different interpretations of the phenomena by different
 people. This makes my research as "something difficult to capture" and makes me stressed.
In page 36, Gee argues that due to falsification that happens as we get more varied data about the context, there's this possibility that another researcher, later re-study our data and question our claims. Gee calls this " Empirical enterprise". This is interesting to me because as far as I've learned in quantitative research, if two different researchers empirically examine the same data, or in other words, replicate the research, they are expected to come to almost the same findings and that shows the robustness of the methods they've used but that's not the case in DA, because DA is all about interpretations.
Also, the frame problem tool which is considered as a tool for DA analysts and which underlines that "if looking at more context does not change what we think the language means, then we can be satisfied , at least for the time being, that our research is on the right track, reminds me of "saturation" in data collection in qualitative research. I have no idea if they are related but this similarity occurred to me.
This also pose this question in my mind that are DA researchers, by using the above-mentioned tools, are seeking to make their interpretations of the discourses more homogeneous or this is not necessarily the case?

In chapter 2. Gee emphasizes on the observation that by speaking, we are always DOING things & not just saying things or communicating. In this regards, we use grammar to build and design structures & meanings. This is interesting to me and helps me understand why conversation analysis can contribute to our understanding of the phenomena.

My question in chapter 2, is regarding the 8th tool of DA which is the "vocabulary" tool. Is it really necessary for a DA researcher to be able to distinguish between English words with German roots relative to those of Latinate root. This requires a good knowledge of linguistics that might not be found in every DA researchers' tool kit!