Discourse Analysis is a broad topic, it is a wide range of disciplines which are sometimes troublesome So the engagement to this topic

requires knowledge of all modes of data analysis that took place before the emergence of Discourse Analysis such as Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis, and Performance Analysis, fields which are mainly concerned with the study of language

y Contrastive Analysis

This is a field of research which flourished in the 50s and 60s. It emphasized the comparison of two languages__ the mother tongue of the learner and the L2 that he/ she wants to learn. This endeavor was motivated by the then predominant belief that the acquisition of a language is in essence the formation of unconscious verbal habits and will inevitably be influenced by the old set of habits__ i.e. the mother tongue. The L2 learner will transfer his old set of habits into the new linguistic context. Where L1 and L2 are similar, this transfer will be positive; where they are different, transfer will be negative. This, in effect, equates the areas of difference between L1 and L2 with areas where the learner is going to meet with problems when learning L2.

y An example of this is the Arab learner of English saying knife pocket

instead of pocket knife due to transfer from Arabic wich has reverse order of head and modifier to that of English Arabic: Head+ Modifier vs Modifier + Head in English

A French learner of English has difficulty in pronouncing the English /0/ (as in thin), because it does not exist in the phonological system of French as a distinctive sound. He usually replaces it with /s/. This is a case of negative transfer. The learner has no otherwise problems with /s/, /k/, or /g/. We can thus predict those areas of difficulty when we compare L1 and L2 and point out those areas of difficulty between them. Now, if the errors that the L2 learner commits are predicted as the result of the influence of the old set of habits on his performance of L2, then we can concentrate on those areas of difference_ and hence difficulty_ in teaching L2. SLA is, therefore, the overcoming of the differences between the two language systems.
In spite of its appeal, the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) __ as the above set of assumptions has come to be called, was not without its flows and inadequacies. Two things are worth mentioning in this connection: vagueness in the difficulty assumptions, and the validity of the errors basis (Lakhal Ayat 2008).

Error Analysis

A number of proponents of an error analysis approach claim that contrastive analysis cannot serve as an adequate tool for identifying the areas of difficulty for learners of a second language. But on the other hand, it has been noticed that error analysis is not able to explain the avoidance phenomenon, since error analysis registers only the errors done by learners of a second language (Schatchter 1974). Avoidance behavior represents a communicative strategy of a learner of a second language by which the learner prefers using a simpler form instead of target linguistic element for the reason of difficulty on the part of the target feature. Consequently, avoidance behaviour serves as manifestation of learning problems, and its results should be definitely considered when compiling language syllabi and tests (laufer and Eliasson 1993). And since error analysis does not consider and is not able to explain the avoidance phenomenon, it cannot be observed as an adequate approach for assisting teachers of a second language with learning materials (Elena Gluth)
An example of that is the Arab learners who prefer using the active form instead of the passive

After Contrastive analysis and error analysis approaches, performance analysis took place. But it has been noticed that there is something which is quite missing. It is said that we should focus on the input itself. i.e. what is given to students, to what they are exposed. And since the input of the spoken language is different from the input of the written language, it is better to expose students to discourse because in discourse, the focus is on what is said too and not on what is written only. All these approaches lead to the emergence of discourse Analysis.

A Brief Historical overview Discourse analysis is concerned with the study of the relationship between language and the contexts in which it is used. It grew out of work in different disciplines in the 1960s and early 1970s, including linguistics, semiotics, psychology, anthropology and sociology. Discourse analysts study language in use: written texts of all kinds, and spoken data, from conversation to highly institutionalised forms of talk. At a time when linguistics was largely concerned with the analysis of single sentences, Zellig Harris published a paper with the title 'Discourse analysis' (Harris 1952). Harris was interested in the distribution of linguistic elements in extended texts, and the links between the text and its social situation, though his paper is a far cry from the discourse analysis we are used to nowadays. Also important in the early years was the emergence of semiotics and the French structuralist approach to the study of narrative. In the 1960s, Dell Hymes provided a sociological perspective with the study of speech in its social setting (e.g. Hymes 1964). The linguistic philosophers such as Austin (1962), Searle (1969) and Grice (1975) were also influential in the study of language as social action, reflected in speech-act theory and the formulation of conversational maxims, alongside the emergence of pragmatics, which is the study of meaning in context (see Levinson 1983;Leech 1983).

y British Discourse Analysis vs American Discourse analysis

British discourse analysis was greatly influenced by M. A. K. Halliday's functional approach to language (e.g. Halliday 1973), which in turn has connexions with the Prague School of linguists. Halliday's framework emphasises the social functions of language and the thematic and informational structure of speech and writing. Also important in Britain were Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) at the University of Birmingham, who developed a model for the description of teacher-pupil talk, based on a hierarchy of discourse units. Other similar work has dealt with doctor patient interaction, service encounters, interviews, debates and business negotiations, as well as monologues. Novel work in the British tradition has also been done on intonation in discourse. The British work has principally followed structural-linguistic criteria, on the basis of the isolation of units, and sets of rules defining well-formed sequences of discourse.

American discourse analysis has been dominated by work within the ethnomethodological tradition, which emphasises the research method of close observation of groups of people communicating in natural setting examines types of speech event such as storytelling, greeting rituals and verbal duels in different cultural and social settings (e.g. Gumperz and Hymes 1972). What is often called conversation analysis within the American tradition can also be included under the general heading of discourse analysis. In conversational analysis, the emphasis is not upon building structural models but on the close observation of the behaviour of participants in talk and on patterns which recur over a wide range of natural data. The work of Goffman (1976; 1979), and Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) is important in the study of conversational norms, turn-taking and other aspects of spoken interaction. Alongside the conversation analysts, working within the sociolinguistic tradition, Labov's investigations of oral storytelling have also contributed to a long history of interest in narrative discourse. The American work has produced a large number of descriptions of discourse types, as well as insights into the social constraints of politeness and face-preserving phenomena in talk, overlapping with British work in pragmatics. Also relevant to the development of discourse analysis as a whole is the work of text grammarians, working mostly with written language

The term 'discourse analysis' has come to be used with a wide range of meanings which cover a wide range of activities. It is used to describe activities at the intersection of disciplines as diverse as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, philosophical linguistics and computational linguistics. Scholars working centrally in these different disciplines tend to concentrate on different aspects of discourse. Sociolinguists are particularly concerned with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation, and their descriptions emphasise features of social context which are particularly amenable to sociological classification. They are concerned with generalising across 'real' instances of language in use, and typically work with transcribed spoken data.

y Psycholinguists are particularly concerned with issues related to language comprehension. They typically employ a tight methodology derived from experimental psychology, which investigates problems of comprehension in short constructed texts or sequences of written sentences. Philosophical linguists, and formal linguists, are particularly concerned with semantic relationships between constructed pairs of sentences and with their syntactic realisations. They are concerned, too, with relationships between sentences and the world in terms of whether or not sentences are used to make statements which can be assigned truth-values. They typically investigate such relationships between constructed sentences attributed to archetypal speakers addressing archetypal hearers in (minimally specified) archetypal contexts.

Computational linguists working in this field are particularly concerned with producing models of discourse processing and are constrained, by their methodology, to working with short texts constructed in highly limited contexts. It must be obvious that at this relatively early stage in the evolution of discourse analysis, there is often rather little in common between the various approaches except the discipline which they all, to varying degrees, call upon: linguistics (Yule, Brown 1983).