This case study is an analysis of target discourse to collect and analyze discourse samples of radio and television forecasts. We focused on three aspects of an analysis of target discourse: (a) identifying recurrent subtasks to understand the internal structure of weather forecast discourse, (b) analyzing linguistic features that frequently co-occur with the subtasks (i.e., structural ellipsis and technical and sub-technical vocabulary), and (c) developing samples of prototypical discourse that can be put to use in task-based materials. Our intention in this chapter is to be as descriptive and transparent as possible in reporting methods and procedures of analysis, so interested researchers and practitioners can refer to this study when conducting their own analysis of target discourse studies.

This study reports on a task-based analysis of target discourse by examining a corpus of naturally occurring face-to-face office-hour interactions between English-speaking students and instructors at a US university. Fourteen office hours involving 106 interactants were extracted from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English and coded for types of office hours, sub-tasks, and pragmatic and interactional features. Based on the findings, a prototypical model of an office-hour interaction was produced, which can serve as a sound basis for developing genuine pedagogic tasks for teaching EAP students the necessary second language pragmatics to navigate office-hours.