1. Feminist Post-structualist discourse analysis (FPDA) FPDA can be defined as an approach to analysing intertextualised discourses in spoken interaction and other types of text. It draws upon the poststructuralist principles of complexity, plurality, ambiguity, connection, recognition, diversity, textual playfulness, functionality and transformation. The feminist perspective on poststructuralist discourse analysis considers gender differentiation to be a dominant discourse among competing discourses when analysing all types of text. Baxter, 2007)). FPDA adopts exactly parallel methods to its partner, but without the focus on a feminist perspective where gender differentiation is key.
2. Discourse Analysis (DA) Discourse Analysis (DA) has a strong focus on studying language in its own right, although it is often appropriated as an analytic tool by researchers from other disciplines. Like CA, this approach in its diverse strands recognizes that there is an orderliness, logic and meaningfulness to linguistic performance.The hallmark of DA however, is its recognition of the variability in and the context dependence of participants‘ discourse. In fact, in Discourse Analysis there are some key features such as Principle of variability, Constructed and constructive nature of language, Interpretive repertoire, and combinations of macro and micro-analytical approaches.
3. Conversation Analysis (CA) Conversation Analysis CA, examines social interaction, specifically spoken interaction. It studies talk produced in everyday conversation which practitioners prefer to call "talk-in interaction". CA object of study focuses on natural occurring interactions. This analysis could be made from a video or tape-recordings and their transcripts which led analysts uncover various things that are not seen easily or at first sight in a conversation. Sacks (1992) raised the possibility of investigating utterances as social actions which speakers use to get things done or to avoid getting things done in the course of a conversation with others.
4. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) CDA is useful to linguistic scholars because, like CA and DA, it analyses real, and oftenextended, samples of spoken and written discourse. However, unlike CA in particular, CDA adopts a macro-analytical view of the world in that it takes the notion of discourse in its widest sense.Thus CDA research specifically considers how language works within institutional and political discourses. For example, in education, organisations, media, government), as well as specific discourses (around gender and class), in order to uncover overt or more often, covert inequalities in social relationships. Furthermore, CDA does not regard itself as a coherent theory, a sub-discipline of discourse analysis or as a methodological approach like CA and DA. Rather, it views itself as a "critical" perspective, or programme of scholarship which can be combined with other approaches and commissioned by scholars working in a range of disciplines related both to linguistics and to the social sciences more generally.
