1) Explain the relation between “discourse” and “text”
Discourse and text are two fundamental notions in the theory of discourse analysis. It can be said that most researchers in this field encounter two these terms and notions. Although the two these notions need to be differentiated distinctly, the issue in practice is not completely simple. They can be used either to substitute for each other or to distinguish from one another. Many authors consider discourse as text. Sometimes text is understood in many different aspects as followings:
According to Brown and Yule, 1983, text is seen as the verbal record of a communicative act or as the linguistic product of a communicative process by Widdowson, 1984.
Besides, text tends to be seen as a semantic or communicative category. For example, Halliday and Hasan, 1976 view text as a “semantic unit” characterized by cohesion or a framework that is logical and general. De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) define text as a “communicative occurrence which process serves constitutive conditions of textual communication via cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality.
Whereas “discourse … is language in use…” as is stated very clearly by Brown and Yule (1983). According to Crystal, 1982, discourse is considered as an uninterrupted language sequence (especially spoken language) larger than the sentence, and often created a cohesive unit.
Cook, 1989 considers discourse as language sequences that are perceived meaningful, united, and purposeful.
Thus, the authors above have basically tried to find out how to differentiate between discourse and text. They all either see text as written language and discourse as spoken language or think that in each the linguistic product has something related to text known as cohesion as well as something related to discourse known as coherence.
According to Widdowson (1984), the difference and the relationship between text and discourse can be best captured by the followings:
Discourse is a communicative process by means of interaction. Its situational outcome is a change in a state of affairs: information is conveyed, intentions made clear, its linguistic product is Text.
However, Widdowson is probably one of the first persons who make very clear and explicit the distinction between text and discourse. According to him, text typically has cohesion whereas discourse has coherence, which can be proved by the following example:
A: Did you vote Labour or Liberal, Peter?
B: I didn’t register, mate.
This mini-exchange shows that although there is no formal link between A and B because cohesion is missing here, but there is in fact a potential relationship between them as the listener can make an inference that Peter did not vote, for he did not register.
With the way of looking at discourse and text, it is followed that a text is simply a representation or a verbal record of the whole communicative process (that is discourse) in which many situational factors are involved. As such text can be both written and spoken and there will be no limit on the size of a text. On the other hand, the analysis of discourse would involve, among other things, the context of situations, the meanings or intentions that the writer or speaker assigns to a linguistic means or expression. In the light of this distinction, discourse analysis can be contrasted with text analysis. Whereas discourse analysis is concerned with the functional analysis of language in use, text analysis deals with the analysis of formal features of text such as cohesion, text structure and so on with little reference to the extra-linguistic which gave rise to the text. We will make this point that these are comparable to two sides of a paper. As a result, there is a close tie between discourse analysis and text analysis and sometimes it is impossible to draw any line between them.
From what is analyzed above, it can be acknowledged that respects of text consist of such factors as cohesion, theme-rhyme structure, information structure, types of discourse, whereas that respects of discourse are composed of such factors as coherence, speech acts, using background knowledge in generative process and interpretation of discourse, top-down processing, bottom-up processing, interactive processing, and meaning negotiation.
In sum, discourse and text are closely related together. In text, there is discourse, and in discourse, there is text. We cannot separate them from each other.

2) How can discourse analysis be applied to language teaching?
Discourse plays a very important role in teaching foreign languages. It provides learners with a wide range of knowledge in the interpretation of the target language as well as the source of language in general, and discourse is important in many aspects of teaching English in particular. In the scope of this paper, I just emphasize the significance of discourse on teaching text interpretation with top-down and bottom-up text processing, coherence and cohesion, and context.
As we all know, in order to help learners understand more deeply about the texts, teachers have to provides learners with a large number of relevant methods and techniques. However, the language teaching will get no effect unless the teachers focus