Over the last three decades, various disciplines of discourse analysis have shared a common interest in language use, especially in how people use real language. It is therefore of immediate interest to language teachers when selecting and devising teaching materials or when engaging learners in activities aimed at leading them to be more proficient users of their target language. This paper begins with outlining essential written discourse elements, such as grammatical and lexical cohesive devices, clause relations and larger text patterns which play important roles in syntactic and semantic cohesion and coherence in written texts. Then, the procedure of a written discourse analysis on a news text is described. The paper ends with a discussion on the insights from the written discourse analysis, which might be applicable, in specifiable ways, to language teaching, focusing on how to apply written discourse elements to teaching written English in real classrooms.