Course finder
Semester 2
Discourse Analysis (LASC10114)
Subject
Language Sciences and Linguistics
College
CAHSS
Credits
20
Normal Year Taken
3
Delivery Session Year
2023/2024
Pre-requisites
Visiting students should have completed at least 3 Linguistics/Language Sciences courses at grade B or above. We will only consider University/College level courses.
Course Summary
Discourse analysis is the study of language in use. In this course, the students will learn empirical methods for studying naturally-occurring language data in various social, institutional and technological contexts.
Course Description
Discourse analysis looks at how people use language in real-life contexts. In this course, we will explore how discourse or language in use can be studied empirically. We are going to focus, in particular, on two types of naturally-occurring discourse: spoken (e.g. small talk, professional interaction, media interviews, etc.) and computer-mediated (e.g. text and multimedia messaging, social media postings, etc). The course will cover three main components: 1. What is discourse and discourse analysis: introducing key concepts in discourse analysis such as written vs. spoken discourse, small d and big D discourse, cohesion, turn-taking, etc.; 2. What are the main approaches to discourse analysis: e.g. Conversation Analysis, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Computer-mediated Discourse Analysis, Critical and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis; 3. How to design and carry out a discourse analysis project: the ethical and practical considerations of collecting spoken, text messaging and social media data in different contexts, transcribing spoken and multimodal data, analyzing naturally-occurring discourse data adopting one of the main DA approaches. The course is highly hands-on. The students will learn to apply linguistic skills they have learned in this and other courses to examine real-life questions.
Assessment Information
Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0% Data Analysis of 1500 words, worth 40% Project of 2500 words, worth 60%
view the timetable and further details for this course
Disclaimer
All course information obtained from this visiting student course finder should be regarded as provisional. We cannot guarantee that places will be available for any particular course. For more information, please see the visiting student disclaimer: