Discourse, Society and Culture

Course Code: MMALIE_04

Masters Level Module

Contemporary approaches to language learning and teaching emphasise the development of communicative competence, a concept which requires an understanding of how language is used in real social contexts. This module introduces you to the main approaches and key issues involved in analysing spoken and written discourse. Topics and approaches include the ethnography of communication, linguistic pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, intercultural communication, genre analysis, corpus analysis and critical discourse analysis. You will be encouraged to work on language data of your choice, which could be drawn from settings as diverse as classrooms, internet chat rooms, newspaper columns or radio phone-ins. The module will examine genres as different as casual conversation, interviews, newspaper articles, and academic discourse, exploring the influence of social context on meaning and how cultural and community assumptions influence the ways we understand and interact with others. Sessions will be organised around a combination of lectures and group discussions, some of which will be student led. The module is assessed by a coursework assignment of 5,000 words in length which is based on a discourse analysis of relevant data.