News & Events
Coming this fall:
TESL 5910
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING
Fall 2008
W 4:00-6:30
Dr. Anne Lazaraton (lazaratn@umn.edu)
This course will focus on the systematic analysis of the authentic spoken and written discourse of both native and nonnative speakers of English. Throughout the course we will attempt to answer two primary questions:
• How does discourse analysis "fit" into traditional linguistic analysis? }
• How can discourse analysis help the language teacher?
Through assigned readings, class discussions, and homework assignments, students will gain expertise in applying various discourse analytic approaches (e.g., conversation analysis, speech event theory, cohesion analysis) to a variety of discourse data. Students will then select and utilize one of these methodologies to analyze some authentic discourse data (which they have collected for this course or for another purpose) to prepare an end-of-semester course project. Although the course focuses on English discourse, students may pursue projects using authentic data from other languages.
Required text
Hatch, E. (1992). Discourse and language education. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Course requirements
General requirements, reading assignments, and class participation (10%)
Reading presentation (10%)
Homework assignments (30%)
Course project (50%)
Course topics
- Preliminary Matters: Doing Discourse Analysis
- Transcription Issues
- Communication Theory: System Constraints and Conversation Analysis
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Communication Theory: Ritual Constraints
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Speech Acts and Speech Events
Rhetorical Genres
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Coherence, Cohesion, Deixis, and Discourse
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Discourse Mode and Syntax
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Pragmatics, Prosody, and Contextual Analysis
