School of English - AUTh

Description

Course description and objectives:

The focus of the course is on analysing language in its linguistic and situational context, as used by its speakers, but also on multimodality (incorporation of various forms of discourse, such as icons, pictures, logos, visual symbols, etc.). This is a direct consequence of the view that people do not just mean but act and perform in language. This course is designed to be partly theoretical and partly practical.

In its theoretical part students will be acquainted with various modes of the analysis of discourse and text. In its practical component students are expected to develop an acute awareness of selectional issues as per genre and form their own hypotheses. Amongst other things, this course will aim at making prospective teachers of English acquire a critical stance towards reference grammars and coursebooks intended for the use of EFL and help them to develop an awareness of the need to heed and incorporate the findings of discourse analysis in their teaching strategies and materials designing. It cannot be overemphasized that an appreciation of the issues discussed in this course will greatly depend on a fair grounding in general linguistics, semantics and pragmatics. Therefore it is recommended that this course follows the above. It must also be stressed that the practical component of this course presupposes small classes.

Learning outcomes

• An appreciation of the centrality of discourse in all forms of social life
• Competence in text analysis including multimodal discourse
• To practice knowledge acquired in various courses (mainly pragmatics, semantics) and apply it in the technique of analysis
• To comprehend and put to practice why some forms or constructions are used in specific contexts/genres rather than others, and possibly generate their own hypotheses to be put to test
• Acquisition of a critical stance in language use
• Acquisition of a good background for further studies at postgraduate level
• Possibly, to develop skills at adapting or incorporating the discursive angle into further analyses in other fields (literature, advertising, media, film studies, etc.)
• To develop and adopt as an automatic reflex the discursive outlook in further fields of applied knowledge and practice, most notably in language learning and FLT