Postgraduate - UnitAPG5704 - Discourse analysis

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2015 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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12 points, SCA Band 1, 0.250 EFTSL

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Level	Postgraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Arts
Organisational Unit	Linguistics
Offered	Not offered in 2015
Coordinator(s)	Dr Louisa Willoughby

Synopsis

Every day, we engage with a wide range of different text types and speaking situations, from casual conversations with friends to news reports, medical appointments to advertising. In this unit, we explore the typical features of these and other genres and the ways in which language can be used to manipulate, persuade or empower the hearer/ reader. The unit introduces students to a variety of approaches to doing discourse analysis, including Conversation Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics. Students apply these methods to a range of texts and reflect on the appropriateness of each for answering different types of research questions.

Outcomes

On successful completion of this unit, a student will be able to:

Understand and be able to apply key terms and concepts used in discourse analysis
Analyse texts for coherence and cohesion and comment on their genre-specific features
Describe in detail the ways in which English speakers use paralanguage cues (such as pitch, stress, pauses, laughter) to convey meaning in conversation
Comment on the appropriacy of different approaches to discourse analysis for answering specific research questions
analyse how the language used in a text serves to persuade the reader and reflects a particular ideology
apply insights from this unit to their own professional context

Assessment

Within semester assessment: 100%

Workload requirements

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 288 hours per semester typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. A unit requires on average three/four hours of scheduled activities per week. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement.

Chief examiner(s)

Dr Louisa Willoughby

This unit applies to the following area(s) of study

Applied linguistics