Undergraduate - UnitATS2676 - Sociolinguistics

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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6 points, SCA Band 1, 0.125 EFTSL

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

Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Arts
Organisational Unit	Linguistics
Offered	Not offered in 2015
Coordinator(s)	Dr Melanie Burns

Synopsis

This unit will explore the relationship between language and society, describing regional and social, and ethnic varieties of a language, and the values, attitudes and ideologies associated with these varieties. Societal and individual bilingualism, multilingualism, genre and code choice will be examined in the context of speech communities and communities of practice. A particular focus will be the ways in which individuals exploit a range of linguistic resources to take stances in interaction.

Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this unit students will be able to:

Identify and assess the significance of key theoretical perspectives in the study of language and society;
Apply sociolinguistic insights to everyday experience;
Describe the main data gathering methods used in sociolinguistics, and select appropriate methods for a range of research questions;
Design and carry out a small sociolinguistic fieldwork project;
Engage in informed debate on matters of theoretical and practical significance in the areas of language and society, language education, language purism and language planning.

Assessment

Within semester assessment: 100%

Workload requirements

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 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 Simon Musgrave

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

Linguistics

Prerequisites

Two gateway units in Linguistics

Prohibitions

ATS3676