Course syllabus

Langtchg 763 Discourse Analysis and Language Teaching

15 points

Semester 1, 2018

Course dates  Monday February 26 to Friday June 1

 Class:                        Online 

 Course lecturer         Associate Professor Helen Basturkmen

                                    Phone: 84965 Email: h.basturkmen@auckland.ac.nz

                                    Office: Arts 2, Room 435

Course aim and outcomes

The course aims to help participants develop an understanding of approaches to discourse analysis and apply this understanding in the analysis of texts, and to examine ways to focus on discourse in language teaching. A number of approaches to analysis are introduced and opportunities are provided for participants to analyse spoken and written texts and discuss applications for language teaching. The course focuses in particular on four areas/approaches: pragmatics, cohesion and coherence, genre analysis and critical discourse analysis.

 By the end of this course, you should be:

 1. aware of ways in which texts are organised

 2. aware of major approaches to the analysis of discourse

 3. able to analyse texts using a range of approaches

 4. able to use approaches and findings from discourse analysis in teaching language

 SET TEXT  

 The set textbook for this course is:

 Paltridge, B. (2012). Discourse Analysis, 2^nd edition.  London: Bloomsbury              

 There is also a list of set chapters and articles (see Reading List). 

Dear course participants

I would like to welcome you to the module on discourse analysis for language teachers. My name is Helen Basturkmen and I am the convenor of this course. I hope you will find the course interesting and that you will be able to use ideas from it in your thinking about language teaching and learning. Discourse analysis is fast becoming as relevant to language teaching today as grammatical analysis has been. This is because discourse analysis is about texts (written and spoken). It is now well recognised that texts are the units of language we use in real life. Everyday we write and read texts and everyday we participate in them in speaking and listening. People are interested in knowing how these units are constructed, what features they have and how best they can be described for pedagogical purposes. Take a few moments to think and note down the texts that you have encountered or produced today. It is hard to conceive of communication without the concept of texts and in teaching language how can we not offer some description to our learners of the nature of text?

The course is organised into four sections.

Part I: General Concepts

We consider some common features of discourse analysis and texts. Session 1 examines the question 'What is discourse analysis' and the notions of text, discourse and context. Session 2 examines the goals of discourse analysis. These will be recurrent themes of the course and it is important to establish working definitions and understandings of them of them to refer to at later points. In session 3 we consider the ideas of cohesion and coherence, facets that provide unity to a text and allow one part to be interpreted in relation to another. Session 4 is concerned with the notion of planning in text production. In some circumstances we produce spoken and written texts that we have time to plan, craft and revise. This leads to specific textual features. In other circumstances we do not have planning time and we produce texts spontaneously or with very little planning. Again this circumstance is reflected in particular textual features.

Session 1: What is discourse analysis.

Session 2: goals of discourse analysis   

Session 3: cohesion and coherence 

Session 4: corpus analytical techniques and the features of planned/unplanned discourse 

Part II: genre

We examine the notion of genre (specific types of texts that are produced and reproduced in particular discourse communities). Approaches to the description of genres and applications of genre-based descriptions in language teaching are discussed.

Session 5: service encounters and editorial letters 
Session 6: teaching genres 
Session 7: help with assignment one/revising (genres)

Part III Pragmatics

Session 8: speech acts 
Session 9: politeness 
Session 10: teaching pragmatics 
Session 11: assignment 2  

Part IV Critical Discourse Analysis

Session 12 : CDA 

 Read the course schedule here