Discourse Studies

Recommended Prerequisites

Not applicable.

Teaching Methods

Shared seminar sessions combining lecturing with debate will stimulate collection and preparation of materials beforehand and develop active critical engagement with them. Individual oral presentations will also develop analytical, argumentative, and dialogue skills, as well as public exposition. Final project on a topic agreed with teachers should reveal student's ability to collect data and select relevant bibliography, organize and expose ideas with sophistication and critical positioning.

Learning Outcomes

This seminar provides students with critical skills in discourse analysis. At the end of the semester, they should be able to

(a) collect and analyse texts, communicative events and practices in distinct genres, by articulating textual and interactional strategies and configurations with the correspondent dynamics of historical, social and cultural performativity and representation;

(b) collect and analyse texts in distinct genres - social, communicative, literary, etc. - by relating strategies and configurations to communities of practice, and use them as resources to produce and legitimize their own texts;

(c)apply analytical tools and practices to multiple and complex instances of textual, semiotic and discursive activity;

(d)recognize the critical conditions for those analytical tools and practices by relating them to the corresponding theories of language and discourse;

(e) create critical language awareness.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

We start by discussing the situated nature of human language activity to focus on some of the basic concepts in discourse studies. Drawing on authentic data collected by lecturers and students, we propose a caleidoscopic lens to semiotic activity by looking at

1. 'discourse' as a process of production, negotiation and circulation of 'texts';

2. 'discourse' as performative forms of inference and interaction at play in situated communicative events;

3. 'discourse' as 'practice' that points at representations and forms of knowledge sustaining and being sustained by sociocultural and sociohistorical life. 

We end this course by exploring specific articulations of discourse, culture and society manifested in disciplines such as language and linguistics, literary and cultural, as well as communication studies - among others, the tools offered by literary studies or by studies in academic discourse.

Head Lecturer(s)

Maria Clara Bicudo de Azeredo Keating

Assessment Methods

Assessment
In-classparticipationand oral presentations: 40.0%
Research work: 60.0%

Bibliography

Angermuller, J., et al. (2014). The Discourse Studies Reader: Main currents in theory and analysis. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Bennett, K. (Ed.). (2014). The Semiperiphery of Academic Writing. Discourses, Communities and Practices. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gee, J. P. (2014). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. (4th Edition). London: Routledge.

Jones, R. & Norris, S. (2005). Discourse in action: introducing mediated discourse analysis. London: Routledge.

Jones, R. (2018). Discourse analysis: a resource book for students. (2nd edition). London etc.: Routledge.

Pérez-Llantada, C. (2012). Scientific Discourse and the Rhetoric of Globalization: The Impact of Culture and Language. London: Continuum.

Wodak, R. & Meyer, M., eds. (2015). Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis (Introducing Qualitative Methods series). Second Edition. London: Sage.