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Instructors: PD Dr. habil. Martina Lampert
Event type:
online: Proseminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.866.312
Credits:
6,0
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 45
Registration group: ELing 312
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
The course will familiarize students with elementary tools and essential skills to promote their self-determined studies in upcoming linguistics courses, with maximum opportunity for individual support and topics tailored to each course member.
In these days (of Covid-19) with its severe limits on personal interaction in class, we will instead take the chance to work on students’ writing skills. Indeed, we should understand this situation as a welcome opportunity since, according to L2 teaching and applied linguistics’ experts, written competences have dramatically decreased over the last decades when oral skills have been in the center of attention, not only in university classes.
Hence the requirements for Active Participation in this course will place a focus on some important variants of academic writing and promote participants’ skills in three different research presentation formats, such as a reading report (or summary) of a textbook chapter, an abstract of a research article, and a scientific poster (further details will follow in due time). A term paper based on the three texts that students have been working on intensively during the winter will complete the course requirements.
Contents:
This proseminar will offer a guided step-by-step introduction into the linguistic analysis of discourse. In its most general terms, we will be engaged with the academic study of any meaningful unit of connected, natural language in context, in our case English, be it spoken or written.
To exemplify the spoken specimen first:
Well, we went to, we went to San Francisco because I remember, uh, uh, oh, what the heck’s the name of that hotel we stayed? Big hotel. Mm. Oh, anyway, uh, but we just stayed there a couple of nights and that’s all, and then we took the bus back, of course.
Even a cursory and brief glance at an arbitrary fragment, such as the above transcript from an authentic exchange, will include diverse phenomena that ‘flood’ any normal conversation – prominently among them so-called discourse markers (well), hesitations and pauses (uh, uh, oh), restarts (oh, anyway), repeats (we went to, we went to). In addition, we encounter ‘stand alone’ verbal sequences (e.g., Big hotel.) that do not at all conform to what we would consider as ‘regular’ (or well-formed grammatical) clause or sentence format; that is we find non-clausal units, phrases, or even single words.
Direct face-to-face interactions of this kind also include regular responses from the conversation partner(s), such as back-channeling (mm), abandoned utterances (because I remember), among many others. And apart from that, speakers regularly engage in diverse non-verbal activities, e.g., eye-contact and gaze shifts, manual gestures, facial expressions, or changes in body posture, as vital component sources of information in spoken discourse.
Second, this proseminar will introduce and explore the diverse phenomena that ‘build up’ written texts:
Apart from its typical verbal design, now we find complete and complex syntactic structures that are visually represented as alphabetical and non-alphabetical symbols: The former include the letterforms that make up words, which involve meaningful typographical variants like bold face or italics, while the latter feature the various punctuation marks and different symbols (e.g., &, §, %). Writing also calls on a variety of vision-based formats to organize a text on the familiar two-dimensional display: We find layout features such as paragraphs, along with tables, figures etc.; we come across colored boxes or illustrations and photos.
And addressing the new technologies, ‘writing’ also goes beyond such static spatial arrangements: In the course of the digital literacy (r)evolution, numerous dynamic options have developed that functionalize time-/motion-based devices (among them animated emoticons); and users are confronted with sophisticated non-linear techniques to engage with a text that allow the reader to fundamentally restructure and amplify the original written format according to their individual needs and interests as, e.g., in hypertext.
Additional information:
To add some general information on the course itself:
As the proseminar is a Modulprüfung in Module 4 of the B.Ed. program, to obtain credit, you will have to actively participate in the course and write a term paper (as mentioned). The entire course is credited 4 CPs, which in fact corresponds to a student’s workload of about 120 hours in total and divides into 90 hours for Active Participation (making up to almost 7 hours per week!) plus 30 hours for writing the term paper.
To be granted Active Participation you will be expected to hand in some written tasks during the semester, such as those briefly introduced above. As Modulprüfung, a term paper of about 2,500 words will have to be handed in after the end of the term in pdf form, its date of submission will be announced on time.
Here is some preliminary information on the course’s organization:
The class will be entirely digital, and, in general, I will be available for e-mail office hours via mlampert@uni-mainz.de each Monday during course time (8:00 to 10:00 AM), starting on November 2, 2020. (In case this time slot, which was fixed in Jogustine in advance, would not suit you, another contact time may of course also be negotiated.)
All the course material will be made accessible for participants in pdf form. Among others, it will include PowerPoint Presentations to introduce and survey the course topic(s), various how-to’s for the written tasks you are expected to carefully carry out as well as a pool of texts for participants’ initial reading task.
Further detailed updates on the course and its organization will be available shortly before the start of the term.
Now I am looking forward to connect with you from November 2 onwards. However, in case you should have any questions in advance on whatever issue, please do feel free to contact me any time via e-mail to mlampert@uni-mainz.de
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