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Instructors: PD Dr. habil. Martina Lampert
Event type:
online: Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.008.200
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: Engl. Ling. 200
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
This course will familiarize students with basic tools and essential skills to promote their self-determined empirical studies of data from authentic English exchanges, with maximum opportunity for individual support and topics tailored to each course member.
As the understanding of such integrative approach to communicative interaction in face-to-face settings is still in its beginning in linguistics, we will, after an introduction to this research paradigm, adopt a decisively empirical ‘learning by doing’ method, and students will engage in their own small-scale multimodal interaction case studies.
A note on the course’s general orientation and procedure: 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 few decades when oral skills have been in the center of attention, not only in university classes. And for seminar students, this emphasis on academic writing may well have an advantageous ‘side effect’ in view of their upcoming bachelor thesis.
Hence the requirements for Active Participation will place a focus on academic writing and promote participants’ skills in different research presentation formats, such as a critical reading report on a research article of free choice from a large selection of current multimodality research. Or students will compile a scientific poster on their own project, using authentic data (from ready at hand internet sources). This exploratory work, which will occupy them over the second half of the term, is supposed to present participants’ initial findings and insights into the interaction of verbal, vocal, and gestural modes of expression, and it will then serve as the sound basis for their empirical term paper.
Contents:
In this seminar, we will take a closer look at authentic communication in face-to-face settings. Such interaction among participants not only involves spoken language, in our case English, but also—and critically so—other modes of conveying meaning, which ultimately include the entire body as well as objects in the physical environment. That is, we will engage in a fairly recent empirical and comprehensive approach in linguistics: Multimodal Interaction Analysis, the academic study of meaningful behavior of co-present interlocutors in natural context—at family dinner tables, in all kinds of workplace, in cars and shops, walking and talking in guided visits and so on.
This approach acknowledges the obvious fact that an(y) act of speaking necessarily features and, in fact, incorporates all the dimensions of communication available to speech. Typically, co-present interlocutors will functionalize all the resources the acoustic and visual channels provide for, smoothly and routinely integrating verbal, vocal, and gestural modes of expression.
In interactive exchanges, speakers will, for instance, systematically draw on non-verbal cues to convey affective messages such as surprise or doubt, and a full-fledged analysis will accordingly have to pay respect to all dimensions of communicative behavior: verbal expressions; prosodic cues like pitch movements and variation in intensity along with the more specific functions of intonation (e.g., high rise to convey politeness); co-ordinated embodied actions such as gaze shifts, manual gestures, and body posture; objects in the immediate surrounding that are typically manipulated during exchanges, for instance, mugs in a coffee break encounter or maps and pointers during an architects’ meeting.
And here is a brief excerpt— just to exemplify the spoken dimension that you all are familiar with, but might not have become aware of from a meta perspective:
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 this transcript from an authentic exchange, will make us stumble over—or wonder at—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 a ‘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, then—minimally—include regular responses from the conversation partner(s), such as back-channeling (mm) or abandoned utterances (because I remember), among many others. And apart from that, speakers regularly engage in diverse activities beyond the verbal that are recorded in this simple orthographic transcript, 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.
That is, as Jewett (2016:70) aptly notes, interlocutors “orchestrate meaning through their selection and configuration of modes. Thus the interaction of modes is significant for meaning making.”
Recommended reading list:
All essential course materials will be made accessible for participants’ convenience in PDF form. Among others, they will include PowerPoint Presentations to introduce and survey the course topics, various how-to’s for the written tasks as well as a pool of texts for participants’ initial reading task.
Additional information:
The class will be entirely digital, and we will be using the LMS-software of JGU (https://lms.uni-mainz.de).
Digital teaching:
The platform used in this class will be the LMS-software of JGU (https://lms.uni-mainz.de).
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