I've been thinking of putting together a class for the Cambridge Center for Adult Education tentatively called Language In Use, which would use discourse analysis to look at pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, a little philosophy of language, possibly CDA, and, if I don't like them, relevance/conversational coherence. Maybe something like this:
Week 1: intro. discussion of transcription techniques/theory. examples. (then they go home, record a conversation, transcribe & photocopy for all)
Then for the following weeks, we use the transcripts to talk about, maybe,
Week 2: Brown & Levinson (face)
Week 3: Grice (conversational maxims)
Week 4: Austin (performatives etc., conditions of felicity)
I also want to throw in the use of dissociation in the media, but maybe that'd be better in a class on rhetoric (the problem being the compartmentalization of "a class on rhetoric," although it could just be a broad "Intro to" with segments on history (if need be), argument, rudimentary analysis, devices. Although Argument would be a good class in and of itself.
Just thinking out loud. Comments welcomed!
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2 comments:
You are such the born linguist. My fantasy class planning, on the other hand, seems to involve liberation theology and movies about revolution :-).
The question that immediately comes to mind for me: what do you mean by using discourse analysis to look at pragmatics etc? Because to me that would suggest applying the method to their texts (Grice, Austin etc), which I don't think you're actually meaning to do. Or is it because you want them to look at their transcript and look at the theories with the transcript in mind? I wonder how that would work - I can imagine frustrating ensuing because theories are not always easily converted into methods.
That may or may not have made sense. It is my thinking aloud in response to your thinking aloud. As if we were wandering the streets of Boston, gesticulating, drinking coffee and/or beer, and skipping every so often.
Yeah, I'm thinking of having them look at their transcripts (maybe specifically suggested by me) with certain theories in mind. I think that my fervor for this came from a DA course I took at Pitt (because Barbara wasn't teaching that term) where my transcript yielded seemingly zillions of things, but that could be because I'm a kowtowing Polish peasant at heart and conduct myself thusly around authority. But, you know, nonetheless.
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