Course Description: Studying discourse means more than examining language use; it entails studying the use of language as a form of social practice, and a way of reflecting and shaping society. This course explores socially informed and critical approaches to analyzing language at the level of discourse (beyond the level of the sentence), including an overview of current theories and methods with an emphasis written data. With this set of tools, students will gain experience analyzing different forms of spoken and written texts such as computer-mediated interaction, print/online news and other forms of public discourse such as political speeches, graffiti, and online media. Students will develop their own projects and present their research at the end of the semester focusing on (but not limited to) examinations of micro structural patterns across texts, word-formation processes, lexical choice, and translanguaging, or macro level phenomena such as speaker intentions, and socio-cultural meanings in relation to ideology, identity, power, and gender.

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