BLS2202 Discourse Analyses

The course aims at introducing students to the study of spoken and written texts. It looks at a text as a unit of language analysis. It is based on the view that texts are not juxtaposition of sentences but have internal grammars that bind them and make then unified linguistic units. The course analyses the nature of a text

Course objectives 

• To introduce the student to the study of discourse
• To familiarize the students with the major concepts in Discourse Analysis 
• To help the student understand the relationship between discourse and the social world 
• To show the student the basic principles that guide human conversation
• To show how cultural and general norms for human behaviour help to shape discourse

Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course the student will be able to:

• Describe how the spoken discourse is structured
• Identify how written text is structured in terms of the information units and thematic units; 
• State the resources that language users use to signify connectedness in texts 
• Demonstrate the relationship between language and ideology
• Describe how humans use spoken and written discourse enact power
• Discuss how language specifically relates to culture, gender, and conflict