Conversational and Discourse Analysis
F05
Peter Jones

What can we learn by looking closely at how talk and texts communicate? Conversation and discourse analyses explore language in relation to our uses of it. Resources for the analyses come from linguistics and the social sciences, including conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis. We analyze various forms of language use, but focus on casual conversation and pedagogical discourse. Students will spend two hours a week working with one or more nonnative speaker(s) of English. They will make recordings of their work and analyze them to help them understand the ways that pedagogical discourse is patterned and may potentially contribute to their tutees’ learning.