122228 SE Linguistics Seminar / MA applied linguistics & TEFL (2016S)

All of us use English online on a daily basis, we read websites, consult - and contribute to - Wikipedia, we watch Youtube, we skype, we text, we tweet, etc. What's the relationship between such online practices to well established offline language use? What's special about them (and what not)? How can they be researched (and why should they be)? It is questions like these that we will deal with in the seminar course, which focuses on English used by native and non-native speakers in (selected) social media from a discourse-pragmatic perspective.

Participants will learn about relevant research areas (e.g. computer-mediated communication, code-switching, pragmatics) and approaches (e.g. conversation analysis, genre analysis, multimodal analysis). By undertaking small-scale empirical studies, they will gain informed insights into specific discourse-pragmatic aspects of English (functioning as a lingua franca) in the digital world.

This seminar course combines mini-lectures, on- & offline assignments, reading-based group work and discussions, and individual research work leading to student presentations and seminar papers.