Discourse and Social Interaction

Course Objective
After completion of this course:

- you can describe and apply the principles of inductive, data-driven research in the field of interaction analysis and conversation analysis;

- you are familiar with the basic concepts used to analyze language as social interaction;

- you are able to apply these basic concepts to analyze spoken language in face to face and mediated/online settings;

- you are able to use these basic concepts in a range of different conversations.

Course Content
This course starts from the idea that spoken and written discourse can be studied as social action: when interacting with each other via different modes of communication, people manage to accomplish a variety of actions, such as inviting or blaming, accounting or denying matters.

This course aims to develop your analytical skills to understand what it is exactly that people do when they talk in person or over the phone. You will also encounter other examples such as broadcast interviews. The focus across settings and modes of communication will be to examine how speakers accomplish whatever it is they are doing and how this influences the unfolding conversation. The analytical skills are based on the concepts and principles used in conversation analysis and reflect current research.

You will analyze instances of informal talk as well as talk in institutional or organizational settings. Data for analysis might thus be derived from various settings and contain both instances of spoken interaction as well as mediated discourse.

When you pass this course, you are able to break down any conversation in turns, ascribe social actions to these turns by asking and developing claims on what would be an appropriate response to what the conversational partner has done in the previous turn. This procedure helps you to see how turns at talk drive conversations. You will be able to use these analytical skills to evaluate and offer advice on the options speakers have at different moment in the interaction and how this has an influence on the course of the conversation, whatever mode of communication they employ. Based on these observations, you are able to formulate ideas on which turns at talk are more appropriate or desirable in the given context.

Teaching Methods
Lecture, seminars and workshops, 6 hours per week in total.

Method of Assessment
Written exam, graded (group) assignments and ungraded (group) assignments. You have to pass the written exam to pass this course.