CLASP Related Courses - Fall 2010
COMM 6410: Discourse Analysis
Professor: Karen TracyTime: TR 2-3:15
Place: TBA
Course description:
Discourse Analysis is a seminar with two purposes. A first purpose is to enable students to do a discourse analysis: To take instances of talk and text and arrive at interesting, persuasive claims. To accomplish this purpose, students will be practicing the technical and analytic skills that comprise discourse analysis (transcribing and being able to read transcripts; developing a vocabulary that enables you to comment on features of talk, language, and interaction; learning how to select excerpts for analytic focus; developing your ability to explicate inferences and make arguments; and building an insightful paper-length claim that contributes to your academic community's scholarly discussions. A second purpose of the seminar is to provide students a sense of the variety of discourse traditions while developing deeper understanding of three particular ones: (1) conversation analysis, (2) action-implicative discourse analysis, and (3) critical discourse approaches. The first part of the class will involve assignments with common texts. Then, in the second part of the semester, students will work with a set of institutional, interpersonal, or on-line talk/text that is of interest to themselves to develop a discourse research paper that would be suitable for submission to an academic conference.
A detailed syllabus is available at http://comm.colorado.edu/tracy. I will be updating readings but this 2009 syllabus captures the basic shape and assignments of the course. If you have questions feel free to email me directly (Karen.Tracy@colorado.edu).
