Dr Alison Standring PEL6.01E

This course will only be open to General Course students hosted by the Language Centre. 

The course will cover key theories and concepts involved in communication with a contrast between written and spoken discourse, and a focus on genre and identity. Students will be English majors and so will apply the theories and concepts to the appropriate and effective usage of English in real-life cases and will analyse how linguistic and communication strategies can be used effectively in English-medium social, professional and academic contexts.

Some important themes and areas include:

• The features of written and spoken discourse

• Methods of analysing discourse

• Genre

• Identity

20 hours of seminars in the MT. 20 hours of seminars in the LT.

Two hours per week integrating: (a) lecture input on a range of concepts and themes; (b) class discussion building on pre-set reading; (c) student presentations and tasks; (d) tutorials.

Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6, in line with departmental policy.

The 2-hour weekly sessions will be task-based and these tasks will help prepare students for their summative assessment. Students will also have 1-2-1 sessions in office hours in order to discuss progress on summatively assessed coursework tasks. This is normal LSE practice for courses using continuous assessment. 

• Fiske, J. (2010). Introduction to Communication Studies (3rd ed.). Routledge.
• Flowerdew, J., & Wang, S. H. (2015). Identity in academic discourse. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 81-99.
• Gee, J. (2014). What is Discourse Analysis. In An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (pp. 22-35). Routledge.
• Have, P.T. (2007). Doing Conversation Analysis (2nd ed.). SAGE.
• Hyland, K (2012) Identity: Interaction and community. In Disciplinary Identities: Individuality and community in academic discourse (pp. 1-20). Cambridge
• Nesi, H. (2016). Corpus studies in EAP. In The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes (pp. 230-241). Routledge.
• Shaw, P. (2016). Genre analysis. In The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes ( 267-279). Routledge.

Additional reading list

• Blommaert, J. (2005). Introduction. In Discourse: A Critical Introduction (Key Topics in Sociolinguistics, pp. 1-20). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Devitt, A. J. (2015). Genre performances: John Swales' Genre Analysis and rhetorical-linguistic genre studies. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 19, 44-51.
• Dressen-Hammouda, D. (2008). From novice to disciplinary expert: Disciplinary identity and genre mastery. English for Specific purposes, 27(2), 233-252.
• Fairclough, N. (2001). Critical discourse analysis as a method in social scientific research. In Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 121-138). SAGE Publications, Ltd
• Flowerdew, L. (2005). An integration of corpus-based and genre-based approaches to text analysis in EAP/ESP: Countering criticisms against corpus-based methodologies. English for specific purposes, 24(3), 321-332.
• Gee, J. (2014). Sample of Discourse Analysis 1. In An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (pp. 174-189). Routledge.
• Hyland, K (2012) Investigating Identity. In Disciplinary Identities: Individuality and community in academic discourse (pp. 45-69). Cambridge
• Hyon, S. (1996). Genre in three traditions: Implications for ESL. TESOL quarterly, 30(4), 693-722.
• Le Ha, P. (2009). Strategic, passionate, but academic: Am I allowed in my writing?. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8(2), 134-146.
• Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press.
• Tribble, C. (2014). Corpora and corpus analysis: New windows on academic writing. In Academic discourse (pp. 141-159). Routledge.
• Wodak, R. (2011) Critical Discourse Analysis. In Continuum companion to discourse analysis (pp. 38-53) Continuum International Publishing Group.

Essay (25%, 1500 words) in the MT Week 6.
Coursework (25%, 1500 words) in the MT Week 11.
Project (25%, 2000 words) in the LT Week 6.
Presentation (25%) in the LT Week 11.