Mastering English Language Use and Usage
Courses
The seminar provides contexts for developing linguistic awareness. These include activities that promote the application of critical reading and thinking skills and analysis of differing perspectives on form-meaning relationships, particularly as these are illuminated by recent developments in the field of reading, rhetoric, and critical approaches to language study. The seminar will thus offer both a theoretical framework for the act of reading and an exploration of different strategies for approaching reading (both of traditional texts and multimodal objects) in the ELT classroom. The seminar will conclude with a discussion of critical approaches to language study and of how such approaches, through the analysis of real-world examples, might be incorporated within the language classroom.
By the end of the seminar, students are expected to be able to do the following:
1. Participate in advanced discussions on the nature and value of reading and rhetoric in language learning;
2. Identify different approaches to textual-based learning in the language classroom;
3. Apply different reading strategies to classroom contexts;
4. Identify rhetoric as a domain of human interaction, both in terms of its general contours and its specific elements;
5. Identify and analyze the rhetorical components of texts drawn from a range of different mediums and contexts;
6. Apply the tools of rhetoric to language learning contexts.
7. Grasp the basic theoretical underpinnings to critical approaches to language study;
7. Develop and write a research paper on reading, rhetoric and/or critical language practice as applied to the field of ELT.
The contents of the seminar are structured according to five topics:
Topic 1 - Reading in the ELT classroom
Topic 2 - Reading, multimodality and participatory culture
Topic 3 - When is rhetoric?
Topic 4 - Rhetoric in practice
Topic 5 - Language and criticality: theory and practice
Dancygier, B. & Sweetser, E. (2014). Figurative Language. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Evans, Vyvyan, et. al. (2007). The Cognitive Linguistics Reader. London: Equinox.
Fairclough, N. (Ed.). (2013). Critical Language Awareness. New York: Routledge.
Foss, Karen A. et. al. (2002). Readings in Contemporary Rhetoric. Prospect Heights, Ill: Waveland Press, Inc.
Geeraerts, Dirk, et. al. (2006) Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Note: Other required readings will be provided during the course of the semester.
This seminar is taught in the regime of e-learning, combining periods of individual work with collaborative learning in an online environment.
During the course of the semester, students will have access to a general forum, where they can pose questions are make comments on the learning process itself, a social forum and a specific forum for each of the topics to be studied in the seminar.
Online collaborative activities focus on consolidating individual persectives on the resources studied and developing the skills of academic debate and discussion that drive the advancement of all fields of knowledge. Such activities may assume a variety of forms including the following:
1) clarifying or commenting on specific passages or aspects of individual texts, including the summarizing of key ideas or arguments presented;
2) developing comparative analyses of the various resources studied in this seminar (works, topics, and/or general cultural problems or tendencies).
The work developed in individual discussion forums will seek to establish connections between these activities and specific resource materials.
Final assessment for the course unit will be expressed on a scale of 0 to 20, broken down into the following elements:
Two paper reviews (8 marks: 4 marks each);
Continuous assessment report (4 marks);
Final research paper (8 marks).
Língua de ensino: Inglês