English 416 : English in Society

Syllabus for Fall 2017

Tuesday & Thursday, 9:30 - 10:45 p.m., 2637 Humanities

Instructor	Assignments
Materials	Assessment and Grading
Aims of the Course	Course Outline

Professor Richard F Young 7163 Helen C White Hall Office hours: Wednesdays, 9:00 - 11:00 a.m., or by appointment E-mail: rfyoung at wisc dot edu Home Page: www.wisc.edu/english/rfyoung

Class E-mail List. Use the class e-mail list as a public bulletin board for discussions about the class.  Send your messages to engl416-1-f17 at lists dot wisc dot edu. In order for you to receive messages from the e-mail list, your e-mail address must be in the Registrar's database.  You can update your preferred email address by accessing My UW-Madison, "Student Records" tab, "Preferred Address" module.

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Required Materials

Young, R. F. (2008). Language and interaction: An advanced resource book. London & New York: Routledge. ISBN: 978-0-415-38553-4 (paperback). A copy of the textbook is on reserve at College Library, Call No. P40.Y68.

These 11 focal studies are available for download from Box: Cicourel, A. V. (1995). Medical speech events as resources for inferring differences in expert-novice diagnostic reasoning. In U. M. Quasthoff (Ed.), Aspects of oral communication (pp. 364-387). Berlin & New York: W. de Gruyter. Day, D. (1998). Being ascribed, and resisting, membership in an ethnic group. In C. Antaki & S. Widdicombe (Eds.), Identities in talk (pp. 151-170). London: SAGE Publications. Goodwin, C., & Duranti, A. (1992). Rethinking context: An introduction. In A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (Eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon (pp. 1-42). New York: Cambridge University Press. Hall, J. K. (1995). (Re)creating our worlds with words: A sociohistorical perspective of face-to-face interaction. Applied Linguistics, 16(2), 206-232. Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar (3rd ed.). London: Arnold. (Chapter 1) Hanks, W. F. (1996). Language and communicative practices. Boulder, CO: Westview. (Chapter 1) Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press. (Chapter 6) Hymes, D. (1962). The ethnography of speaking. In T. Gladwin & W. Sturtevant (Eds.), Anthropology and human behavior (pp. 15-53). Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington. Hymes, D. (1972). Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J. J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication (pp. 35-71). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Ochs, E. (1996). Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In J. J. Gumperz & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity (pp. 407-437). Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, E. (2002). Becoming a speaker of culture. In C. J. Kramsch (Ed.), Language acquisition and language socialization: Ecological perspectives (pp. 99-120). London: Continuum.

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Aims of the Course

The English language is both an object of study in its own right and also a tool that people use to communicate information and to influence the behavior and opinions of others. The English language has been studied for centuries, but what we know about English is strongly influenced by writing and written language and, because writing and reading are most often done in isolation, many linguistic theories have ignored the social life of language. Yes, language has a social life and, obviously, social interaction does not happen in isolation; it involves people doing things and influencing each other by what they do. To combine the English language and social interaction in a single thought means asking: How does social interaction happen through English? And how does our knowledge of the English language change when we consider it to be primarily a means of social interaction? These are the two questions that we will wrestle with over and over again in this course. If you are interested in language and if you are interested in social relationships, this course will help you develop those interests.

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Assignments

Attendance and Readings. You are expected to attend class regularly and to complete weekly readings from section A of the textbook and from the course packet.  Attendance will be taken at each class meeting.

Extension Tasks. You are expected to carry out extensions tasks from Section B of the textbook based on each reading. The readings extracted in Section B of the textbook are short extracts from the articles and chapters in the course packet. Your responses to a given reading are due on the last day scheduled for discussion of that topic. Assignments handed in late will receive a failing grade. These activities must be done in teams of between three and five students. Each member of the team will receive the same grade.

Explorations. On seven occasions throughout the course, a team of students will present one complete lesson based on Section C (Explorations) in the textbook. The team grade will be determined by the votes of the students in your audience on the Presentation Evaluation Form.

Final Exam. Your knowledge and interpretation of the readings and lectures will be assessed by one final take-home exam.

• The exam is in take-home format and each student should write his or her own exam.
• There will be nine essays questions on the exam, of which you may choose to answer four.
• Each question will be taken from one of the nine Explorations sections in the textbook. (Question 1 will be taken from Unit C1; Question 2 be taken from Unit C2; and so on.)
• Each of the four questions that you answer will be scored out of a maximum of 25 points, for a total maximum points of 100 for the exam.
• Exam questions will be handed out on in class Tuesday, December 12. I will also send the questions to the class email list. Hard copies of your answers are due by 2:25 p.m. on Thursday, December 21. Answers handed in late will receive a failing grade.

Authorship. Some of your assignments for this course involve integrating information from published sources into your own writing. This means that you need to be careful not to plagiarize: "to steal or pass off (the ideas and words of another) as one's own" or to "present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source" (Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition, p. 888). For advice on what sources you should document and how to document them, consult Quoting and Paraphrasing Sources on the Writing Center's web site, from which the preceding statement is taken.

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Assessment and Grading

I will award letter grades for the Extension Tasks and Explorations and percent scores for the final exam. The meanings and equivalencies of the grades follow.

The final grade for the course will take into account grades awarded on all assignments in the following proportions.

Incompletes. The grade of "Incomplete" will only be used for a student who has carried the course with a passing grade until near the end of the semester and then, because of illness or other unusual and substantial cause beyond his/her control, is unable to complete the remaining assignments.

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Course Outline

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This page was last revised on September 14, 2017 .