In this module you will engage with socio-political and socio-educational issues around language use in society, including language activism, gender linguistics, online interaction, and education policy. You will focus on sociolinguistics, language and power in society and in educational discourses, and fairness in language use. All weeks will include some discussion of methods for analysing language use in relation to power in society.
A the end of this module, you should be able to critically analyse texts from the point of view of power negotiation, and have an awareness of different theoretical stances to, and different methods of researching, power in language.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
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A | Spring Term 2022-23 |
The Module aims are:
By the end of this module, students should have a clear understanding of the compelling, ubiquitious and pervasive interrelation between of language and power.
By the end of this module, students will be able to:
Academic skills
Graduate skills:
In detail, sessions will cover:
Week 2 will offer a module overview and assignment requirements. You will then discuss methodologies used in usage-based language analysis, both of written and spoken discourse, and focus on a couple of examples of this, including Corpus based analysis.
Week 3 will offer a discussion of how plurilingualism is systematically erased in educational contexts, including examples of educational language rights, the provision for EAL (English as additional language) students, and code mixing and translanguaging.
Week 4 will focus on language use and class division, offering both a historic perspective and current overview of the research area, including intersectionality.
Week 5 will include a discussion of gender linguistics, including historic perspectives, current theories and linguistic activism on the topic. You will critically discuss key authors on this issue, and discuss implications for educational contexts.
Week 6 will discuss global language changes, global language policies and current language shifts. Here, our central discussion will be: can language policy halt the increasing dominance of English?
Week 7 will discuss how and if we can decolonise foreign language learning. In this week, we will examine conceptualisations of foreign language teaching that aim to decolonise the foreign language curricula.
Week 8 will include a discussion of Critical Discourse Analysis: what this is, and example of applying Critical Discourse Analysis to educational discourses, both classroom data, and educational policy documents.
Week 9 will include a discussion of linguistic activism, and the premises under which campaigners fight for language change, using examples of e.g. LGBTQ activists and anti-English movements.
The final week will be an assignment workshop, where you will have a chance to discuss an assignment outline, and assignment options in small groups.
Task | % of module mark |
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Essay/coursework | 100 |
None
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 100 |
Via marker feedback on assignment and feedback sheet as well as face to face feedback.
Holmes J. & Wilson, N. (20117). Introducing sociolinguistics. London: Routledge.
Mooney, A. & Evans, B. (2019). Language, society and power. London: Routledge.
Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and power. London: Longman.
Simpson, P., Mayr, A. & Strathman, S. (2019). Language and power. London: Routledge.
Macedo, D. & DrGraff, M. (eds) 2019. Decolonizing World Language Education. Routledge.