- Department: Language and Linguistic Science
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: M
- Academic year of delivery: 2024-25
The module focuses on developing core academic skills while conducting and engaging with primary research: literature reviews, synthesising, critical reviews, and applied analyses presented in ways consistent with conventions for published work on multimodal conversation analysis. From a pool of readings, you will write summaries and critical comparisons, design a research poster with a sample of an analysis, culminating in an original research essay.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
---|---|
A | Semester 2 2024-25 |
Engage with primary research and conduct independent research
Understanding the main theoretical and empirical issues and the competing analyses of specific phenomena within particular topics of multimodal conversation analysis.
Communicate research effectively via a range of modalities and conventions used in multimodal conversation analysis.
Develop core academic skills in communicating research in different academic formats.
Develop compelling and concise short-form writing through writing summaries of research papers
Conduct and communicate independent research by writing a long essay.
By the end of the module, you will be able to:
Read and engage with research articles in multimodal conversation analysis, broadly understand them and be able to articulate the issues that are addressed and the analysis proposed
Communicate research effectively through poster design using conventions used for published multimodal CA research.
Develop clear written and visual presentation of multimodal CA analyses.
Identity a topic of research through the synthesis of key issues in the literature.
This module will have a mixture of input sessions, presentation sessions, and independent study time. Input sessions will introduce you to the relevant issues in multimodal conversation analysis as well as to relevant academic skills. Presentation sessions will consist of sharing formative work and receiving feedback. Independent study and preparation time will be scheduled in between input and preparation sessions.
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 80 |
Essay/coursework | 20 |
None
This module is reassessed at component level. This means that if you are required to re-sit this module, you will have to re-take only the components you have failed (Summative 1: Poster and/or Summative 2: Essay).
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 80 |
Essay/coursework | 20 |
Individual written feedback will be provided for all written pieces of work. Weeks 4 and 9 are specifically designated as consolidation and feedback weeks, where you will meet with a member of staff to discuss your formative work and to introduce your upcoming summative work and in week 11, you will meet to discuss your essay proposal.
You will read a selection of journal and edited volume articles on different perspectives on topics in multimodal CA based on the theme selected for each academic year. For example, for turn-taking, turn-constructional units, and multimodality in interaction, you could be asked to read some of the following:
Auer, P. (2021). Turn-allocation and gaze: A multimodal revision of the “current-speaker-selects-next” rule of the turn-taking system of conversation analysis. Discourse Studies, 23(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445620966922
Bögels, S., & Torreira, F. (2021). Turn-end Estimation in Conversational Turn-taking: The Roles of Context and Prosody. Discourse Processes, 58(10), 903–924. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2021.1986664
Fox, B., & Heinemann, T. (2021). Grammar and Hands: Manual Turn-Taking and Its Relationships to Verbal Turn-Taking in the Transfer of Objects. Frontiers in Communication, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.661721
Ford, C., & Thompson, S. (1996). Interactional Units in Conversation: Syntactic, Intonational and Pragmatic Resources. In E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Interaction and Grammar (pp. 134–184).
Kendrick, K. H., Holler, J., & Levinson, S. C. (2023). Turn-taking in human face-to-face interaction is multimodal: gaze direction and manual gestures aid the coordination of turn transitions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 378(1875), 20210473. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0473
Selting, M. (2005) Syntax and prosody as methods for the construction and identification of turn-constructional units in conversation. In Hakulinen, A. and Selting, M. (Eds) Syntax and Lexis in Conversation: Studies on the Use of Linguistic Resources in Talk-in-Interaction. John Benjamins, pp. 17–44