course-schedule

Contrastive Phonology (Seminar)

Termin:
wöchentlich | Dienstag | 14:15 - 15:45 | 07.04.2025 - 11.07.2025 | C 12.102 Seminarraum

Inhalt: This course deals with the phonetic and phonological differences between English and German and where difficulties will most likely arise for German native speakers when producing English sounds. You will be expected to work in pairs, analysing each others' speech using PRAAT. You will point out errors and give suggestions to your partner as to how to improve pronunciation.

Interlanguage Pragmatics (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Ilka Flöck

Inhalt: The utterances "Clean up the kitchen, will you?", "Would you be so kind as to clean the kitchen?", "Bit dirty in here, don't you think?" can all be understood as attempts by a speaker to get a potential hearer to clean the kitchen. Apart from this similarity are there any differences between these utterances? Would you utter each in all contexts? Or would you prefer specific strategies in different situations? Why do we prefer to be indirect in some situations and direct in others? Native speakers are able to make split second decisions about which linguistic strategy to use in a specific context. However, the development of such sociolinguistic and pragmatic competences cannot be taken for granted in foreign language learners. In fact, it is usually a lengthy process that requires increased attention of learners and their teachers. In this seminar, we will explore how pragmatic competence can be defined and measured in language learners and how language learners have been found to differ pragmatically from native speakers. Since pragmatic errors have the potential of causing severe irritation between interlocutors, it is vital that language learners not only learn to produce grammatically well-formed sentences and have a good pronunciation but also are aware of different pragmatic norms in different languages and become pragmatically competent speakers of English. Students will be expected to engage in empirical research, i.e. to collect and analyse data in groups. This empirical work will form the basis of the module assessment (cf. below)

Syntax (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Onwu Inya

Termin:
wöchentlich | Montag | 08:15 - 09:45 | 07.04.2025 - 11.07.2025 | C 5.019 Seminarraum

Inhalt: This course introduces students to fundamental principles of syntax, focusing on English phrase and sentence structures. It explores how words combine to form phrases and sentences, examining key syntactic concepts such as phrase structure, grammatical relations, sentence types, and syntactic variations across regional and national varieties of English. Special emphasis is placed on the role of syntax in language teaching, highlighting its significance in grammar instruction and effective communication. The empirical aspect of the seminar will focus on syntactic variations across different varieties such as Nigerian English, British English, Irish English and so on. The goal of the empirical work is to demonstrate how different speakers form grammatical constituents. Relevant linguistics : an introduction to the structure and use of English for teachers by Paul W. Justice will be the main material for the seminar. This will be supplemented by other texts on syntax. Students will be expected to engage in empirical research, i.e. to collect and analyse data in groups. Specifically, students will be required to work with the spoken sub-corpus of the International Corpus of English (ICE) to account for syntactic variation. This empirical work will form the basis of the module assessment.

Course Schedule

Lehrveranstaltungen

Contrastive Phonology (Seminar)

Interlanguage Pragmatics (Seminar)

Syntax (Seminar)