Students

APPL911 – Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication

2019 – S1 Evening

General Information

Download as PDF
Unit convenor and teaching staff Unit convenor and teaching staff Lecturer
Jill Murray
Contact via email
C5A 526
email for an appointment
Margaret Wood
Peter Roger
Credit points Credit points
4
Prerequisites Prerequisites
Admission to MAppLing or MAppLingTESOL or MTransInter or MAdvTransInterStud or MTransInterMAppLingTESOL or MIntPubDip or MAccComm
Corequisites Corequisites
Co-badged status Co-badged status
Unit description Unit description
This unit equips participants with the tools for analysis of how meaning is constructed in context through spoken and written language. The content includes speech act theory; politeness and face; the cooperative principle and implicature; relevance theory; cultural scripts; and metaphor. There is an emphasis on analysing how communication operates in different cultural contexts, and on accessing and interpreting current research. Communication in social and institutional contexts, language in the media, and practical implications for language learning and translating/interpreting are explored.

Important Academic Dates

Information about important academic dates including deadlines for withdrawing from units are available at https://www.mq.edu.au/study/calendar-of-dates

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:

  • Understand the relationship between pragmatics and culture
  • Understand the kinds of approaches to analysing language that are commonly used in pragmatics.
  • Make judgements about the types of analysis that are most suitable for researching particular types of discourse
  • Identify examples of unsuccessful cross-cultural communication and use pragmatic theories to explain them.
  • Analyse examples of discourse using speech act theory, politeness theory and theories of implicature
  • Reflect on how intercultural competence operates in your own personal and/or professional contexts
  • Understand the applications of linguistic pragmatics in real life
  • Evaluate current research in pragmatics in an area of personal or professional interest
  • Apply a critical approach to choices in linguistic pragmatics in a range of text types
  • Design and implement a research project which uses appropriate pragmatic theories to explore communication in a cross-cultural context or one related to an area of professional interest.

General Assessment Information

Late assignments The policy regarding late assignments has now been standardised across postgraduate Linguistics units. 

  • Late submissions without an extension will receive a penalty of 5% of the mark achieved for the assignment for each day after the due date. This will be calculated on a pro-rata basis for the first day, which means that if you have issues uploading your work and you submit shortly after the due time you may not be penalised at all.  From the second day onwards the full 5% will apply. 
  • Late submission of an assignment without an extension will not be permitted after marks have been released to the rest of the class.
  • Extensions will only be given in special circumstances, and can be requested by completing the Special Consideration request at ask.mq.edu.au and providing the requisite supporting documentation.
  • For more information on Special Consideration, see the university website https://students.mq.edu.au/study/my-study-program/special-consideration
  • Assignments submitted after the deadline, regardless of the reason, will be marked and returned at a date determined by the unit convenor.

Extensions cannot continue beyond the start of the following semester, and students should be aware that long extensions may impact graduation dates.

Academic Honesty

As a good student, you are responsible for ensuring academic integrity practices are followed at all times. Your first step is to read the University's Academic Honesty Policy, and make sure you know what constitutes good practice. Then make sure you know how to reference and cite correctly. There are other practices we need to consider, and one of these is the potential for collusion.

Informal study groups are encouraged as a good way to assist your learning, but please remember that all your independently assessed assignments must be totally independently completed. Unless you are doing a group project where each member contributes to producing one piece of work, for which you get the one mark, using part or all of someone else's work constitutes collusion and breaches the University's Academic Honesty policy.

Do not collude with any other student by selling, giving, lending, explaining or showing all or parts of your independently assessed work/answers/past or current assignments, and do not ask to buy, borrow, see and use all or parts of the work of another student.

Do not reuse any work you have presented for assessment in this or another unit. This will activate a turnitin alert. 

Assessment Tasks

Name Weighting Hurdle Due
Assignment 1: Text analysis 30% No Monday 1 April 2019
Assignment 2 Research project 60% No Monday 10 June 2019
Participate in web activities 10% No Throughout the unit

Assignment 1: Text analysis

Due: Monday 1 April 2019
Weighting: 30%

Analysis of transcript, plus  commentary.

You will be given a transcribed spoken text to analyse, applying what you have learnt about the elements of context, implicature, speech act theory and politeness theory.

The assignment will be assessed in relation to the following criteria

  • Accuracy of identification of the features of context that must be understood in order to understand the speakers’ meanings in the text.
  • Accuracy of analysis using the tools from each of the three areas of pragmatics covered in the course.
  • Statement and justification of conclusions drawn: clarity of argument and relationship to results of analysis. 

The text will be made available to you two weeks before the due date. 


On successful completion you will be able to:
  • Understand the relationship between pragmatics and culture
  • Understand the kinds of approaches to analysing language that are commonly used in pragmatics.
  • Analyse examples of discourse using speech act theory, politeness theory and theories of implicature

Assignment 2 Research project

Due: Monday 10 June 2019
Weighting: 60%

RESEARCH PROJECT Decide on an area of pragmatics that you would like to focus your research question.

Suggested theoretical areas are:

Im/politeness, implicature and/or relevance theory, discourse pragmatics, metaphor, critical discourse analysis.

This assignment will involve a small research project based on a defined pragmatics topic, involving the analysis of selected linguistic data. Please choose one of the following two options:

1. Perform a pragmatic investigation involving an encounter between two or more interactants which is in some way interesting or problematic. Cross-cultural interactions are a particularly rich source, but you may also like to investigate issues of power, gender or other areas explored in the unit.  If you choose spoken data, it may be from a film; internet, radio, or television broadcast or other suitable public source. You will need to supply an appropriate transcript of relevant passages, showing the features which are relevant to your investigation. If you choose written data, it will usually consist of texts which are available in the public domain. This assignment will allow you to demonstrate your understanding of how pragmatics can be applied to explain the reasons and effects of the language choices made by the speakers or writers.

 The type of pragmatic analysis you undertake will naturally depend on the nature of the discourse itself – not all aspects discussed in the unit may appear in or be relevant to your discourse sample and context. Do not attempt to cover all aspects dealt with in this unit!

OR

2. A pragmatic investigation on a topic of your choice involving the collection of data.  

[a] Choose one speech act (or a set of related  speech acts) which you think may be interesting to examine. Thoroughly review the published literature related to research investigation of the speech act(s). Design a task through which you will be able to gather data on performance of the task by people from different cultural backgrounds. This could be a discourse completion task ( DCT), a set of scenarios designed to elicit participants' reported responses to situations in specific contexts, or a task involving judgements of appropriateness. Your classmates will be invited to participate through the ilearn site. You can also advertise the research on social media. 

[b] Alternatively, you may undertake a research project using a corpus such as the BNC, or COCA . 

ANYONE PLANNING TO CHOOSE THIS OPTION MUST DISCUSS IT WITH THE UNIT CONVENOR AT LEAST 4 WEEKS BEFORE THE DUE DATE. THE ASSIGNMENT INVOLVING HUMAN PARTICIPANTS HAS GENERAL  ETHICS APPROVAL,BUT AN AMENDMENT WILL NEED TO BE LODGED. 

Keep your investigation focused and narrow in scope for this small study.

The general approach, format, style, mode of presentation, type of analysis, discussion and argument should aim to resemble the genre of the scholarly research paper found in professional refereed journals.

If in your exposition you refer to and discuss a piece of textual evidence (e.g., an exchange in an interaction), short excerpts can be shown in the main body of your text as well as being included in the longer transcript in an appendix. If you are quoting longer passages, it is recommended that you number each line in the transcript and refer to the line numbers.

The assignment will be assessed in relation to the following criteria. You should:

  • identify the issue you are dealing with and the system of analysis you will use.
  • undertake a literature review identifying  and evaluating recent relevant work.
  • demonstrate an understanding of relevant pragmatic concepts;
  • apply these concepts appropriately to your chosen issue and context;
  • evaluate your conclusions in the light of the scope of your project:
  • write clearly and concisely in academic style;
  • provide a reference list citing all and only those references cited in the body of your essay;
  • use APA referencing style;
  • provide a suitable transcript of your data (option 1) or summary of responses ( option 2). 
  • observe the word limits.

The word limit for this assignment (4000 words) does not include displayed data, any appendices and references.

Your grade will be mostly determined by:

  • the  relevance and critical nature of your literature review
  • the quality of the analysis and conclusions.
  • how well your discussion of the data is related to the theory. A detailed rubric showing how the marks are allocated will be made available to you on the ilearn site. 

On successful completion you will be able to:
  • Make judgements about the types of analysis that are most suitable for researching particular types of discourse
  • Understand the applications of linguistic pragmatics in real life
  • Evaluate current research in pragmatics in an area of personal or professional interest
  • Apply a critical approach to choices in linguistic pragmatics in a range of text types
  • Design and implement a research project which uses appropriate pragmatic theories to explore communication in a cross-cultural context or one related to an area of professional interest.

Participate in web activities

Due: Throughout the unit
Weighting: 10%

Throughout the unit, there will be a number of web tasks that both internal and external students will be asked to complete. These are an important part of your learning.

Some of these will be optional, but others will be clearly indicated as contributing to your assessment.

Details will be provided on the ilearn site.


On successful completion you will be able to:
  • Understand the relationship between pragmatics and culture
  • Identify examples of unsuccessful cross-cultural communication and use pragmatic theories to explain them.
  • Reflect on how intercultural competence operates in your own personal and/or professional contexts

Delivery and Resources

This unit is delivered in blended mode. This means that both internal and external students are expected to work through the online materials. For the internal students, it will be clearly indicated on the ilearn site which tasks and readings should be completed before the face to face session, which after. Most of the activities are compulsory but a small number are optional.

There is no textbook for this unit  but the following resources texts are useful. 

Archer, D., Aijmer, K., & Wichmann, A. (2012). Pragmatics: An advanced resource book for students. London & New York: Routledge. ISBN:978-0415497879

Archer. D. and Grundy, P. (Eds) (2011). The pragmatics reader. London and NY: Routledge

Bowes, H. & Martin, K. (2007). Communication across cultures: Mutual understanding in a global world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Culpeper, J., and Haugh, M. (2014). Pragmatics and the English language. UK/US: Palgrave McMillan

Hua, Z.,  (Ed) (2011) The language and  intercultural communication reader. London and NY: Routledge

 

Reading material for this course consists of book chapters and some journal articles that can be found on e-reserve, and other journal articles can be accessed directly through the library catalogue. Weekly reading lists will be available on the i-learn site, which you can access from the first day of the course. Reading guides and questions are provided for the key readings.  

For copyright reasons, some of the items on e-reserve may not be available for the entire period of the course. This means that students must download them when they are available and also that it is no cause for concern if readings do not appear until shortly before the corresponding module is due to commence.

The APPL911 website has a range of resources, including course notes, tasks, online discussions, etc. To login to the website, go to the is http://learn.mq.edu.au.

There are also links to advice and assistanceon this web page.

There is a range of other resources available to Macquarie students. See the following URL for more information:

http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/support/postresources.htm

 

Unit Schedule

Week Lecture Date Topic Lecturer

1

TUESDAY

26 Feb

Introduction to pragmatics.

JM

2

5 Mar

Implicature and the co-operative theory

JM

3

12 Mar

Speech act theory

JM

4

19 Mar

Linguistic politeness

JM

5

26 Mar

Applying  linguistic pragmatics to intercultural communication

JM

6

2 Apr

Prosody and communication

JM

7

9 Apr

Conducting research in pragmatics

JM

                                BREAK

 

8

30 April

Review and extension: informational and interpersonal pragmatics

JM

9

7 May

Pragmatics and discourse

JM

10

14 May 

Critical Discourse Analysis:  Pragmatics and power

JM

11

21 May

Figurative language, metaphor and culture

JM

12

28 May

Acquiring, teaching and learning pragmatic  competence

JM

13

4 June

Review: Applications and directions.

JM

 

 

 

 

           

For current updates, lecture times and classrooms, please consult the MQ Timetables website: http://www.timetables.mq.edu.au

Learning and Teaching Activities

HOW TO USE THE READINGS AND LECTURE MATERIALS - INTERNAL students

In order to get the most from this unit, you will need to: 1. Read the essential pre-reading before the lecture/seminars on the ilearn site (these are indicated with a *star) 2. Complete all of the nominated pre-lecture online tasks (indicated with a *star) 3. Attend all of the lecture/seminar sessions 4. Participate in small group discussions and tasks in class 5. Download and read the powerpoints after each of the lecture/seminars 6. Access other readings from the unit website as well as journals and library resources. 7. Consult with the lecturers about any assessment or other issues that need clarification. NB: Participation in some of the online web discussions is required for the assessed web participation component of the unit. The other web activities are optional. Some web tasks duplicate class activities, but are nevertheless useful for revision and for obtaining feedback from other students.

HOW TO USE THE READINGS AND LECTURE MATERIALS - EXTERNAL students

In order to get the most from this unit, you will need to: 1. Read the course notes and work through all the readings and activities for the modules. 2. Complete one online module per week. 3. Participate each week in web discussions and tasks 4. Maintain contact with the course convenor and other students. 5. Access other readings from the unit website as well as journals and library resources 6. Consult with the lecturer about any assessment or other issues that need clarification. NB: External students who wish to attend some of the internal sessions should discuss this with the unit convenor. It may be possible if room size permits.

Policies and Procedures

Macquarie University policies and procedures are accessible from Policy Central (https://staff.mq.edu.au/work/strategy-planning-and-governance/university-policies-and-procedures/policy-central). Students should be aware of the following policies in particular with regard to Learning and Teaching:

Undergraduate students seeking more policy resources can visit the Student Policy Gateway (https://students.mq.edu.au/support/study/student-policy-gateway). It is your one-stop-shop for the key policies you need to know about throughout your undergraduate student journey.

If you would like to see all the policies relevant to Learning and Teaching visit Policy Central (https://staff.mq.edu.au/work/strategy-planning-and-governance/university-policies-and-procedures/policy-central).

Student Code of Conduct

Macquarie University students have a responsibility to be familiar with the Student Code of Conduct: https://students.mq.edu.au/study/getting-started/student-conduct​

Results

Results published on platform other than eStudent, (eg. iLearn, Coursera etc.) or released directly by your Unit Convenor, are not confirmed as they are subject to final approval by the University. Once approved, final results will be sent to your student email address and will be made available in eStudent. For more information visit ask.mq.edu.au or if you are a Global MBA student contact globalmba.support@mq.edu.au

Student Support

Macquarie University provides a range of support services for students. For details, visit http://students.mq.edu.au/support/

Learning Skills

Learning Skills (mq.edu.au/learningskills) provides academic writing resources and study strategies to improve your marks and take control of your study.

Student Services and Support

Students with a disability are encouraged to contact the Disability Service who can provide appropriate help with any issues that arise during their studies.

Student Enquiries

For all student enquiries, visit Student Connect at ask.mq.edu.au

If you are a Global MBA student contact globalmba.support@mq.edu.au

IT Help

For help with University computer systems and technology, visit http://www.mq.edu.au/about_us/offices_and_units/information_technology/help/

When using the University's IT, you must adhere to the Acceptable Use of IT Resources Policy. The policy applies to all who connect to the MQ network including students.

Graduate Capabilities

PG - Capable of Professional and Personal Judgment and Initiative

Our postgraduates will demonstrate a high standard of discernment and common sense in their professional and personal judgment. They will have the ability to make informed choices and decisions that reflect both the nature of their professional work and their personal perspectives.

This graduate capability is supported by:

Learning outcomes

  • Identify examples of unsuccessful cross-cultural communication and use pragmatic theories to explain them.
  • Reflect on how intercultural competence operates in your own personal and/or professional contexts
  • Understand the applications of linguistic pragmatics in real life
  • Apply a critical approach to choices in linguistic pragmatics in a range of text types
  • Design and implement a research project which uses appropriate pragmatic theories to explore communication in a cross-cultural context or one related to an area of professional interest.

Assessment tasks

  • Assignment 2 Research project
  • Participate in web activities

PG - Discipline Knowledge and Skills

Our postgraduates will be able to demonstrate a significantly enhanced depth and breadth of knowledge, scholarly understanding, and specific subject content knowledge in their chosen fields.

This graduate capability is supported by:

Learning outcomes

  • Understand the relationship between pragmatics and culture
  • Understand the kinds of approaches to analysing language that are commonly used in pragmatics.
  • Make judgements about the types of analysis that are most suitable for researching particular types of discourse
  • Analyse examples of discourse using speech act theory, politeness theory and theories of implicature

Assessment task

  • Assignment 1: Text analysis

PG - Critical, Analytical and Integrative Thinking

Our postgraduates will be capable of utilising and reflecting on prior knowledge and experience, of applying higher level critical thinking skills, and of integrating and synthesising learning and knowledge from a range of sources and environments. A characteristic of this form of thinking is the generation of new, professionally oriented knowledge through personal or group-based critique of practice and theory.

This graduate capability is supported by:

Learning outcomes

  • Understand the relationship between pragmatics and culture
  • Make judgements about the types of analysis that are most suitable for researching particular types of discourse
  • Evaluate current research in pragmatics in an area of personal or professional interest
  • Apply a critical approach to choices in linguistic pragmatics in a range of text types
  • Design and implement a research project which uses appropriate pragmatic theories to explore communication in a cross-cultural context or one related to an area of professional interest.

Assessment tasks

  • Assignment 1: Text analysis
  • Assignment 2 Research project

PG - Research and Problem Solving Capability

Our postgraduates will be capable of systematic enquiry; able to use research skills to create new knowledge that can be applied to real world issues, or contribute to a field of study or practice to enhance society. They will be capable of creative questioning, problem finding and problem solving.

This graduate capability is supported by:

Learning outcomes

  • Make judgements about the types of analysis that are most suitable for researching particular types of discourse
  • Analyse examples of discourse using speech act theory, politeness theory and theories of implicature
  • Evaluate current research in pragmatics in an area of personal or professional interest
  • Design and implement a research project which uses appropriate pragmatic theories to explore communication in a cross-cultural context or one related to an area of professional interest.

Assessment task

  • Assignment 2 Research project

PG - Effective Communication

Our postgraduates will be able to communicate effectively and convey their views to different social, cultural, and professional audiences. They will be able to use a variety of technologically supported media to communicate with empathy using a range of written, spoken or visual formats.

This graduate capability is supported by:

Learning outcomes

  • Understand the relationship between pragmatics and culture
  • Identify examples of unsuccessful cross-cultural communication and use pragmatic theories to explain them.

Assessment task

  • Participate in web activities

PG - Engaged and Responsible, Active and Ethical Citizens

Our postgraduates will be ethically aware and capable of confident transformative action in relation to their professional responsibilities and the wider community. They will have a sense of connectedness with others and country and have a sense of mutual obligation. They will be able to appreciate the impact of their professional roles for social justice and inclusion related to national and global issues

This graduate capability is supported by:

Learning outcomes

  • Understand the relationship between pragmatics and culture
  • Identify examples of unsuccessful cross-cultural communication and use pragmatic theories to explain them.
  • Reflect on how intercultural competence operates in your own personal and/or professional contexts
  • Apply a critical approach to choices in linguistic pragmatics in a range of text types

Changes since First Published

Date Description
19/02/2019 Changes made to assignment dates