Welcome to Art of Conversation!
Faculty: Susan Fiksdal
Flash! I understand that other classes are using the Olympus recorders and therefore you may have difficulty completing your project by Monday. Try using the mic on your laptop if that seems possible. If you can’t find a way to do the recording, you can do the work by Thursday, Nov. 19.
For project 7: You can now upload your 4 audio files as well as your paper and transcripts. To avoid having so many files to open, it would be best for your faculty if you put the transcripts with your paper in one file. Please be sure to coordinate the naming of each transcript with each audio file.
Final Project: Please find the assignment, which is posted in week 9 (week of Nov. 29). I also handed it out in class. If you cannot find journal articles appropriate for your topic, please contact Susan.
Our seminar week 9: Our program aide, Alena, will videotape our seminar on Tuesday, Dec. 1 . The reading is now posted on the Moodle site. We will begin by viewing some seminars recorded in the early 1990s, and then discuss the reading for the second half. That second hour will be the one Alena will videotape.
Program Description:
We engage in conversation every day and yet we don’t usually pay close attention to the ways in which it works. When a conversation seems to flow, or, conversely, when it awkwardly jerks along, we sometimes wonder why. The primary objective of this program is to investigate conversation and discover the way conversation works: how it is organized, how it constructs our social reality, and why we have misunderstandings because of these conversations. Using sociolinguistic principles and discourse analysis, we will look at various types of conversations and you will learn various methodologies for gathering data to analyze. Some conversations we examine will be cross-cultural, and we will use this term in its broadest sense, looking at conversations between people of different linguistic cultures, particularly those between genders, classes and ethnicities in the United States. We will examine the ways speakers create identity, draw on power and solidarity, maintain face, and construct a style. We do these things by drawing on linguistic resources and by jointly constructing, moment by moment, our conversations. The notion of “art” in conversation has to do with the patterning and variation and meaning we create. This is not a program that will help you learn to converse more easily; instead, it is a rigorous examination of the verbal and nonverbal behavior of conversation. This is a demanding program and your faculty expects that you will spend at least 40 hours, including class time, on the work.