Discourse and Power: Health and Business Communication

Code

ENGL3095

School

English

Level

3

Credits

20

Semesters

Autumn UK

Summary

This module explores the vital role that discourse plays in various communicative domains in healthcare and business settings. Students will explore these domains through a variety of contemporary frameworks for examining discourse and communication, including critical discourse analysis, multi-modal discourse analysis, and interactional sociolinguistics. The module offers the opportunity to analyse and reflect on the discourses of healthcare and the workplace, as two crucially important domains of social and professional life. To this end, professional and healthcare discourses will be investigated through a range of genres and communicative modes, including face-to face communication, advertising, media discourse and digital interactions. In so doing students will have the opportunity to analyse a range of socially-situated texts, including: Healthcare professional-patient encounters, online support groups, university branding, business meetings, health promotion campaigns, leadership talk, workplace interactions, corporate websites. The module offers a rich resource for discourse-based studies of language in professional and social life and enables students to examine the strategic uses of communicative strategies in specific social settings. 

Any reassessments will take place in the form of essays or assignments.

Target Students

Only available for final-year students on SH and JH English programmes; including 2+2 programmes; students participating in exchanges from the School partner institutions; and final-year students on the Liberal Arts programme.ENGL1002 Studying Language is a pre-requisite for this module.

Co-requisites

Modules you must take in the same academic year, or have taken in a previous year, to enrol in this module:

• Studying Language (ENGL1002)

Classes

• One 1-hour-30-minute seminar each week for 11 weeks
• One 1-hour-30-minute lecture each week for 11 weeks

Lecture - 1x 90mins per week + Seminar - 1x90mins per week In week 6 of the module, seminars will run for 2 hours.

Assessment

• 25% Presentation: Group Presentation (15-18 mins) that takes place in Week 6
• 75% Coursework: Coursework - 1 x 3500 word essay

Assessed by end of autumn semester

Educational Aims

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and understanding

• Of methodological design and application in data collection
• Of theoretical discourse frameworks and approaches and their application to professional life
• Of a wide range of discourse analytical techniques

Intellectual skills

• The ability to seek out, assimilate and critically evaluate published research relating to the discourse and the domains of health and work
• The ability to understand, compare and contrast different approaches, methodologies and theoretical frameworks
• The ability to undertake discourse analysis independently and relate this to existing research and theory
• The ability to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their own work and draw appropriate conclusions

Professional and practical skills

• The ability to deliver an oral presentation to a professional standard
• The ability to produce a project report to a professional disciplinary standard
• The ability to design and execute discourse-based studies
• The ability to communicate analyses and conclusions effectively using and applying the technical concepts of the field
• The ability to apply analysis of data to practical settings and understand the implications for social change

Transferable (key) skills

• The ability to deliver orally project findings and key contemporary ideas
• The ability to produce systematic and rigorous descriptive and discursive writing
• The ability to undertake independent investigations of discourse analytic research
• The use of appropriate information technology to aid the research and data analysis process

Conveners

• Dr Daniel Hunt