Assignment Overview:
• This assignment is to assess your abilities to understand and analyze given data sets that are
relevant to language and culture. Based on your thoughtful understanding and analyses of the
data, you should apply this information to further analyses and your teaching.
Purpose:
• To read and analyze diverse cultural and linguistic issues critically
• To apply the information and findings to planning of teaching
Procedures/Requirements:
• Reviewing the Data Set
o Read and understand the data set. For this project, you’ll apply analyses from the
perspective of sociolinguistics to data which has already been recorded and transcribed
for the Michigan Corpus of Academic English (MICASE)
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/ .
o The set of data is a transcript of three professor/student meetings during office hours, and
the information is in the following table.
• Written Analysis (One paper with three sections)
o Section 1: Overall Analysis (suggested length: 2-3 pages)
The transcript involves a teacher and three office hours meeting with students. Respond
to the following questions.
§ What can you tell about the speakers from the transcripts and the language that is
used?
§ Does the language used reflect gender, age, social status, or race/ethnicity of the
speaker?
§ Does the data indicate that any of the participants are non-native speakers of English?
Title Intro to Poetry Office Hours
Transcript ID OFC300JU149
Academic Division Humanities
Publisher Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, English
Language Institute, University of Michigan
Transcript URL http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/c/corpus/corpus?c=micase;
cc=micase;view=transcript;id=OFC300JU149
2
§ What functions of language are present?
§ What discourse types are used?
§ Include examples from the data to support your conclusions.
§ Office hours are held in American universities for teachers to assist students with
difficulties or problems. Can you tell what the problems or difficulties the students
have? Give examples to support your analysis?
o Section 2: Closely Analysis (suggested length: 2-3 pages)
Closely analyze the data in ONE of the interactions (S2/S1, S2/S3, or S2/S4) in the set for
any THREE of the features listed below. Do any patterns of use emerge?
● Turn-taking
● Adjacency pairs
● One type of speech act
● Repairs
● Interruptions
● Paralinguistic features
● Topic management
● Response tokens
● Obliges
● Pronouns or demonstratives
● Euphemism
● Other features may be analyzed with professor approval
o Section 3: Analysis and Practices (suggested length: 1 page)
● Pick one of the features you analyzed in Section 2 that you think should be explicitly taught
to non-native speakers of English to improve their communicative/interactional competence.
● Explain how your analysis led to this choice.
● Using the model described in Barraja-Rohan (2011), what kind of materials could you use for
the “awareness raising phase” for teaching that feature?
● Describe two examples in as much detail as possible.
Format:
• Times New Roman; 12 points; double-spaced; 6-7 pages; 1” margin on every side
• Include your name, course title, name of the assignment, and submission date in the
upper left corner of the assignment.
• Only electronic document via Canvas is acceptable.
• Your project should follow APA format (I expect that all sources, including the course book,
articles we read in class, or any outside sources be cited in-text and in a works cited list at the end
of the paper), be saved as a .doc or .docx file. If you have any problems or questions, you may
ask during the synchronous session or through email or Canvas. Again, your analysis and your
writing must be your own individual work.