Discourse

Knowing how to get work done through meetings is an increasingly important skill set. Students explore the discursive strategies used in a variety of multicultural business meetings, both face-to-face and virtual. Using discourse analytic methods, students analyze why some meetings are considered productive and others not so much. Students will learn about different approaches to discourse and analyze transcriptions of talk and videotaped interaction to order to see how communication between individual breaks down at times. Students also learn how detect the interactional cues that are inherent in our everyday talk, and how such cues lead to successful, and not so successful, meeting outcomes. The roles, relationships, conflicts, and goals that emerge and shift within different types of meetings and communicative encounters will also be topics of discussion. Assigned readings, group presentations on supplemental readings, and a final presentation on a collaborative research paper will be amongst the course requirements.