UCL - Analysis and Practice of Academic Discourse

[FLTR1540]

[15h + 15h] 5 credits

This course is taught in the 1st semester.

Teacher(s):

Language: French

Level: First

Aims
Main themes
Content and teaching methods
Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Aims

· To recognize and to treat in an appropriate manner the linguistic and discursive particularities that characterize the written material meant to give an account of, and to construct, knowledge in the disciplines of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters.
· For the students to be able to understand and to produce academic writing in their own disciplines.

Main themes

· We shall study the linguistic particularities of academic discourse in French. We shall examine both the internal (structure, thematic progression, movement) and external (the relation to the situation at hand) coherence of the texts.
· The practical work addresses the students' reception to oral and written academic discourse (see below). The students will also engage in analytic exercises, reformulating and synthesizing notes taken during the course and their readings in the course-notes. Finally, we shall treat the problems of discursive construction and of mastering linguistic norms.

Content and teaching methods

Communication situations in a university context : specificities and implications. Characteristics of argumentative writing for scientific purposes. The structure and specificities of language for a scientific article in the human sciences. Guiding principles for developing a summary : types and functions of summaries. The varaibles of oral communication situations; variations of language.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Assessment:
- assignments carried out by the students during the semester will be graded.
- the final exam will be comprised of two parts: 1/ a written summary of an oral presentation on a general subject evaluating skills of comprehension (see above) and reformulation for this kind of discourse, as well as the quality of writing and the mastery of linguistic norms; 2/ questions on specialised texts ( a choice of two or three texts will be proposed) evaluating analytic and synthetic abilities for a specialised text.

Course holder:
The course will be coordinated by a specialist in Romance studies. The tutorials will be lead by specialists from different fields.