School of Languages and Cultures

Winter Research Program 2021

AVAILABLE PROJECTS

  1. Indonesia Council Open Conference: Assistant Program Organisers
  2. Converting the Mudburra dictionary into e-dictionaries
  3. How accurate is professional Mandarin/English interpreters' real-life telephone interpretation?
  4. Maidens sans frontiers – Girl Culture in Japan and Beyond
  5. Politeness strategies in Korean: Analysing spoken discourse in the socio-cultural context
  1. Sensing Australia’s Living heritage
  2. Developing and validating written and oral proficiency tests for second language Japanese
  3. Social action and meaning negotiation in discourse
  4. COVID-19 Communication by Australian governments

8. Social action and meaning negotiation in discourse

Project duration:

The project will run for 4 weeks (June 21 – July 16) and the applicants will be required to be on campus.

Description:

In this project, the scholars will be involved in most stages of qualitative research in the area of pragmatics (from data collection to writing up and presenting the results of analysis).

This project explores how language works in a number of interactional settings, ranging from online (YouTube and social media) comments to televised discourse to face-to-face conversations. Using interactional pragmatic, interpersonal pragmatic and discourse-analytic approaches, the project will primarily analyse how social action and meaning are (co-)constructed and negotiated in interaction, with a special focus on identity, humour and offence.

Proposed schedule

Week 1: reading on the methodology and topics;

Week 2: data collection and preparation for analysis;

Weeks 3 & 4: data analysis and presentation of results

Expected outcomes and deliverables:

Scholars taking part in this project will have an opportunity to (1) gain important research skills in data collection and data analysis, (2) be introduced to or expand their knowledge of pragmatics and discourse analysis, (3) write a literature review of previous studies, and (4) apply their knowledge in doing a pilot analysis. At the end of the project, the scholars will produce a 1-2-page analysis and present it at a Linguistics Seminar Series seminar in the School of Languages and Cultures.

Number of hours per week: 

36

Suitable for:

This project is open to applications from the students who are fascinated by how language works in interaction and who have some prior knowledge of linguistics/language in society:

  • Undergraduate 2-4-year or Honours’ students (Linguistics, English as International Language or related majors);
  • Postgraduate students (Applied Linguistics).

Participants required: 

1

Primary Supervisor:

Dr Valeria Sinkeviciute

Further info: 

If you are interested in this project, but you are not sure whether you have a necessary background, please contact the supervisor Dr Valeria Sinkeviciute via email prior to the application submission.