DISCURSIVE PRACTICES[1]

 SENIOR SEMINAR FOR FALL, 2006

COM 475  Schedule

Prerequisite:  RESEARCH METHODS and Junior or Senior standing in COM

• Reading: Karen Tracy's Everyday Talk

• You will start with transcribing a conversation and analyzing it

• Discussion Board Homeworks: Each homework makes use of concepts from

the Textbook, Everyday Talk

• You will Identify a discursive practice in conversation to be researched

• Review & Critique of one journal article related to your project

• Build a project/term paper from the DISCURSIVE PRACTICE identified

• The seminar meetings are building toward your research project

• The class selects 4 of the best projects for inclusion in a panel at the conference, “Thinking Matters”

[1]Karen Tracy describes “discursive practices” as “talk activities that people do.” She continues, “A discursive practice may refer to a small piece of talk (person-referencing practices) or it may focus on a large one (narratives); it may focus on single features that may be named and pointed to (speech acts) or it may reference sets of features (dialect, stance).  Discursive practices may focus on something done by an individual (directness style) or they may refer to actions that require more than one party (interaction structures), p. 21.