Syllabus - Summer, 09

Department of Curriculum and Instruction
Linguistics of Reading/Storytelling: 3 credit hours
Course Syllabus
Instructor: David Novak
Office:
Phone: 828-280-2718
Email: novateller@aol.com
Office hours: TBD
Course Schedule: July 13 – 30, M-Th, 5:30-9:00pm
Room: Rogers-Stout Hall 427
REQUIRED TEXTS:
Rowe, Bruce M. and Levine, Diane P. “A Concise Introduction to Linguistics.” Pearson, 2006.
ADDITIONAL READINGS (much of the following will be included in a Course reading pack, to be available at the start of class):
1. Boyd, Brian. “The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature: The Delight We Get from
Detecting Patterns in Books, and in Life, Can Be Measured and Understood.”
2. Bryson, Bill. “Becoming Americans” from Made In America, pp. 13-29.Perennial, 1995.
3. Chafe, Wallace.. “Integration and Involvement in Speaking, Writing, and Oral Literature,” Spoken and Written Language, Deborah Tannen, ed. NJ: Ablex, 1982, 35-53.
4. Dissanayake, Ellen. “Making Special”: An Undescribed Human universal and the Core of a Behavior of Art.
5. Fine, Elizabeth. “An Illustration of a Performance-Centered Text.” From The Folklore Text. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.
6. Hymes, Dell. “The Lost Boy.” From “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics, pp. 143-183. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981
7. Leguin, Ursula. “She Unnames Them.”
8. Locke, John L. “Social Work” from Why we Don't Talk To each other Anymore, pp. 67-102. Simon & Schuster, 1998.
9. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale.
10. Sobol, Joseph D. “Innervison and Innertext: Oral Traditional and Oral Interpretive Modes of Storytelling Performance,” in Carol Birch and Melissa Heckler, Who Says: Essays on Contemporary Storytelling.
11. Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Folkstories of Children, pp. 1-43. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.
12. Tannen, Deborah. “The Oral/Literate Continuum in Discourse.” Spoken and Written Language. NJ: Ablex, 1982, 1-16.
13. Tannen, Deborah. “Involvement in Discourse,” pp. 9-35. Talking Voices. Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge University Press. 1989

* other readings TBD.

CATALOG DESCRIPTION: Relationships of local dialects to reading; alphabets; phonology; morphology; syntax, and semantics as related to reading; aspects of psycholinguistics which are primarily linguistic.
ADDITIONAL COURSE INFORMATION:
This section of Linguistics of Reading/Storytelling will be especially geared to the needs and interests of storytellers, focusing intensively on the psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics of narrative. Reading students should consult the Instructor for further information.
Relationship of Course to College Philosophy and Goals:
COE Conceptual Framework Standards:
This course gives students an opportunity to assimilate five dimensions of leadership: concern for diversity, reflective practice, lifelong learning, caring, and critical thinking. General knowledge, content knowledge, and professional knowledge requirements are also met.
COURSE OBJECTIVES:
1. To explore the linguistics of storytelling, in its conversational, performance, and literary contexts.
2. To understand the linguistic and rhetorical strategies which signal the emergence of narrative from the matrix of everyday conversational and informational speech and writing.
3. To inventory the specific linguistic techniques that foster teller-listener involvement in storytelling performance.
4. To help storytelling and reading majors to understand how to better use these techniques to raise the level of their own performance, teaching, and communication.
COURSE TOPICS:
1. Basic tools of linguistic analysis: linguistic levels; analysis at the levels of morphology, phonetics, phonology, grammar/syntax, semantics, stylistics, and higher levels of structure, especially including narrative.
2. Discourse analysis: the methods which sociolinguists, anthropologists, and folklorists have devised to represent spoken language and oral narrative in print, and how these methods reflect on and refract the oral language process.
3. Dialect, and its roles in storytelling and literature.
4. Linguistic and paralinguistic involvement strategies.
5. Defining and exploring narrative and the linguistics of story and storytelling: the dynamic representation of events in passing time; levels of narrative density; general and specific verb tenses, demarcative transitions, construction of action and dialogue, creation of anticipation, qualities of style and “voice” in storytelling and literature.
GRADED ASSIGNMENTS:
Writing assignments:
1. Record and transcribe a story told in a conversational setting. Notate all conversational turns, interactive responses, and as many of the paralinguistic elements such as pauses, expression, inflection, dynamics, laughter, etc. as can be reconstructed. Write a socio-linguistic analysis of the context, stylistics, and interactional dynamics as revealed in the language of the performance. 10-20 pp. double-spaced total.
2. A. (for Storytelling majors) Record and transcribe a storytelling performance in a more formal solo performance setting. This can be from one of the class members, a member of another storytelling class on campus, one of the storytelling professors, or any other professional or avocational storytelling performer on campus or elsewhere (it is fine to record the performance in the student’s home region before the beginning of the course). It is acceptable to use a recording of one of your own performances, but it will need to be in a live setting, and will also need to be recorded within one month of the beginning of class. Write a sociolinguistic analysis of this performance. Compare and contrast the linguistic strategies, paralinguistic aspects, and interactional elements of this performance with the conversational performance analyzed earlier. Analyze the narrative structure according to the models covered in readings and in class (Propp, Sutton-Smith, etc.) 10-20 pp. double-spaced total.
OR:
2.B. (for Reading majors) Choose a children’s book, short story, or novella (no more than 50 pp. in length) and do a close analysis of the linguistic and narrative strategies therein. Compare and contrast the language of the literary work with the language of the conversational story that you have analyzed above, on the levels of structure, style, vocabulary, syntax, and the presence or absence of involvement or interactional markers.
3. Language Journal (100 pts.): Journal entries are to be posted to the blog in an ongoing basis for the benefit of the entire class and are to be completed by July 30. Students will keep a language journal during the course, consisting of word etymologies, neologisms, and particularly interesting, thought provoking, odd, funny, revealing, eccentric, creative, or dumbfounding examples of language collected in the field.
A) Word etymologies should be selected for their relevance to the art of storytelling. Collect at least twenty five word etymologies.
B) Neologisms are to be of newly coined words currently in use. Collect twenty five neologisms
C) The language samples can come from encounters with spoken, written, or electronically transmitted language—from conversation, overheard or reported speech, published or unpublished writing, or from language on radio, television, film, or the internet. Each sample should be at least the length of a complete utterance (depending on the context an utterance may or may not conform to the grammatical confinements of a complete sentence—i.e., a proverb (“Waste not, want not”), and exclamation (“Phat!”), or an advertising slogan), but no longer than a paragraph or a conversational turn or two. You will document the context in which you encountered the sample, the date, time, place, speakers, and media involved. You will then write a paragraph analyzing and commenting on precisely what is revealing and distinctive about it. Examples recorded without commentary or analysis will not be credited. Nor will more than three examples from any single source, unless you apply for and receive a special exemption. The purpose of this exercise is to hone your sensitivity to the subtleties and creative uses of language in many different forms and contexts. Collect fifty entries of examples of language collected in the field.

Other assignments and quizzes TBD

GRADING
Paper #1 300 pts.
Paper #2 300 pts.
Language Journal 100 pts.
Quiz: 100 pts.
Attendance and Participation: 200 pts.
Total Points: 1000
ATTENDANCE
Students are required to be in class on time for each meeting. Three late arrivals or early departures will be counted equivalent to one absence on your record. A second absence will result in a drop of 50 points. Each subsequent absence will result in a drop of 100 points. Arriving more than 30 minutes late or leaving more than 30 minutes early will count as an absence
FINAL GRADING
A: 926-1000
A-: 900-925
B+: 875-899
B: 825-874
B-: 800-824
C+: 775-799
C: 700-774
Grades lower than a C in a graduate class are considered failing.
NOTE:
Because of the concentrated time span within which the course will be meeting, students would be wise to get hold of the required texts in advance, and to familiarize themselves with their main outlines.
They should also be thinking about and making notes on the two major writing assignments. They are encouraged, though not required, to record and transcribe their conversational and performance stories at home before their arrival.

For more information on courses and the masters program, go to www.etsu.edu/stories/.