Investigating Interaction (MSK 1) - Single View

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IMPORTANT: Students who need two or more linguistics courses in their module(s), should ideally take this course in conjunction with Margret Seltings MSK2 course "Reparaturen im Gespräch - Forschungsergebnisse und eigene Analysen" in the same term. -

Social interaction is perhaps the most important means to organize our life and to accomplish action(s) together, whether in everyday conversation or institutional talk. It is also the fundamental site of language use, language learning and language change. But how does social interaction work? How is it organized? And how can we describe its workings scientifically?
As the first course in the module on spoken and written communication, this course is designed to introduce students to basic concepts and methods in Conversation Analysis (CA) and Interactional Linguistics (IL). Together with MSK2, this course will enable students to (eventually) study human social interaction, describe recurrent patterns (existing and new), and thus in the end also to work in areas which require expertise in spoken communication. We will explore relevant concepts and methods together and thereby develop a better idea of what distinguishes CA and IL from other approaches to spoken language. In doing so, we will also already come across a number of basic insights into how human interaction works.