After attending this course, students should be able to independently address questions about the relationship between language used online and the social world, drawing upon appropriate linguistic literature to conduct small-scale research projects. 

The course combines mini-lectures, assignments, reading-based group work and discussion, and individual research work leading to a presentation and final written paper. 

This course is concerned with the discourse-analytic study of social media (including social-network sites, blogs, microblogs and forums). We will examine language (and its interplay with other media, including pictures, music, emojis, etc.) used in various social media genres and on different social media platforms to explain how “produsers” represent themselves, the communities they affiliate with and the ideas they stand for. Embedding situated online interaction in the broader sociopolitical context, we will critically reflect upon the relationships created, and the worldviews negotiated, in contemporary digital discourses – and the question how these insights can be made useful for language teaching.

Bublitz, Wolfgang & Christian Hoffmann (Eds.) (2017). Pragmatics of social media. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.Caroline Tagg, Philip Seargeant & Amy Aisha Brown (2017). Taking offence on social media: conviviality and communication on Facebook. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave.Ruth Page, David Barton, Carmen Lee, Johann Wolfgang Unger, Michele Zappavigna (Eds.) (2022). Researching Language and Social Media. A Student Guide. 2nd Edition. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge.Seargeant, Philip and Caroline Tagg (2014) (Eds.). The Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Continuous evaluation based on class participation, short homework assignments, submission of proposal and seminar paper, and an oral presentation. 

Contents covered in class and in the compulsory readings on digital discourse analysis/linguistics. 

Attendance (max. 2 absences) Part 1: Class participation, preparation and readings, smaller (online) assignments, discussions (f2f, online) 15%Part 2: Oral presentation: 20%Part 3: Paper proposal: 20%Part 4: PS paper (3,500 words +/-10%): 45%All parts (1, 2, 3 and 4) must be completed and at least three out of four parts must be positive. The overall pass mark is 60%.Grading scale: 1 (sehr gut) 100-90%; 2 (gut) 89-80%; 3 (befriedigend), 79-70%; 4 (genügend) 69-60%; 5 (nicht genügend) 59-0%.