Modena International Workshop – Syllabus and Organization

The Modena International Workshop focuses on methodological problems and involves students in different forms of presentations of their own work in progress. Participation of student and staff from different partner institutions will provide useful feedback for an assessment and revision of individual research hypotheses, as well as tools for developing greater awareness of issues in research methodology.

Students attend classes, tutorials and workshops, work on assignments and oral presentations, and engage in independent pre-reading.

The areas in focus are:
i) Language and textual varieties: methods and applications of corpus linguistics; integrating quantitative and qualitative methods, with special reference to the analysis of historical, geographical, and register variation;
ii) Problems of textual interpretation: Textuality, translation, interaction analysis, rhetoric and argumentation, cross-cultural and intercultural studies.

Special attention will be paid to comparative analysis, in the belief that comparison (of texts, language varieties, languages) is useful in highlighting the features and functions that are important to each variety.

The international workshops will include:
a) Specially developed lectures;
b) Tutorials (with supervisor and with visiting lecturers);
c) Presentations.

Lectures will centre around methodological problems that may be of general interest to students in the language/culture area. Major points of interest in Modena will be: corpus perspectives on the study of language variation, argumentation, translation, interaction analysis, cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives. Lectures will aim at presenting methodological and theoretical problems rather than reporting on research carried out, to help the students see the relevance to their own research.

Tutorials will offer students the opportunity to present their own research projects and discuss them in small special interest groups, while at the same time getting feedback on different aspects of their research project from lecturers. Each lecturer will offer two tutorials to groups of  3-4 students.

Presentations at the end of the workshop will offer students the opportunity to present their work more formally in an international context.

The modules are taught in ninety-minute sessions

PowerPoint presentations at the end of the Workshop give students the opportunity to discuss their individual projects with the entire group.

Preliminary reading materials will be made available in September.

Certificates of attendance will also be available.