English in Cultural Contexts: Audiences, Adaption, and Ideology

Course goals

1) Successful participants that have completed this course are familiar with concepts like identity, cultural representation, self-other images, stereotype, perspective/point of view, essentialism, multiculturalism and imagology.
2) Successful participants can work within the following ICC approaches: cultural representational approach and contrastive approach.
3) Successful participants have developed an increased awareness of the benefits and pitfalls of English as a lingua franca in intercultural communication.
4) Successful participants are able to identify promising research areas within the domains of this course, and suggest ways of undertaking such work.

Content

Students will analyse representations of cultural or national identity in literature, film or other media of their choice. Recent iterations of the course have taken different versions of Beauty and the Beast for a starting point, with students bringing in a wide variety of adaptations. Representations will be viewed against the backdrop of older or different versions. In doing so, students will read research in media studies, (post)colonial studies, intercultural communication, anthropology, imagology, discourse analysis and linguistics. The use of English as a lingua franca plays a role as well. In the final weeks of the course students are encouraged to explore additional fields of their preference. Students with an interest in teaching will be given the opportunity to propose lesson plans.

Additional information

As of August, please check Brightspace regularly for more information concerning your course(s).

Participants may join the peer feedback programme or skills lab to improve their written or spoken English.

This course is equivalent to TLMV14316 Eng-English and Cultural Identity.