Text Analysis and Interpretation

obligatory courses

The goal of the course is to enable students to interpret, analyse and critically evaluate a text. Strategies and skills practised include various patterns of text development as well as persuasion techniques. Throughout the course students are expected to be actively involved in all the activities.

The overall aim of the course is to teach students to interpret, analyse and assess a text. (Assessment should include expressing one's opinion on the content, the form and the quality of the text.) Strategies and skills practised in the course include various patterns of essay organisation (definition, process analysis, causal chains, the reflective and argumentative essay), various strategies of text development, persuasion techniques (emotive language, logical reasoning, types of fallacies), writing rebuttals.

Class work will include reading and analysing selected texts, which may eventually lead to longer home assignments, including book/film reviews, critical summaries (summary/analysis essays), and others. Short tasks will be given to practise various types of writing skills.

Classes offer students a supportive environment in which they can further their reading and writing skills while also providing ample opportunity to develop critical skills. Students will be encouraged to handle varied texts actively and intertextually using such strategies as changing titles, providing alternative endings, devising a text using another text as a model etc.

Requirements: Students are required to participate actively in all in-class activities and to hand in home assignments. Materials: Selected essays: The Independent, The Guardian, The Times, The Spectator, The Duet Projects Files.

Barnet, Sylvan, William E. Cain. A Short Guide to Writing About Literature. Longman 2002.

Barnet, Sylvan, Marcia Stubbs. Practical Guide to Writing. Little, Brown and Company, Boston. Toronto 1975.

Hepburn G. Robert A. Greenberg. Modern Essays: A Rhetorical Approach. The Macmillan Company, New York 1962.

Muller, Gilbert H. (ed.) The McGraw-Hill Reader. McGraw-Hill, Inc. 1982.

Pope, Rob. Textual Intervention: Critical & Creative Strategies for Literary Studies. London 1995. Vesterman, William. The College Writer's Reader: Essays in Student Issues. McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1989.

Students are able to analyse fragments of prose and write book/film reviews, as well as critical summaries (summary/analysis essays).

Skills

The student:

K_U02 is able to communicate in English correctly, coherently and with precision and due regard to the communicational context.

K_U05 is able to select and apply their knowledge on linguistics and literary studies to analysing various types of text and writing about them in the form of reviews or critical essays.

Social competences

The student is ready:

- to continuously develop their intellectual potential through analytical reading and writing

- to recognize the diversity of opinions emerging from different texts and discussions and to use it as a source of inspiration.

The students write two short tests in which they are expected to summarize, paraphrase and explicate excerpts of fiction or popular science articles as well as interpret selected passages of prose writing). They are also asked to write at home one longer paper (an analysis essay) about a chosen short story or scientific article.

The retake consists in submitting written assignments which the student failed to submit and/or in rewriting assignments evaluated negatively, or in writing a new extra assignment or assignments. The submitted translations must obtain positive grades.

Two or three (to be determined by a specific group teacher), formally justified, absences are allowed.