In this course, students will receive an overview of basic statistical functions for using quantitative methods for inquiry in the social, applied linguistics and education field. Students will be exposed to the fundamental concepts and procedures of descriptive and inferential statistics. Students will develop competence in reading and understanding statistics topics from sources such as texts, dissertations, journals, or technical reports.
Course Catalogue
This course will introduce students with written and spoken texts with reference to different aspects of discourse and conversation analysis. It will include the following: cohesion and coherence, deixis, theory of politeness, cooperative principle, relevance, speech act theory, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, etc.
This course introduces students to language change. It considers how and why languages change and the role of language contact. It also presents different theories and methodologies useful for historical and comparative linguistic investigation. Through a series of guided assignments, students will investigate a number of related existing languages from a non-Indo-European language family and reconstruct significant elements of the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of the proto-language. Students will learn the techniques of reconstruction, data collection, and data analysis in this course.
The goals of this practicum are to prepare students with the competencies necessary for a positive teaching career, provide hands-on experience with lesson planning and instructional practices, and to prepare students for doing assessment and evaluation and classroom management. It is to build on prior coursework in methodology, first and second-language acquisition, linguistics and cross-cultural communication. This course includes observations at an assigned field placement, two detailed lesson plans with materials, a statement of teaching philosophy, a letter of introduction to be distributed to the candidates' classes during their student teaching, one recorded micro teaching demonstration, and a presentation and research paper.
This course will give new direction to students’ poetry through practical teaching methods and regular feedback. It will build students’ awareness of the form and elements of the craft. It will also require reading the poetry of prose writers and the poetry of other poets of different centuries. The course will develop a skill of self-evaluation and constructive analysis of the work of others. Finally, students will be able to develop a work in progress. The workshop method will be adopted in class to give students a hands-on introduction to poetry writing. The method of evaluation will be assignments in the form of short pieces of poems as well as writing extemporaneous poems at a sit-in examination. The course teacher will provide guidelines for such writing.
The course is meant primarily for students who have some experience of writing fiction, either in Bangla or English or both and now want to improve their craft. The course, however, will also be helpful to those who haven’t done any fiction writing but feel that they are now ready to begin. It will teach them the basics of writing a story or a novel, beginning with an outline or plot, a narrative structure, a narrative voice, characterization and dialogue, and eventually lead them to more difficult tasks such as mind mapping, conveying emotions and inner turmoil, dealing with conflicts and coincidences and arriving at a satisfactory conclusion.
Creative nonfiction is a genre of nonfiction that uses literary techniques to narrate facts. For writer Lee Gutkind, creative nonfiction is “true stories, well told.” These true stories can involve one’s personal life (i.e. memoir, biography, autobiography), travel experience (i.e. travelogue), journalistic expressions (i.e. op-eds, feature articles), lyrical essays, cultural commentary, and personal anecdotes. The versatility of CNF makes it one of the most exciting forms to be familiar with. In this course, we will explore different types of creative nonfiction genres and learn to incorporate them into our writing.
This course aims to introduce students to some of the tools and techniques involved in playwriting. The course examines the flexibility and variety of story-telling medium and will look at some of the many different approaches available to the playwright. It investigates the underlying bases of theatrical fiction and focuses on the fundamentals techniques in structuring the fiction in terms of ‘dramatic conflict’ (plot, act- structure, character development, conflict, dialogue, rhythm and format and the five-phase sandhi as discussed in the Naiyasastra. The students will be encouraged to explore their own interests and develop their own creative processes.
This course will introduce different genres and types of films: comedy, drama, action/adventure, science fiction, thriller, musical, and others, by screening the film and giving lectures. Students will then learn how to write a script for cinema or television. Exercises and feedback from the instructor and the classmates will give them a firm grounding in all the basics of screenwriting. They will also be able to visit shooting locations to understand the challenge of its practical side. The method of evaluation will be assignments in writing screenplays. The course teacher will provide guidelines for such writing. The workshop method will be adopted in class to give students a hands-on introduction to screenwriting.
Experimental writing in literature (stream of consciousness, cut-up, innovative language, anti-narrative, metafiction) is scrutinized in this course with the purpose of examining the form, the cultural significance, the history, and the racial and gender implications as seen through modernist and postmodernist fiction. By the end of the course, students will understand the relationships between texts and contexts, and what it means for 20th century fiction to be deemed modern or postmodern. In addition, the course will investigate how modern and postmodern literature explore issues of identity. The texts will also consider the connection between notions of identity and the 20th century cultural context as a postmodern phenomenon.