Course Leader: Olena Peftiieva
Home Institution: Mariupol State University, Ukraine
Course pre-requisite(s): Internet Access
The course Art of Critical Thinking is based on critical discourse analysis which is meant for all students who strive to recognize the manipulation strategies, to be knowledgeable and professional. The course offers a special technique to resist biased information, to recognize manipulation that exerts influence on a reader or a listener. The course rests on a democratic approach that takes an ethical stance on personal and social issues with the aim to boost critical thinking.
By the end of this course students should be knowledgeable enough to recognize manipulation strategies, telling objectivity from subjectivity; should be in possession of theoretical linguistic issues and practical skills to analyze the text read or speech heard; perceive hidden messages by identifying presupposition and insinuation, omission and modality; topicalization and gaslighting; correlate discourse and society including social cognition, politics, and culture. The Art of Critical Thinking is a part and a parcel of the general education course and contributes greatly to communicative skills, reading, listening, writing, general literacy and critical thinking.
Tentative Content of the Course
Art of Critical Thinking
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№ |
Tentative Content of the Sessions |
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1. |
The acquaintance with the course plan, seminar and lecture procedure, assessment criteria, and learning outcomes. Lecture 1. Language styles and registers. Classification of Language Vocabulary. Literary (terms, archaisms, barbarisms, foreignisms, occasionalisms), Neutral, Conversational (slang, jargon, professionalisms, dialectal words, vulgar words, nonce-words). |
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2. |
Lecture 2. Lexical Stylistic Devices (metaphor, personification, simile, epithet, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, meiosis, litotes, allusion, antonomasia, irony, zeugma, pun, oxymoron, periphrasis, euphemism, antithesis). |
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3. |
Lecture 3. Syntactical Expressive Means (inversion, detachment, suspense, enumeration, repetition, parallelism, chiasmus, asyndeton, gap sentence link, climax, bathos, ellipsis, break-in-the-narrative, represented speech, rhetorical question). |
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4. |
Lecture 4. Journalistic style. Architectonics of a Newspaper Article. Characteristic features of advertisements. |
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5. |
Lecture 5. Critical Discourse Analysis of a newspaper article. |
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6. |
Seminar 1. Headline, dateline, byline, leading paragraph, body of article, inference. Body of the article. Inverted pyramid. Usage of parenthetical phrases. |
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7. |
Seminar 2. Subjectivity and Objectivity. Manipulation. Insinuations and Presuppositions. |
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8. |
Seminar 3. Omission and Deletion. Gaslighting. |
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9. |
Seminar 4. Foregrounding and Backgrounding. Topicalization: agent-patient relations in sentences. |
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10. |
Seminar 5. Modality. Contextualized interpretation. |
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11. |
Seminar 6. Thomas Huckin’s CDA of an article. |
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12. |
Seminar 7. Expressive means in advertisements |
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13. |
Seminar 8. Characteristic features of advertisements. |
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14. |
Presentation of Individual Case Study 1: Reading article 1, listening its CDA. Discussion. |
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15. |
Presentation of Individual Case Study 2: Reading article 2, listening its CDA. Discussion. |
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16. |
Presentation of Individual Case Study 3: Reading article 3, listening its CDA. Discussion. |
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17. |
Presentation of Group project 1: lexical stylistic devices |
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18. |
Presentation of Group project 2: syntactical expressive means |
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19. |
Presentation of Group project 3: language styles and registers |
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20. |
Module test. |
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21. |
Summing up the results |
(Provide a brief description of instructional approaches that will be used during the course (e.g., lectures, seminars, group projects).)
Course includes five introductory lectures on The Art of Critical Thinking, eight seminars; presentations of individual case study; presentations of group projects, and module test (42 academic hours).
Each student will be supplied with the e-books ‘Art of Critical Thinking’; internet resources.
ASSESSMENT CRITERIA
is based on
European Assessment Scale
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Classroom Activities |
Scores |
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Submission of the Written paper with compilation of terminological apparatus of the course. |
10 |
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Presentation of Individual Case Study: each student presents CDA of an article to the groupmates at the end of the course. |
30 |
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Submission of the essay “CDA of an article” |
10 |
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Presentation of Group project |
10 |
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Participation in Discussion |
10 |
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Module test (written multiple choice test based on theoretical and practical information) |
30 |
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Total |
100 |
European Assessment Scale
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Rating |
Rating |
Rating |
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|
Rating |
Explanation |
||
|
90-100 |
Perfectly |
А |
Perfectly |
|
82-89 |
Good |
B |
Very good |
|
75-81 |
С |
Good |
|
|
67-74 |
Satisfactorily |
D |
Satisfactorily |
|
60-66 |
E |
Enough |
|
|
35-59 |
Unsatisfactorily |
FX |
Unsatisfactorily |
|
1-34 |
F |
Unsatisfactorily |
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