LIN 201 — Lang in the Helping Profession
This course will explore how the discourse used in therapeutic and social welfare contexts reveals identities, attitudes, value/belief systems, and emotional states. We will investigate what we can learn about the therapist/social worker -client/patient relationship from the discourse each party uses, and what we can discover about the individuals involved through the language used. We will examine how people use verbal and non-verbal language to convey emotional stances and to make moral judgments, and students will examine how the language we use changes depending on who we are speaking to and what the context is (e.g. therapy, casework, child protection, etc.). Real-world data are presented in class in order for students to apply their learning of each topic to everyday practice, and the class culminates in a discourse-based process recording project, preparing students for the kind of real-world tasks required in the field. While students will focus on using discourse analysis in order to better understand social work practice and therapeutic talk, the subject matter of the course will be of interest, and use, to anyone interested in a detailed knowledge of how language, both verbal and non verbal, is used to convey emotional stances and to make moral judgments.