LSI COURSES
STUDENTS
LINKS

 

 
rainbow line

University of Hawai'i
Department of Second Language Studies
petroglyph
rainbow line

Language and Social Interaction

rainbow line

    Welcome to the home page of LSI at the University of Hawaii! We are a group of faculty and student scholars who view language as a primary site where social life is created, contested, and transformed. Through studying conversation, texts, and multi-modal discourses, we aim to uncover how people create meaning with one another.

General Purposes

Within the MA in SLS, the specialization in Language and Social Interaction (LSI) prepares students for such professional careers as language educators and language consultants in different institutional settings, as well as for advanced academic study in SLS, applied linguistics, and related social sciences. The specialization takes the view that social life is fundamentally an interactional and discursive accomplishment. It examines how situated interaction interrelates with language use and how (language) learning, language variation and change emerge through interaction. A prominent line of inquiry is the interactional organization of educational settings and other institutions and its connections with macrostructural levels of social organization.
The specialization intends to foster knowledge about and research capabilities in a range of domains, topics, and research approaches, including:

  • Language use in multilingual societies
  • Language variation and change
  • Pidgins, creoles, and non-standard varieties
  • English as an international language
  • Hybrid discourses
  • Codeswitching
  • Language ideology
  • Language and social identity
  • Sociolinguistics and social theory
  • Language socialization
  • Discourse analysis
  • Conversation analysis
  • Pragmatics