Homework: Cross Cultural Communication- Anthropology
This homework is your chance to further explore interesting topics within the broad area of cross-cultural communication. Your primary goal is to make a brief (500+ words) scholarly argument that demonstrates proficiency in course concepts and engages with course-relevant research. You will present this to the class as your initial post. You will then comment on other posts and/or follow up on comments to your post.
You're Topic
Choose one of the following project/topic options:
Option I: Pick any topic that relates to the content covered in the course. Feel free to come up with a topic that builds on a discussion post, a topic presented in class lectures, or some aspect of an academic article.
Option II: Describe a Community of Practice [CoP]. For this option, you will do a more in-depth version of the Module discussion activity by focusing on a particular CoP (or related sub-CoPs that make up a larger CoP etc..). A typical post of this sort would deal with how the communicative practices of a CoP intersect with issues of identity, linguistic relativity, and/or ideology.
Option III: Take a position on the official status of English in the US. For this option, you will engage in this somewhat controversial topic, which comes up in our national political conversation from time to time. At the moment, English is not recognized in the US Constitution as the official national language. For your initial post, use course concepts to make an argument about the following proposition:
The US Constitution should be amended to make English the official language of the US
To be sure, course concepts can be applied to support more than one side of this issue.
Thesis
Regardless of which option you choose, you need to include a thesis (or descriptive argument) about your topic that involves at least one of the analytical concepts from the course. Here is a list of some of our course concepts: indexicality, language ideology, modality, community of practice, linguistic relativity, performativity, code switching, metaphorical framing.
Format your homework according to the following formatting requirements:
i) The answer should be typed, using Times New Roman font (size 12), double spaced, with one-inch margins on all sides.
ii) The response also includes a cover page containing the title of the homework, the student's name, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
iii) Also include a reference page. The Citations and references must follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.