Comm Final
Your final exam will be open on Canvas on Friday August 10th for the full day. You can take the exam
any time within the 24-hour timeframe, but you can only take the exam ONCE. As an online exam,
this test is open book and open note. However, this exam will be timed. Once you start taking the
exam, you will have to complete and submit it within the 2-hour time limit. So you should review the
course materials thoroughly before beginning the exam. If you have provided the appropriate
documentation for additional time on your exams, extra time will be set up for you.
1. There will be 35 objective questions on the exam, each worth 2 points (70 points total).
These could include multiple choice questions and true/false statements.
The exam covers lectures, class discussion, academic readings, Chapter 6 and
Chapters 8-12 from the textbook
Everyday Talk.
Although the focus of this exam
will be on materials we learned after the mid-term, you are expected to be familiar
with the core concepts of this course such as identity, identity-work, discourse
practices, rhetorical and cultural perspectives.
Test questions with an application component may build on readings and
transcripts that we’ve read in class, but will not ask about the specific content of
these materials.
The exam is designed to assess your grasp of particular facts (e.g. the components of
narratives) and check understandings of key course terms and theoretical
relationships. Most importantly, it will assess your analytic skill with these
concepts. Can you appropriately apply the concepts to examples we discussed in
class as well as novel communicative situations?
Many of the questions relate directly to what we did in class, because lectures are
designed to reinforce and expand understanding of the text. At the same time, we
cannot cover everything from the text in class, and you are responsible for
understanding the issues in the text that have not been discussed in class.
2. In addition to the objective questions, there will be 3 short answer questions that will be
worth a total of 30 points. These short answer questions will ask you to relate a few concepts
from class together and apply them to an example situation or analyze a transcript. For
example, one option could be providing you with an excerpt from the Dr. Laura and Jade
transcript (included in chapter 12) and asking you to identify three or four concepts from a
list of possible concepts in their talk, and then discuss how these discourse practices
communicate stances and do identity work.
On the back of this sheet is a list of important terms to know from the second half of
Everyday Talk
and the research readings we studied in this class.
For research articles, you should use the Weekly discussion guide posted on
Canvas as a study guide to prepare for exam questions based on these readings.
The final exam will cover
three articles:
Kitzinger & Frith (1999), and Cameron (2000).
Important Terms to Know
This list is not exhaustive of all the terms covered in class or in the book, but these highlight
some of the most important topics we’ve covered in class.
Conversational floor
Turn relevance places (TRP)
Locally managed turn-structure
Pre-allocated turn structure
Turn construction unit
Continuers
Interruption
Choral talk
Adjacency pair
Pre-sequence
Insertion sequence
Noticeably absent
Conversational preference
Conversationally dis-preferred act
Discourse markers
Direct style
Indirect style
Hint directives
Query directives
Fishing
Dugri
Mitigation markers
Upgraders
Euphemisms
Involvement politeness style
Independence politeness style
Rude style
Expressiveness
Master identity marked styles
Stance
Stance indicators
Belief stance
Skepticism stance
Hostile stance
Involvement stance
Unmarked forms
Marked forms
Modal devices
Extreme case formulations
Avowal of feeling