Discourse Analysis Essay

When I first registered for this class, I thought, “wow, discourse analysis? It sounds hard.” To my surprise, my assumption was accurate. Although the work is tedious and required much effort on my part, it was a rewarding learning experience. I learned about myself as a student, student- interpreter, and a person. From August, until now, I’ve learned a lot about discourse. In this essay, I’ll share my learning experience and I hope you enjoy. The first week of class, focused on the meaning of discourse. Prior to the course, I never focused on the meaning found within sign languages or English. Sure, I knew about how to start and end a conversation, but it never crossed my mind about how locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary speech

I believe the written assignment on ASL prosody and the article “It Just Doesn’t Look like ASL: Defining, Recognizing and Teaching Prosody in ASL”, is my favorite article for this course. I love it because it added to my knowledge about ASL prosody and how to apply to interpreting. In the beginning of the article, you stated how prosodic features are hard for student-interpreters, which is true. Before learning these features, I would only focus on the hands of the signer because I did not want to miss any signs/information. But after learning features such as head tilts, head nods, body leans, eye gaze, eye brows raises/lowering, and mouth movements, I learned that it’s more to ASL than I realized. One of the important aspects of ASL prosody is that the more it is practiced and understood, it can make a non-native signer’s look more “natural”. With the information I had about prosody and the documents I found during my essay on prosody, I learned the importance of learning ASL prosody. While I gathered the information for the prosody essay, I came across two documents on mouth morphemes. The excitement I felt and hard work for the essay paid off. I learned that mouth morphemes can change the sentence. Before, I knew about how mouth morphemes were a huge part of ASL, I had no clue on how to use them properly. But, I’m glad you choose the videos that you chose for this course because several videos had prosodic features that can helped identify these features. Did I also find while watching it the videos the first time? No, but after several watches, the features started to become