This course aims to deal with language above sentence (text) and beyond sentence (meaning in context) as a social and interactive process. A range of techniques and approaches to the study of discourse will be introduced, including the essential concepts of pragmatics, genre analysis, text cohesion and generic structure, and functional analysis of clauses. The course will also examine applications of discourse analysis in cross-cultural (mainly Chinese and English) settings and in educational settings (i.e. teacher-student interaction in the classroom).