Today's Lesson & Half Term Homework

Morning all,

Today will be our coursework lesson as we will need Wednesday & Thursday to go through your responses for the timed assessment, and for people who missed it to catch up.

First things first, if you haven't completed (or started) your research into the WUG test and the FIS phenomenon, can you please complete this today.

Secondly, you should have all now completed an initial draft of your introduction and methodologies. For today, can you put these two sections together onto a word document and see if they from a cohesive intro to your investigation.

Next, continue to work on gathering your data. This needs to be completed as your half term homework. You must have 2 copies, one annotated and one clean.

If you have done all of these, you can make a rough start on quantifying your data:

The first major step in analysing your data is to quantify as many things as possible that will test your hypothesis e.g. if you are hypothesising that you will find defecit features, you will need to count how many hedges, empty adjectives etc. you find. These quantified findings will tell you what is significant (common/patterns of results) and worth exploring or unexpected and therefore worth exploring.

Set out a protocol for anything where it might be ambiguous what you are counting and not counting e.g. for interruptions you might want to establish that you are not going to count any back-channel agreement i.e. only count something as an interruption when it's a contradiction, agenda shift or the first person stops talking immediately or within a second of when the second participant speaks.

You might want to sub-divide e.g. count all interrogatives but keep them also as separate totals for open, closed, tag, rhetorical, prompt questions etc.

Keep them sub-divided also if you have multiple pieces of data so you can see if there are anomalies (surprising results, outliers etc.) in particular contexts e.g. if the participant's number of interrogatives decreases in one transcript, it would be a signal to look closely at why in that context fewer interrogatives were used.

Once you have quantified anything you need to in order to decide how far your hypothesis is supported or contradicted, you can start doing close PEE anlaysis in context to explore why this might be the case according to any relevant theory - be tentative and don't come to any firm conclusions. Ever. Never say proves or disproves. Aways acknowledge the limitations of the data.

CLA essay feedback, planning for assessment and WUG Test/ FIS Phenomenon

Morning all,

Tomorrow you will be doing a timed essay for me which will be your first graded piece of work. This will be based on the 'Joey and adult' transcript you wrote about last week. I have given you all some brief feedback so can you take some time today and reflect on this and think about how you are going to make improvements to this during tomorrow's lesson.

Take a look at the mark scheme (which I gave you all a copy of last Monday) and the exemplar essay for this question by clicking here. Look at the examiner's commentary and think about what this person has and has not done well and how you might adapt this.

Here is a link to the Transcript.

Once you have done this, can you all do some research into the WUG Test and the FIS phenomenon; these are important Case Studies that you will need to reference in your analysis. Post the research notes on your blog and ensure you understand the studies and their relevance.

Any issues, let me know.

Investigation - Methodologies

Morning all

Last week you wrote a very rough draft of your introductions (I am still waiting for a lot of these so you need to make sure I have them by the end of the lesson) so you should all have an idea of what you are investigating and why, and you should have your hypothesis.

If you do not, this needs to be done today.

If you have, then today you need to do the next stage of the investigation which is your methodology. This is how you will test your data to prove/disprove your hypothesis.

Write your methodology in note form, taking into account the following:

• State your hypothesis first and explain the theory basis if necessary (this will go in your intro eventually, not your methodology, but I will need to know it) e.g. The interrogatives used by the caregiver will have an impact on the child's language (Bruner and Vygotsky's ideas about social interaction)

• Explain what kind of data you will collect (be as specific as possible) and how it will help you to test the hypothesis e.g. three transcripts showing a dialogue between the caregiver and child in child-led tasks - this will allow me to see how the caregiver uses interrogatives and how/whether that technique structures the task and the child's responses

• Under the relevant sub-headings, deal with the three key factors to show your sophisticated considerations of the problems and how to solve them - ethicality, comparability, reliability - reliability will be the most important factor in such a small-scale investigation and ethicality may not be an issue in public data - say so if this is the case e.g. ethicality: I will get full, informed consent from the caregiver and all participants over the age of consent (using initial verbal consent and then a form explaining the use of the data and the participant's right to withdraw their permission) and ensure that the recordings do not impact on the child's usual activities by having the caregiver record when the activity is already decided upon; comparability: I will ensure that the same caregiver and child are used, that all the dialogues are child-led as far as it is possible to ascertain this, that (where other participants are involved) any uncomparable sections of data are disregarded, that the context is the same as far as possible (home environment - although time of the day and day of the week will vary due to necessity of getting child-led dialogues, and the age of the child will need consideration as they develop so quickly at this age); reliability: longer transcripts and more of them are desirable (3 transcripts of >3 minutes seems a reasonable amount of data for an investigation of this size), as averages will be less affected by anomalies, but the small amount of data means the effect of possible anomalies will need to be considered, especially when comparing the transcripts rather than using averages across them, and contextual factors will need close consideration when trying to determine how reliable each piece of data is.

• If you need to establish a protocol for what you will include in your testing and what you won't, draft one now, although it might go in your final analysis rather than your methodology

• Please let me know if you will need to ask someone's permission to record natural speech or access private data e.g. someone's letters or diaries, or someone's Facebook data if the expectation is that only friends will see it etc.

• You will need to get me to check your methodology and any letters/forms for permission before you collect your data. Post the methodology on your blogs and email me a version of it at the end of the lesson. As with your introduction, this will not be the marked draft, I will take that in after you have collected the data so it is accurate; this one is just for me to check you have made good choices and considered problems and issues.

Writing a CLA Essay

Morning all,

I'd like you to have a go at writing a response to a CLA essay question today, including everything we have covered about CLA stages, theories and CDS, and remember you still need to include linguistic terminology.

Spend around 10-15 minutes annotating the transcript and then have a go at writing the essay. I'd like one typed essay in from everyone at the end of the lesson. Look at the mark scheme you've been given for guidance. Remmeber that this is your first attempt and we haven't covered the whole topic yet so there will still be gaps in your knowledge.

Good luck!