Language & Gender Intro: Is Your Brain Male or Female?

Morning all,

Today you will be planning and writing an article in response to the documentary we watched on Monday on male and female brains.

Using the notes you took on Monday, create a headline and write your opinion on the topic, using evidence from the documentary and your own opinions. Remember to set it out as an article and develop a line of argument.

Resources:

Link to the documentary for recap

Link to the Guardian's opinion pages - use these articles as style models on how to present your work and the kind of language used. Remember to write a headline!

Link to an article in the New Scientist - 'Scans prove there's no such thing as a male or female brain' - use this as a counterpoint


Any issues let me know!

Meanings & Reps Round Up

Morning all,

Today you'll be combining your meanings & representations analysis skills with your understanding of political leanings of UK publications.

Choose 1 of the articles that you analysed at the start of the year which covered an issue you are interested in i.e. veganism, environmental issues, marriage equality or LGBT issues etc. and read through it carefully to try and ascertain whether it is from a liberal or conservative perspective. Newspapers are clearly preferable here but you can do this with magazines.

Quickly GRAMPS and annotate the text and write an M&R paragraph.

Next try to find an article on the same topic, however from the opposite perspective (i.e. if your article is liberal, find one which is conservative).

Again, GRAMPS, annotate and write a paragraph.

Finally, write a comparative paragraph of the two articles.

This is practise and revision, so you can do all of this on your blog.

Any problems let me know!

Meanings & Representations Continued

Morning all

Firstly can you ensure that all your essays for Mirror Money and Mumsnet are completed and handed in by the end of the lesson, and a reminder that your comparison essay is due in today. Take some time now to complete this; the PPT from Monday's lesson is posted below.

We are continuing with the meanings & representations approach, and will be looking at the same, sensitive topic presented in two different newspapers from opposite sides of the political spectrum. This is in part so we can begin to recognise newspaper bias, since we will be looking at a lot of articles over the course of our study.

Read through the two articles and then complete the following task before you start to GRAMPS them:

click this link  to access the Political Compass quiz. There are questions here on society and the economy, so answer them as best you can. This is simply an exercise which will tell you where you are on the political spectrum and it will help you to recognise your own bias!

After this, focus on the Guardian article; GRAMPS it and annotate it as closely as possible (it is a long article so this will take a while).

Once you have completed this, show me your annotations and I'll give you the extension task.

Any issues let me know!

Today's Lesson

Afternoon everyone,

For your homework and revision, here is today's lesson PPT.

See you Wednesday, and a reminder that I'll be taking in your Q3 comparative responses in Wenesday's lesson.

Meanings and Representations PPTs

Hi all,

Please see below the PPTs from this week's study of the meanings & representations analytical approach. Read over these if there's anything you're still unsure of. Next week we will start looking at how to write the comparative response. Please finish your analyses of Texts A & B over the weekend ready to hand in on Monday.

Meanings and Reps Intro & Mumsnet

Mirror Money Intro

Mirror Money & Mark Scheme

Post-It Questions

Hi everyone,

In the list below I've provided a definition for the elements of the course people aren't quite confident on based on your Post-Its from Thursday's lesson. Hope this helps!

• Parenthesis - This is a word or a phrase that is inserted into a sentence or passage, and the sentence would be grammatically correct and complete without it. It's usually marked by brackets, dashes or commas. Basically, it refers to the phrase which is in brackets.

• Colloquialisms - This is the term for slang, informal language and dialectal words. 

• Lexical field - This refers to a group of words in a text which all relate to one particular word or subject. For example, the Mumsnet text we are looking at in class has a lexical field of proms.

• Discourse structure - This is the term used to describe the way in which an entire text is organised (i.e. how its parts are assembled). For example: a question and answer format; problem – solution structure; narrative structure; adjacency pairs in a spoken interaction.

• Discourse markers - This refers to words, phrases or clauses that help to organise what we say or write (e.g. OK, So, “As I was saying…, However, In Addition, Subsequently” etc.).

• Pre-modified noun phrase - This refers to an adjective coming before a noun in a noun phrase. As soon as we modify a noun, it becomes a 'noun phrase'. A noun phrase usually begins with a determiner ('a' or 'the') and usually has the noun as the most important word. The usual word order in English implies that an adjective should go infront of the noun, as in 'The brown dog' etc. This is known as pre-modification. But we can post-modify noun phrases too, e.g. 'The dog, which is brown, ran down the street. 

• Grammar - This term refers to sentence structure, function and word order (syntax) and verb tense. Any time you analyse these things, you are analysing the grammar of the text.

• Pragmatics - This refers to language in use and the contexts in which it is used and the inferences a reader makes from a text. It refers to what the author is implying, and not directly saying, and what prior knowledge and understanding the reader would need in order to understand the text and its meaning. It also refers to: the implied meanings of words, utterances and speech acts in their specific contexts, how attitudes, values and ideologies can be signalled through language choices, how language is used to enact and reflect relationships between people, aspects of culturally-based routines that are founded on shared assumptions and tradition

• Semantics - This refers to the meanings of words and the relationships between them. It can be applies to entire texts or single words. For example, 'destination' and 'last stop' technically mean the same thing, but semantically they have subtle differences in meaning. 

• Lexis - Very simple, lexis means words and vocabulary!