Today's lesson and half term homework

Afternoon all,

Today is our last lesson of this half term and we need to ensure we are all making good and speedy progress on our investigations.

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 if not already. 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 only count something as an interruption when it's a contradiction, agenda shift or the first person stops talking immediately or within 1 second.

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. Never say 'proves' or 'disproves'. Aways acknowledge the limitations of the data.