Welcome Year 12 Language

 Welcome to my new Year 12 English language classes!

I use and update this blog regularly to post lesson content, resources and tasks. Most of your online lesson content will be on Teams, however make sure you check the blog regularly.

If you need to get in touch my college email address is cal@stbrn.ac.uk

A reminder of your homework:

• You all should have created a blog as your summer task, but if you haven't you need to make one now. Follow the instructions below:
• Go to blogger.com and enter your Gmail details. If you don't have a Gmail account make one now, and keep a note of your Gmail address and password.
• Make your blog and then everyone needs to send me the URL via email to cal@stbrn.ac.uk
• Your URL should be something like 'claudialanguageblog.blogspot.com' but if you have something different then let me know
• You need to complete and submit the other parts of the summer task (glossary) next lesson.

Enjoy your first week!

C Block - Wednesday Lesson

Hi all,

As discussed, the first piece of work I'll be setting remotely (not setting this yet, and I'll communicate further through Microsoft Teams when we've set up) will be a discursive essay on the topic of language & occupation. The resources you will need for this are your blue booklets, and the language & occupation slides below (click to open):
PPT 1
PPT 2
PPT 3
PPT 4
Lang & Occupation Mind Map
This will be set formally through teams next week, but you can make a start on the reading now and consider the essay question:

Evaluate how far a person’s language might be affected by their occupation.

Paper 2 Feedback

Please click here for P2 feedback.

Paper 1 Feedback

Please click here to access the feedback PowerPoint

Work in my absence 20th Jan

Hi all,

I am absent today, so please find linked below your work set for today. You will need to use the PowerPoint from Thursday's lesson (linked in post below) and your language change booklets. The questions in response to this text are at the end of the article by Sandi Toksvig, which addresses the descriptivist vs prescriptivist debate. Please write up your answers on your blog.

Link to article

Lang Change PPT

Please click here to access.

Bibliographies

Please click here to access the bibliography powerpoint.

Final investigation lesson before Friday deadline

Afternoon all,

As the title says, this is your last investigation lesson before your full draft is due in on Friday. As you are only entitled to one draft, you need to ensure that it's up to the required word count so your feedback is as detailed and specific as possible. Some of you have a lot of catching up to do - you must ensure that it is all completed and up to scratch.

The final piece that is missing is the conclusion in which you evaluate your findings and decide whether or not these have proven your hypothesis. Some general advice:

Conclusion/Evaluation:

• Conclusion needs to be tentative - mention any issues you had with generalising or the reliability of your data, despite your careful methodology
• Evaluate how far your hypothesis was proven
• Consider any contextual elements that might have affected the data (e.g. age/dialect/social group etc.)
• What would you need to make a more effective investigation? e.g. more data, a more focussed hypothesis, another section/another technique analysed etc.
• Don't be self-critical, but do be evaluative of the investigation

Conclusion & Evaluation can be combined under one heading, and should total about 300 words. You have a handout containing 3 examples, so look at each one and model your own on their style.

Investigations: Organisation and Editing

Hi everyone,

As the first draft deadline for your coursework looms ever closer, ensure that you are making rapid progress with your analysis.

Another task on your list is to organise your investigation and edit out anything unnecessary which may tip you over the word count.

In order to make your investigations presentable, please complete the following steps today:

1. Now that you have collected and shown me your data in full, copy and paste your data onto a new document and delete it from your original investigation document.

2. Introductions: please edit your introductions down to a word count of approximately 200/300 words.
Note: your hypotheses should be stated clearly at the end of your introduction and not in your methodology.

3. Methodologies: please edit your methodologies down to a word count of approximately 200/300 words.

Note: together your introductions and methodologies should equal approximately 500 words. You can tailor these sections to suit your needs but be aware that the methodology will likely net you more marks.

4. Analysis: overall your analysis needs to be approximately 1200 words but remember that your analysis needs to be organised into sections with subheadings and data tables. Data tables are not included in your word count.

5. When you have completed your analysis, you need to write a conclusion and evaluation at approximately 300 words. I will provide a model of this for you next week.

Investigation - Starting to analyse your data

Afternoon all.

Today you need to start working on your analysis, and also you need to keep chipping away at your intros and your methodologies. Additionally if you have not yet collected your data, this now needs to be done as a matter of urgency.

Remember that this is an investigation and not an essay so when you hand in your first draft, the analysis needs to be divided into subheadings that will help you explore your hypothesis. This means that you need to give an overview of the data in each section of the analysis (under each subheading) and not explore each piece of data separately.

To structure your analysis section you need to:

1. Choose sub-headings
2. Present quantified data in the form of tables/charts
3. Explore those findings using PEE, context, theory and relate it all back to your hypothesis.

Click here to see an example of how your analysis should be presented.


Choosing subheadings:

• Consider how you are testing your hypothesis e.g. if you are looking at the use of CDS, your subheadings might be 'interrogatives', 'child-led discourse', and 'simplification and diminutives' (notice that these are features of CDS across a range of frameworks that will be significant in the data that will allow you to explore the uses of CDS in the transcripts in a structured, comparative way)

• They don't necessarily need to be techniques, they could be key questions i.e. 'In which ways is dominance established by the dominant participant?' (Notice that this question allows the exploration of not only who may be the dominant participant in each of the transcripts but how they achieve this and could call for more subheadings under this key question)

• The quantifying you have done should lead you to choose these subheadings thoughtfully because it should point you to the significant or puzzling findings that need exploration with PEE

Using Tables/Charts:

• Tables and charts are an important part of your analysis - they help provide evidence of all the thinking you have been doing in order to test your hypothesis and are the basis for your findings

• They should represent the most interesting of your quantified data and should help you to explain why you have chosen to focus of particular areas of the data e.g. if you are looking at gendered language in written texts, you might have a table of which lexical fields dominate and then choose to explore the top two with PEE analysis

• They should be introduced at the start of of the section in a clear and useful way that establishes why they are interesting/useful and an overview of what they show

• They should be positioned where they will be useful to the reader of your investigation and referred to in the analysis, not just for show

 PEE

• Because of word limit, you need to be highly selective about what you explore: pick significant or puzzling findings and look at quotes in context (context is AO3 and worth 20 marks - for tentatively exploring how meanings and representations are affected by social and cultural issues etc.), applying all relevant theories (AO2 - 15 marks) and exploring techniques using terminology, clearly guiding the reader (AO1 - 15 marks)

• Always relate your explorations back to your hypothesis - remember, that's what the investigation is about - how far if your hypothesis supported/contradicted (not proven/disproven because it's such a small investigation) by the data you have collected?

You may go over the word count at the drafting stage but it is better to have more that you can select the best bits from to raise the consistence of the quality of the overall piece. You might end up leaving out a whole sub-heading in order to go into more depth on the others.

C Block - Investigation Work

Morning all - hope you all had a nice half term!

At the end of this term your first draft of your investigations is due in. This means we have approx. 7 lessons to get your introduction, methodology, analysis, conclusion and evaluation all tidied up ready to hand in. You are only permitted one draft for which you get feedback, so you need to have this all completed or you'll miss out on advice for your final draft.

Over half term you will have collected all of your data ready to analyse, but fist you need to quantify your data in order to help you pick out the relevant aspects to analyse and this is what you will be doing today.

The is the first major step in analysing your data. You won't be analysing every single word of every single piece of data you have collected. Therefore, you need to quantify (i.e. single out) 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 also 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'. Always acknowledge the limitations of the data.

Make a start on this today as next week we will be writing your analysis sections. Any questions, let me know.

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.

Methodologies

Afternoon all

Now that you have all written an introduction the next step is to outline your methodologies. The reason for doing this is to ensure that you have an awareness of how you are collecting your data and how you intend to analyse it, whilst ensuring it remains comparable, reliable and ethical. The more thorough the methodology, the higher your mark for AO2 will be.

Start off by writing your methodology in note form, taking into account the following:

• 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. I will collect 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

Below is an example for how to address each factor:

1. 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. If your data is in the public domain (i.e. TV/YouTube) just use this section to outline that
2. 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); 
3. 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.

For an exemplar methodology, please click here.

Please put your introductions and methodologies together in one document and hand them in at the end of the lesson. I will mark these together as they give me a clear picture of your investigation as a whole project - any issues let me know!

PPTs for Skinner's Behaviorist Theory, Chomsky and how to write a response

Please click here for last week's PPT.

Please click here for yesterday's PPT.

Last Thursday's PPT for CLA

Hi all, please click here for the powerpoint.

Monday (D block) & Wednesday (C block) Tasks

Hi everyone,

As mentioned last week, in these lessons you will be completing your introductions and hypotheses. Your introductions (300 words approx.) need to be with me at the end of the lesson so I can check them over and identify any issues with your investigation that need to be ironed out. If your intro is fine, then this part of your investigation will be complete and you can move on. You should outline your hypothesis at the end of your introduction.

For introduction advice, please see the previous posts below this one and read over this exemplar introduction (this inv. got an A).

Any issues please let me know.

Investigations - Writing an Introduction

Morning all,

If you have an established investigation idea that you want to run with, you will be writing a draft version of your introduction to this investigation. This needs to be about 300 words and needs to be finished by the end of the lesson and emailed to me. So essentially, you have 90 mins to write 300 words - should be easy!

This is an essential part of your investigation; a good introduction will orientate the marker and show off what you know in a concise, academic way.

Planning:

• Why you chose the theory area and data - what makes this an interesting and useful investigation? (remember to be academic and not overly enthusiastic)

• A summary of what you know about that theory area including a range of theories and how they connect/contrast

• What you have focused in on from all of those and why

• Therefore what your hypothesis is

• How you will test it (which features of language will you quantify/explore) and why

There is a clear flow here that is essential for getting good marks on AO1 (the structure and flow of your investigation and the clarity and precision). Really think about the reader's needs - what do I need to know to understand your thinking and your process?


To exemplify this and to give you an idea, below is an introduction taken from a previous investigation. You can use this initially to give you ideas about the structure and content, but I don't want 20 slightly edited versions of this coming back to me at the end of the lesson:

Gender was the main focus throughout my investigation. Gender is stereotyped

by many people, therefore I have undertaken an investigation to gather and

analyse my own data. I wanted to investigate whether men and women speak

differently, using Robin Lakoff’s theory ‘The Deficit Model’ . Lakoff’s theory looks

specifically at gendered speech, in particular, women using deficient language

such as ‘hedges, tag questions and false starts’.

The data I have gathered is from ‘The Only Way is Essex’. Reality TV is a hot topic,

Towie has a main purpose to entertain, and its audience’s are teenagers, also the

cast within the show. In 2011 the show had 1.7million viewers. 6 I am using TOWIE

because it is an informal show where spontaneous conversations take place.

Danni and James are one of the main couples from the show. They are very

popular with fans which have led to them being shown more frequently on the

later series of the show. There are Fan Pages on Instagram which show that they

are a well-known couple.

The Deficit Model is a theory that suggests that ‘male language is the norm and female language is deficient.’  Robin Lakoff has a book ‘Language and Woman’s place’ which is based on female language being weaker than males. 8 She created a list of language

frequently used by women such as ‘hedges, polite forms, tag questions and

empty adjectives’. She also states that they apologise more and lack a sense of

humour. The Dominance model can be used in my investigation, which is a theory by

Zimmerman and West. This model states that ‘men dominate the conversation due to their superior status’. In mixed sex conversations, men are more likely to interrupt. The Difference Model may be useful for my investigation, looking at how men and women are brought up differently; meaning ‘communication between the sexes is similar to communication between two different cultures’.

Therefore my hypothesis is ‘Danni will use more deficit features than James whilst in conversation’.

Transition work for summer

Hi all,

In addition to collecting your data for your investigations over the summer, please also continue to build on your knowledge of the theories you have studied throughout the year.

Click here to access the transition task. Please make a copy to your own Google drive and fill in the grid (the first has been done for you - this should be fairly self explanatory) and use the booklets and resources that have been shared with over the year to help you.

Have a lovely summer, see you in September!

Investigation Ideas

Hi all,

Please see a previous post of mine from 2017 with some info on approaching the investigation. Get creative with this, really think about your interests and how you could explore them.

Click here for post

Quick addition: here's a link to a thread on Dan Clayton's Twitter in which he asked teachers to reply with their favourite investigation titles they've seen over the years.

How To Write A Transcript

Hi all,

Please click here to access instructions on writing a transcript to help you with your mini investigations.