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.