A2 coursework lessons 15th and 18th October

Gorgeousnesses,

please be ready for Friday's coursework lesson by ensuring you have done all your theory reading, you are certain of the hypotheses you will be using that come from that theory reading and that you have thought about exactly why you chose that theory area and that data pool.

Tuesday: ensure you have finished your media text preparation work as I will be coming around to look at this with you today. For the rest of the time, please work on your investigation.

Friday: now you are certain of exctly what you are doing, it is time to write the introduction. As per the coursework booklet, there are certain elements that the introduction should contain (you may find that you can use some of the information that is currently in your methodology and then you can reduce the word-count of that). What is vital to understand is that this is the reader's first impression of you: it must show that you are a thoughtful, evaluative, sophisticated student who is very aware of the reader's needs (in terms of what needs explaining and how) and can write in a formal voice that is nonetheless very engaging. Keep it concise but explain your thinking and enthusiasm.

If I were a student doing an investigation into the gendered language of my peers, I might write an introduction like this.

An investigation into the gendered language uses of St Brendan's AS Drama students

Introduction

 The myriad theories regarding possible differences between male and female speech is a daunting but fascinating area of Language theory. Over time, it appears that the shift has been from distinctive differences percieved during the Dominance/Difference/Deficit research of the 1970s/80s (Zimmerman and West, Tannen, Lakoff) to a focus on the biological aspects [citation needed] and, more crucially, on the context that language is used in rather than by which gender (Cameron: "your genes don't determine your jeans"*1). Although Cameron's point is convincing, while our physical gender may not determine our language, particularly in a college where many feel the need to fit in and/or find their niche, society does appear to have some expectations of what is masculine or feminine speech; we may (even subconsciously) choose to conform to this. I am interested to see if this is the case.

I chose to examine the language of my peers but not those who shared my friendship group so that I could remain objective. I wanted to record people participating in a task and, when not asking friends who might give their time generously, I decided on students who regularly participate in group tasks to gain a better chance of them agreeing. I could have chosen Sports students, but since I wanted verbal responses rather than predominantly physical participation in my tasks, I decided that Drama students would give wholehearted participation and (I predicted) be confident enough to retain their individuality in a group task. I know that accommodation would be something worth looking at, but in the time frame of this investigation, I decided that differences would be more practical to explore within a limited data sample.

I needed to set tasks that would provide the participants with opportunities to use a range of language, so I decided on one discussion task, one problem-solving task and one solo interview (with the same questions and delivery for each participant - I practised this in advance).

Each of the six participants (three female and three male) would take part in each activity and, using the Dominance/Difference/Deficit theories, I could determine how far the language they used was in line with those gender expectations.

Hypotheses:

• According to Zimmerman and West, males will interrupt more in mixed-sex conversations (the discussion, the problem-solving and potentially in their interview with me).
• Males and females will predominantly correspond to the traits described in Tannen's Difference theory pairings (I will focus on status versus support in the discussion, competition vesus co-operation in the problem-solving task and report verus rapport in the interview).
• The language of females will be deficient in comparison to that of the males (I will look for Lakoff's 'deficient' techniques in both males and females and evaluate their use in context).

Rather than key frameworks, I will use theory headings, however the exploration will necessarily focus on discourse (for interruptions, back-channel agreement, length of turn etc.) and grammar for sentence moods, syntax analysis, word-classes etc.

*1 I would need a footnote and to reference that article in my bibliography

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Now, obviously this is much longer than my advised word count for the introduction and I would try and cut it down in my second draft (I wrote this in just over half an hour and had to come up with the whole idea for the investigation in that time) but you can see how the thinking is explored and then I can go into more detail about the exact process in the methodology, but that can be shorter because of the explanation here.