Welcome back! Assessment week joy to you all! We will be doing the CLA half of an exam paper on Friday so revise all your terms and theory, little by little, all week.
Today I will be doing feedback on the analyses (notice the pluralisation is the same as hypothesis/hypotheses). Get a peer to read your media text (on-screen or hard copy, which might be easier), make some improvements and hand it in tomorrow - it won't be marked if it is late, remember. As soon as you can, start working on improving your analysis. Here are some general points for you all to consider (ask me any questions if you need clarification):
- the intros still need work (and it was very hard for me to know if your points were relevant to your title/hypothesis if you didn't give them in); ensure that you tell me in a clear and engaging way all I need to know to understand what you have chosen to look at and why it is a worthy investigation (why it's interesting). Also, show how your knowledge of theory leads you to choose an interesting hypothesis, and show how you will test it (which techniques you will be looking for, what kind of data and subjects you have chosen etc.)
- methodologies still need data description tables to set out exactly what you collected and clarify how you will refer to it in a way that reminds me what each transcript/letter/comment is e.g. 'transcript one' isn't as clear as 'T1rocket' to refer to the transcript of Zach telling his rocket story because I won't remember what transcript one refers to without a clue
- introduce the analysis so that you have a chance to evaluate why you are starting by looking at (for instance) sentence moods rather than non-standard English - it really helps if you have quantified your data in ways that relate to your hypothesis so that you can show what is most significant and why (ask Josie if you can see her approach)
- Sub-headings to organise the analysis are vital - they could be techniques, theories, key questions or another organisational structure you can think of but I don't want an essay, I want an investigation report (that allows you to hit the criteria of a logical/systematic approach) - each section might need another mini intro to establish the section's significance
- Within sections, ensure you have cohesion by using discourse markers at the start of each new paragraph e.g. in contrast, similarly, subsequently etc. (read my 'bad writing' post below this one to check you are not committing any other faux pas). If you change focus in a section, make it clear how and why.
- Many, many more terms needed! AO1 marks are almost exclusively for terminology used consistently and with accuracy (but also clear organisation and well-structured PEE). Choose aspects to investigate that allow you to closely analyse the terminology you can apply to significant quotes in context, tentatively exploring the relevance of theory and context as to why language might have been used in that way (and tentatively offering alternative interpretations).
- Relevance - I got tired of writing 'rel' on paragraphs that weren't closely linked to the title/hypothesis - either link them explicitly or leave them out
- Footnotes - more use of footnotes to cite theory (e.g. if you mention 'accommodation' you might need to footnote it as Goffman's CAT theory and give the year so I can refer to your bibliography and see how that is defined in your source (or at least check that you have a source!) or define your interpretation of particular terms so you can investigate their use with your limited resources e.g. how are you defining 'emotive' language that relates to 'feelings' to test Tannen's difference theory?
- Speaking of which, more range of theory please - if you are looking at CLA, I am sure you will also find gender or power theories relevant to apply as you go (don't forget to footnote them and put sources in your bibliography where possible) and you should evaluate how far your data supports/contradicts them all the way through, challenging theory (you have to show a 'range' of theory tentatively applied to get the higher marks)
- Quantify where possible
- Don't forget Harvard-referenced bibliographies for the investiation and the media text
- <sigh> and please, please stop using 'incorrect' and 'wrong' and remember to use 'non-standard'
- Discourse markers and clarification of the significance of what you are looking at
- Overview of how the technique/concept you are examining is used throughout (ideally using quantification to support your interpretation)
- 3-6 terms accurately applied to an exemplifying quote (or more than one) to explore how language is used in the context of the whole piece of data or the whole data pool
- Tentative links to theory and wider context, offering alternative interpretations and evaluating the limitations of your data if necessary
- Clarification of the relationship of what you are examining/discussing to your title/hypothesis
In addition to the open questions to prompt the development of the discourse with a child-led focus, M also uses closed questions, seemingly for transactional and regulatory purposes, however some of these also seem to have a use in developing independence of language use. In table 6 the closed questions are subdivided on the basis of interrogatives that require an answer that offers information (transactional e.g. "would you like juice or milk") and interrogatives that are related to compliance (regulatory e.g. "that wasn't a good idea (.) was it"). These regulatory interrogatives are mainly (4 out of 5 times over the three transcripts) phrased as a declarative with a tag question that is often (3 out f 4 times) not contradicted and reinforces the caregiver's role as the more powerful/knowledgeable participant1. What seems significant is the singular time (1 out of 5 within this small data pool, which might be anomalous in terms of a much larger sample but is here a quite significant 20%) that the regulatory approach is challenged. In T3dinner, C counters the regulatory admonishment "you shouldn't talk with your mouth full (.) should you" with "silly Mummy (.) you asked me a question at the wrong time". The use of the adjectives "silly" and "wrong" seem to seek to reverse the role of the powerful and less-powerful participants. The designation "silly" is characteristic of M's speech (used by M to C on 3 occasions over the three transcripts, along with the similar uses of evaluative adjectives "bossy" (x2) and "lovely" (x2) and therefore could be said to have been modelled frequently and it may or may not have been made clear that this is adult language not suitable for a child to reply with). These adjectives normally show the power behind the discourse of the caregiver to evaluate the behaviour of the child and potentially punish or reward (instrumental power). Although C does not possess this power, the use of this diminutive adjective "silly" to admonish M and the supporting declarative (including another judgemental adjective "wrong") to justify it show the ability of a 3-year-old to utilise adult forms that have been modelled for him for his own purposes, perhaps to try and level the asymmetric power in a circumstance where he may feel justified to stand up for himself (his observation about the circumstances is accepted as truthful, or at least convincing, by M when she remarks "lawyered!"). Her use of the exclamatory perhaps also acknowledges the sophistication of his response which may effectively raise his influential power in this situation and encourage the mother to consider her use of admonishments more carefully, suggesting that Fairclough's notion of unequal encounters2, if it includes changing power balances, is supported to a degree here (while M remains the more powerful participant, C has clearly raised his status in this adjacency pair). C's choice to challenge M's rebuke also suggests that child-led discourse strategies may indeed have encouraged the development of independence and sophisticated discourse strategies even in so young a child as he is able to use structures modelled for him to achieve his own purposes. It is not clear whether the use of the unmitigated FTA3 is finely judged (the verb "lawyered" seems to show an appreciation of C's bald-on-record strategy) or only accepted because of M's likely awareness that children so young are too egotistical4 to see where they might cause offence and therefore cannot choose to use more negative face5 approaches to someone with instrumental power over them. This might be the cause of the shocked humour implicit in the minor sentence "lawyered!" which may indicate a degree of offence which M puts aside by making a remark using low-frequency lexis that C will not understand the implications of and may be purely to manage her own feelings of affront at being challenged through humour; perhaps the remark even came from an awareness of being recorded (the observer's paradox) and was intended for the implied audiences beyond the dinner table who are linguists who would understand the connotations of cleverness and manipulativeness inherent in the noun "lawyer". M may be acknowledging C's progress as an influential speaker who can assert his own personality and sense of fairness by challenging her, maybe even with pride at the effectiveness of her own modelling.
I would probably divide that into several paragraphs for ease of reading but I wanted to show you what a unit of analysis should include and how in-depth you can go as long as you have a narrow enough focus on how you are going to test your hypothesis (find a way to leave out anythign you can't discuss in depth). I would have a slightly longer section before this on open questions and a much shorter section afterwards on how little significance the transactional questions seem to have.
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