AS Lang computer room lesson 21/6/16

Creatives,

please spend this lesson trying out a prospective investigation by choosing a hypothesis and collecting sample data to test it with. Do a quick analysis to see if your hypothesis is supported or contradicted and to what extent (a successful investigation could either support or contradict theory or a bit of both!). Post your findings and any issues you encountered to your blog. What would make this a valid investigation?

Sample data is data that is kind of, sort of, a bit like the data you might really collect and will give you an indication of what you might find, what the problems might be, how much data you might need etc.

Here are five examples of the kind of thing you could do (quickly please) today:

If you want to record a child in your family, find clips of children doing the kind of activities you might want them to do and transcribe some data to test your hypothesis e.g. children will not use language they are not yet cognitively developed enough to understand (Piaget) - this could lead you to look for non-standard uses and what is altered/missing or, conversely, uses of language they clearly don't understand.

If you want to collect Vote Leave propaganda, you could have a look for some on the internet, although your real data might be leaflets. You could test a Power hypothesis e.g. the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (it matters what you call something because language influences thought/attitudes) by looking at how controversial subjects are referred to e.g. lexical fields, use of synonyms, euphemisms/dysphemisms, adjectives.

If you wanted to look at mixed-sex discussions to test deficit theory you could find something on YouTube to transcribe in order to test the hypothesis that women will use Lakoff's uncertainty features, to see if that was the case and suggest reasons why/why not, bringing in other theory when you discuss it. You could then decide what you want to actually record.

If you wanted to look at Penelope Eckert's research on social groups and dialect, 'jocks and burnouts', you could get someone who you know identifies as being in a particular social group to answer some questions about themselves (make sure they are ethical ones) or to talk on a controvesial topic that you could use for all the people you recorded (get permission before you record but don't tell them what you are interested in - get full, informed consent, afterwards and anonymise the data before you post any analysis onto your blog).

If you wanted to look at how occupation affects language, you could test the hypothesis by Swales that members of a discourse community share pragmatic understanding by looking at comments on a particular business magazine or reviews of a product for a particular business and see the kind of abbreviations, coined terms, shared references that were used.

Please post some analysis and reference to how far your hypothesis was supported/contradicted and what you learned about possible investigations.