Language change: a new view on borrowings.

Interesting post. Which borrowings do you think are used for prestige and which for the other reasons?

A-Level Language coursework support - investigations

Investigatives,

Here is the simplified version of the assessment objectives for the investigation component (which is marked out of 50):

AO1 What students do: their application of appropriate language methods, their analysis and their written expression. (15 marks)

 

AO2 What students understand about language study, including others’ ideas and research, along with an understanding of how to conduct a linguistic investigation. (15 marks)

 

AO3 What students interpret and understand from the language being used. In other words, the significance of the language in the data, its meanings and contexts.(20 marks)

 

Key factors:

 

AO3 is worth the most marks and you need to show an awareness of how the language features (which you get marks for exploring in AO1) are tailored to the specific context (GRAPE)  - how is the language of the producer understood by the receiver because of what happened earlier, shared pragmatic understanding, expectations about tone, sociolect, dialect, formality etc, how well-disposed the reciever is towards the producer or text etc, asymmetrical power, roles of the participants etc?

 

You must include a (Harvard referenced) bibliography and make reference to your theory reading throughout the analysis, as well as in the intro, using footnotes - find out how to do this if you don't already know. this will help you get high AO2 marks.

 

For your analysis, write using concise and focused analytical sentences, well-chosen subheadings and clear, contextualised examples from the data (data used in the analysis will not count towards the overall word count). 

 

You will need to include clean (unannotated) copies of your data for the final submission so photocopy another set to annotate as part of your analytical process.

 

Structure of the investigation:

 

Intro - a brief summary of relevant research ideas shouwing how you selected your hypothesis from them and how you are going to test it (how you chose what data to look at and which techniques you will focus on and why)

 

Methodology - how you made your data comparable, reliable, ethical (all your thoughtful considerations of how to collect suitable data - marks are given for this in AO2)

 

Analysis - a structured analysis using appropriate technique or theory sub-headings (not data piece one, two etc. - make sure you cover techniques from multiple frameworks over the course of the investigation) where you identify techniques in quoted data and explore how they suit the context and what relevant theory they might support/contradict (you can/should bring in other theories, not just the one your hypothesis is based on). Use tables of quantified data to identify what is worth exploring in depth and do a mini-intro for each sub-section to guide the reader, explaining why the following analysis is significant.

 

Conclusion - how far was your hypothesis supported/contradicted and why might that be (in context)? Be tentative.

 

Evaluation - what were the useful approaches and what was problematic? How could your investigation be fine-tuned or expanded?

A useful writing/reading site for Lang Lit and Lang doing 'storytelling'

Creatives,

some useful writing advice and some links to wider reading on the Litfic page of TVtropes.

AL2 (A-Level linear, year 2) Language (my AS class) final lesson of the year

Gorgeousnesses,

you are now AL2s, so get used to that terminology!

After our 'big fat quiz' in the classroom, you will be fired up to work hard over the summer :)

Please enrol yourselves on the old A2 Language page of Moodle where there are lots of resources to help you with the new key topics of CLA (child language acquisition) and LC (language change). I will tell you the enrolment key for self-enrolment when we get to the computer room or you can email me for it if you are reading this later. Beware - there are references to the old course, so you must constantly remember that you are not studying the course that it refers to.

Read through the green booklet if you haven't already and then please blog your current plans for your investigation (hypothesis, data and how you will collect it - use the headings of 'reliability', 'ethicality' and, if relevant, 'comparability'). What problems, issues, questions do you have? Put those on your blog too.

See what others are doing and comment on their blogs and do some wider reading around your topic area.

Don't forget that you can acces the textbook (Cambridge Elevate)!