LANGUAGE ANALYSIS
For Assessment 2, you are required to respond to a series of questions about the grammatical structures embedded in the text that you recorded for your hurdle task. There are seven ques-tions and each is worth 10 marks. To achieve a high mark in this assessment, you must active-ly engage with your data at two levels: as a linguist and as an educator. In engaging with the data, it is important to refer to relevant literature (from both the reading list and beyond that list) to support your claims (e.g. I used X’s definition of a noun phrase because it considered three syntactic criteria).
QUESTION A: ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION (10 marks)
You are to prepare your recorded data for analysis. You are to write out your text, as record-ed, with all of the usual features of naturally produced spoken language (i.e., incomplete words, incomplete sentences, hesitation markers and pauses). You must provide an accom-panying table listing the conversational transcription (CA) conventions that you have used in a coding table (e.g., … ‘long pause’), and provide the source of these conventions (e.g. Heritage et al 1984 or Sidnell 2015). If you have prepared a written script for your record-ing, please do not rely on your original script as an accurate representation of what you said (e.g. you may have paused part way through an utterance or not finished a word).
QUESTION B: COHERENCE (10 marks)
Define coherence, and provide a detailed analysis of how your text coheres. In your answer explore your text linguistically and consider how both mode and medium affect how your text coheres. In other words, in your answer, you must explain how the image/s (your “selfie”) and the digital nature of your text affects your text’s overall coherence. In all in-stances, you should also make reference to available literature to support your claims. After you have explained how you have made your text cohere, reflect on how this type of digital text can be useful for teaching English and explain how you might use a digitally mediated and multi-modal text in English language teaching, and for what purposes. Refer to relevant literature in the field.
Hint for analysing coherence: There are many ways to achieve coherence. You may have achieved coherence through the use of multiple resources: the image, the text structure, conversational cues (greetings), a communicative style, lexical bundling (see Hyland 2012), cohesive devices, etc etc.
QUESTION C: PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY (10 marks)
Phonetic transcription, syllables, stress, intonation and phonemic analysis
· Copy the first 100 full or partial words from your text. Using broad phonemic tran-scription, transcribe these 100 words.
· Make a second copy of the broad phonemic transcription of the first 100 words. In this version, divide each of these words into syllables and mark the primary lexical stress of each content word.
· Make a third copy of the broad phonemic transcription. In this version, mark any in-tonation contours that are present in your data.
· Explain how a broad phonemic analysis would be different than a narrow phonetic analysis using the first five words in your transcript.
· Identify one sound or suprasegmental feature in your first 100 words of your transcript and describe an activity that would make use of that sound or suprasegmental feature. Your activity should be creative, interesting and meaningful to your learner to help them develop their communicative competence. It should help in their learning of this particular feature (consciously or unconsciously). Your claims should be supported by literature in the field.
QUESTION D: MORPHOLOGY (10 marks)
Morphological analysis
Make three more copies of your entire 3-4 minute text.
· In the first copy, highlight all instances of inflectional morphemes.
· In your second copy, highlight all instances of derivational morphemes.
· In your third copy, highlight all compounds in yellow font, and all other word for-mation processes in green font.
· Write a paragraph or two after each copy of the transcript explaining the basis of your decisions. These claims should be supported by reference to the literature in the field.
· Indicate how you would teach one morphological feature in your text to a learner of Eng-lish. Your teaching activity should help a learner to use your selected feature. Your activity should be creative, interesting and meaningful to the learner. It should be designed in a way that helps the learner to develop their communicative competence. You should refer to relevant literature in the field to support your claims.
QUESTION E: WORDS (10 marks)
Word categories and meaning
· Analyse your entire 3-4 minute transcript and find one example of every word class. Present your findings in a table with three columns labelled: word class, example and justification. In your justification, provide a detailed explanation of why your word belongs to the selected word class, and state whether your example is prototypical or non-prototypical and why (e.g. it is a non-prototypical noun because the chosen ex-ample of a noun does not take the plural suffix). Refer to the relevant literature in the field to support your claims.
· Provide an analysis of a hesitation marker or unfinished word in your text. You should refer to relevant literature in the field to support your claims.
· State whether you have any ‘flat’ adverbs in your transcript and explain why or why not. (One of the readings for this subject is about ‘flat’ adverbs).
· Indicate how you would teach some aspect of word classes to a learner of English. Your teaching should engage the learner with language in use. Your activity should be creative, interesting and meaningful to your learner. It should help your learner develop their com-municative competence. You should refer to relevant literature in the field to support your claims.
QUESTION F: PHRASES & CLAUSES (10 marks)
Phrasal and clausal categories
Create six copies of the first 100 full words in your transcript and code the phrases.
· Copy 1: Bold your Noun Phrases in the first copy.
· Copy 2: Bold your Prepositional Phrases in the second copy.
· Copy 3: Bold your Verb Phrases in the third copy.
· Copy 4: Body your Auxiliary Phrases in the fourth copy.
· Copy 5: Bold your Adjectival Phrases in the fifth copy.
· Copy 6: Bold your Adverbial Phrases in the sixth copy.
From this transcript, find a good example of a repeated (or partly repeated) phrase or clause which you might use for teaching purposes. Explain how you could use your chosen exam-ple/s as the focus of a teaching activity. Your teaching should engage the learner with lan-guage in use. Support your claims with relevant literature.
QUESTION G: UNDERSTANDING ONE’S LINGUISTIC SELF (10 marks)
Understanding of the essence of your linguistic self
Find two examples that illustrate “your way of speaking” from your 3-4 minute transcript. You may refer to your use of sounds or hesitation markers, or words that you tend to use a lot, or bundles of words, or aspects of your sentence or text structure and explain how these ways of speaking are important to you.
Explain how and why you might teach your students about their individual ways of speaking.
In your answers to all questions, refer to the relevant literature that you have used to inform your claims. You should combine all references in a single bibliography at the end of your assessment.