Tuesday, 13 May 2014

Language Change

  • What are the comparable factors and how do they help you to explore change?
  • How are the techniques suitable for the target audiences of that time and how might audiences of the other time react or what might be changed to suit them?
  • What are the significant aspects of each text that are worth commenting on and how can you link those to terminology, theory and context?


  • The two texts, one being a preface to Isabella Beetons 'Book of Household management' and the other being the back cover of Caitlin Moran's 'How to be a woman' are both from very different time era's 150 years apart and due to this are very different even know they are likely to have the same female primary audience of a similar age range. Although both of the texts look at life from a womans perspective, they take a very different outlook on it. The earliest text sees a womans role as being the perfect housewife, and the later text sees it as a much more informal and equal role. Isabella Beeton takes a more stereotypical approach and seems comfortable with the inequality between women and men, whereas Caitlin Moran uses much more humour and aliteration and has a more empowering outlook regarding change. There is a lot more interesting graphology in the later text, compared to practically nothing in the earlier one, possibly showing that this was unecessary years ago. Semantic Derregation is used with the words 'Mistress' and 'Master' in the earliest text and shows how there is still negative connotations surrounding the female equivalent of the word and this is not the case with the male word.

    Tuesday, 1 April 2014

    Why dialect discrimination is unwise

    Earlier this year a Middlesbrough teacher

    sent letters home to parents giving them

    a list of speech features they should urge

    their children to avoid. The list was made

    up of accent features (pronunciation) such

    as ‘tomorra’ and dialect features (words

    and grammar) such as ‘nowt’ and ‘I done

    that’. Media coverage of the letter resulted

    in the resurgence of an old argument

    about whether schools should ensure that

    working-class pupils are able to adopt a

    prestige speech style and avoid the use of

    local speech features like these.

    Is it unfair that employers should discriminate against potential employees because of their dialect
     

    Tuesday, 18 March 2014

    Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte


    Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

    There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears:  who to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imiah came before the throned kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep with power as prophet-like and as vital – a mien as dauntless and as daring. As the satirist of ‘Vanity Fair’ admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the Levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time – they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead.
    PEE
    In Jane Eyre, a lot of the references used, for example, 'the throned kings of Judah and Isreal' are religious references which shows that religion was much more prevalent years ago in the time that this novel was written. Words such as 'mien' and 'seed' are used in contexts which they would not be used in nowadays, and this shows the age of the piece. Some of the wording used seems very intellectual and this is because those who would have been reading this type of literature would have been highly educated and would have been able to understand the wording.

    Friday, 24 January 2014

    Paragraph of Lineation and Mis-cue's

    Lineation - I want a cat
    The lineation in the childrens book, 'i want a cat' is set in a certain way to help young children who are not yet confident readers develop their reading skills. There is a short, simple breakdown of sentences in place to avoid over-complicating thinks and to help make it easier for the child to comprehend and read.Above the wiriting, is a simple picture to complement the text inside a box to make the whole page as simple and clear as possible

    Mis-Cue's - Hairy Maclary
    In the recording of the young child reading aloud 'Hairy Maclary from Donaldsons Dairy', he makes a series of mis-cues and virtuous errors which are typical for his age range and development. he pronounces the name 'Donaldson' incorrectly and this is likely to be because it is a long word containing a constonant cluster which is confusing to a less confident reader. There are times in the recording where the childmisses out a few of the connecting words such as 'and' and 'the', this is because it is quite a fast paced, rhyming story which makes it easy for children to miss out small words as they are likely to me more focused on trying to read the bigger, more complicated ones.

    Friday, 10 January 2014

    Overview

    In the transcript, Evie's Grandmother is helping her to learn speech through playing games with her and basing them around local topics that interest Evie. As the more powerful participant, Gramdma not only selects the activity on the basis that she knows it will help Evie to develop her language, but also often corrects her vituous errors and even allows Evie to set the agenda. Evie appears to be in the telegraphic stage, and her Grandmother supports this by encouraging and supporting her speech and thought processes as in Bruner's interaction theory.

    6 Points

    - The Grandmothers praise towards Evie
    - Evie's pronunciation
    - Virtuous errors from Evie
    - Copying from Evie
    - Evie leading
    - Questionning from Evie

    Monday, 11 November 2013

    Phonological Development of Children

    Phonological Development is...

    Study of the sound system of the
    language. The sounds that the language
    uses, as well as the rules for their
    combination.

    There are around 200 sounds used in
    languages throughout the world. No one
    language makes use of all 200 sounds.
    English has over 40 different sounds.
    Sound is at the beginning of language learning. Children have to learn to distinguish different sounds and to segment the speech stream they are exposed to into units – eventually meaningful units
     When you read, there are spaces between the words. No such spaces occur between spoken words. So, if an infant hears the sound sequence “thisisacup,” it has to learn to segment this stream into the distinct units “this”, “is”, “a”, and “cup.”

    Sunday, 20 October 2013

    Introduction

    Introduction -

     

     

    What is the difference between the language of women’s magazines and girl’s magazines?

     The communication accommodation theory by Howard Giles shows that when people speak, they adjust what is said or how it is said depending on who they are addressing and what context and situation they are addressing them in. I am aware that this undeniably happens with adults and very young children, but I would be interested to see if this applies with a much smaller age gap and if the difference is so distinct. This is why I have chosen to investigate difference that magazine editors use in their letters to the audience in the top 3 women’s magazines and the top 3 girls magazines to see if that theory applies in this area. Along with the communication accommodation theory, I will be looking at some particular frameworks – discourse structure, lexis and grammar. My hypothesis, based on the theory, is that the two editors letters will be very divergent, especially the grammar and even though essentially they are both aiming to do the same job of addressing the reader, it will be done in two very different ways simply because of the age of their audience. This investigation interests me because when I was younger I used to really enjoy reading the types of magazines I am using which are aimed at younger girls, and now I really enjoy the magazines aimed at young women, so seeing how distinct the differences are will be interesting. The theory, which states that we tend to imitate not only speech but also behaviour habits of those who we are interacting with, appeals to me because I think that it will be correct in the case of my investigation, so it was easy to come up with an interesting hypothesis.  Although this theory is related to speech, it will be interesting to see if the same applies for written texts too.