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.

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
 

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.

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.

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

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.”

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.

Media Text - Synthesising Skills

Media Text – Synthesising Skills

An extract from a magazine

Unfortunately and annoyingly for some, there is no set timeframe for a child to develop speech. You may be feeling frustrated thinking your child can’t talk straight or walk straight, whilst all the other mums are enjoying constantly bragging about how developed and clever their little bundles of joy are. Your child may now be able to point to pictures in a book when you name them or can point to a few body parts when asked, but speaking just is not their strong point. You’ve tried and tried repeating words countless times and being as encouraging as humanly possible, but it’s just not happening! But, it could be that these irritating, bragging parents are simply overestimating what their son or daughter is trying to say whilst you are trying to be more realistic, Andrew Wilkinson says, ‘When parents detect the baby’s first words they claim that he is beginning to talk… But to the linguist single words do not constitute language, which depends on the relationship of one word to another. These single words are now known as ‘holophrases’. So, who’s to say that your child is underdeveloped? Who’s to say that these parents aren’t over exaggerating their child’s milestones? Who’s to say that it even matters?

Media Text Investigation

Choose an aspect of theory in your chosen area and write a paragraph or two about it in three different versions for the following APFs: A men's or women's magazine e.g. Elle A scientific magazine for well-educated non-English-specialists over 20 e.g. New Scientist Another format of your choice 1. Another format of your choice Article for Elle magazine - How to get ahead at work Sick of making coffee? getting the boss' lunch and photocopying for hours on end? Sick of the same tedious day-to-day chores for minimal wage and recognition? Here are some hints and tricks that you can use to get out of this depressing rut and make your way up the career ladder.

Data Evaluation

Data Evaluation

I feel that my data is representive of the whole data pool because i have three of each type of  magazine, to make it fairer and less biased than just looking at one of each type. Also, by taking the top three girls, and the top three womens magazines, they will really represent women and girls of today. I have bought them all from reputable supermarkets in the same month, to give them a better chance of being fair.

I am looking at editors letters in magazines which will make it fairer as all editors letters have the same goal to address the reader. I can look at
I think that the data i have chosen will give me enough to write about because i have started to annotate and found a lot that i can mention and elaborate on. Also, there is not too much data for me to write about and i think 1500 words will be about right.
I am intending to quantify the different words used by the magazines, as i have noticed that some are very similar where they have a similar target audience.

Methodology

The data I have collected is 6 editor’s letters in magazines, 3 from girls magazines and 3 from women’s magazines. I made sure of this by searching the best selling magazines on the internet.
I have purchased all of the magazines from supermarkets so I know that the extracts that I take come from very reliable and reputable sources.
I chose to select three of each because it will make a much fairer investigation rather than just picking out one or two.
I decided not to choose magazines based on what I would like, because they could be biased and unfair, so I chose to select the top three women’s and the top three girls magazines.
They are comparable because they are aimed at the same gender. The girls magazines are comparable because they are aimed at the exact same age and the woman’s magazines are too.
The reason i chose editors letters was because they all serve the same purpose and will be the bets to compare as i will have more to write about.

Hypothesis

My hypothesis is that there will be a vast difference in the chosen language that is used within the publications. I think that the magazines aimed at younger girls will use much more selective so that it cannot offend young readers or their parents.
I have selected 3 of the top women’s magazines and 3 of the top magazines for young girls, I am yet to decided how I will narrow down what texts in these magazines to use.
The communication accomodation theory says that people adjust what they say to accomodate others, it has links with language, context and identity. There are two main accommodation processes described by this theory. Convergence refers to the strategies through which individuals adapt to each other’s communicative behaviors, in order to reduce these social differences. Meanwhile, Divergence refers to the instances in which individuals accentuate the speech and non-verbal differences between themselves and their interlocutors. This theory fits my investagation well.