Guided Study Activities Year 12
These activities are designed to support your learning and
understanding of the course. Your
teacher will select a task to be completed in your study lessons allocated on
your timetables. Feedback on tasks should be given as specified by teacher or
task.
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Topic
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Task
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Due date
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Lexis and semantics
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1.
The use of adjectives is common ploy in brand advertising and in so-called
‘price wars’ between supermarkets and other retail businesses. Find examples
of this practice. Annotate, share and discuss.
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2.
Find other examples of the conscious use of adjectives and adverbs for effect in
travel brochures or travel writing. Explore why and how the text producer has
used these lexical choices for a particular effect. Share and discuss.
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3.
Find three examples of strong connotative meanings (symbolic,
associated meaning relying on culturally shared conventions) from advertising
texts. Annotate, share and discuss.
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4.
Substitution
exercise: Print a short news article/ find a copy of a daily newspaper
and find an article of 150-200 words in length. Highlight the nouns within the article and then for
each one, using a thesaurus, find synonymous lexical items. Experiment with
inserting these into your base text. What impact does this have? Explain why
the writer of the article may have chosen one lexical item over another.
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5. Find
10 linguistic expressions of conceptual
metaphor (newspaper reports are particularly fertile ground for this).
You might also find the following websites useful for further examples of
conceptual metaphor. Add your examples, and your comments on them.
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Grammar and syntax
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6.
Find 10 examples of headlines from newspapers
or magazines that utilise noun phrases. Annotate them. What patterns do you notice emerging? Can
you differentiate between styles,
for example in the kinds of modifiers used depending on the context, audience and purpose of your examples?
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7.
Find different newspaper headlines on the same
story that use active and passive forms. What is the effect of this
different use of voice? Is it related to a political ideology or another
vested interest that the text producer might have? Think about whether agency
is made explicit and foregrounded in an active construction or made less
explicit or omitted in a passive one. Discuss.
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Phonology
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8.
First World War poetry is a good place to
start when exploring sound symbolism
in literary texts. The poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in
particular rely heavily on phonological patternings for some of their
effects. Find examples and discuss.
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9.
Product brand names rely on phonological
features: think about the sound symbolism in snacks such as ‘Monster Munch’
or ‘Crunchie’ and in hair products such as ‘Herbal Essences’, ‘Supersoft’ and
‘Silvikrin’. Collect other examples and explore phonological patterning in
them. How do phonological features
combine with the lexical and grammatical ones to produce a particular effect?
Discuss.
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Graphology
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10.
Find examples of iconic and symbolic signs, explaining their use and the context
in which they occur.
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Typography
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11.
Find a text that relies on font to create a certain effect or tone. Rewrite them, using a
variety of different fonts, varying between subtle and more outlandish
choices. How does this alter the base text? What other changes to a font
might you utilise and what is their impact?
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Spoken Discourse
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12.
Interviews are a good place to start looking
at conversational analysis. You
could collect data from television and radio interviews (chat shows, current-
affairs programmes, political interviews) and consider their structure in the
light of your learning. You could also begin to explore some of the ways in
which topic management is secured and maintained and speakers cooperate with
each other. Make notes, share and discuss.
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13.
Produce a set of guidelines on recording spoken discourse and
transcription. You can consult various sources. Wray, et al. Projects in Linguistics: A Practical Guide
to Researching Language, Chapters 12, 15 and 18.
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Power
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14.
Using Fairclough’s
model look at a charity advertisement and compare the kinds of strategies
used in comparison to other types of advertising.
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15.
Find an example of a newsarticle or editorial or television/ radio report that is
evidence of an editor’s or journalist’s power over the ways in which news is
presented to the public. You might like to focus on the ways in which implied
readers are assumed by the text producers.
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16.
Research initiation-response-feedback (IRF)
model (Coulthard and Sinclair 1975, 1992). Their model is based on classroom interaction. Can you find any variations on this model? For
example in the kinds of questioning that the teacher uses in more detailed
responses to students’ answers?
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17.
Research and explain using examples oppressive and repressive strategies
used by superiors acting as powerful participants in conversational
encounters.
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18. Political speeches provide fertile
ground for exploring the various techniques that are used to exert influence,
persuasion and power. Explore example and discuss.
You can explore one of the
Prime Minister’s speeches.
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19.
Read one of the books- could be part of a
book!- on Language and Power or a similar topic in the library and make some
notes on the content to recommend to other linguists. Was there any mention
of topics covered in lessons, any examples to simplify terminology or ideas
covered in lesson?
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Technology
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20.
Investigate the language of phone-ins in more detail. BBC Radio 5
Live ( www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive),
which offers downloads of recent phone-ins in MP3 format, is a good place to
start, but you could also compare radio phone-ins with those on television,
for example on daytime shows or sports programmes.
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21.
Collect some examples of emails and consider what properties of spoken and written texts
they contain. Discuss.
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22.
Explore the differences between sports commentary on radio and television.
Find examples and discuss to what extent the absence of images will dictate
what the commentator should say to ensure that viewers can follow the action.
Consider verb and lexical choices, shared knowledge and sentence structure.
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23. Investigate
message boards and chat rooms,
make some notes on the following:
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Evidence of Grice’s conversational maxims
being adhered to or broken, including examples of flaming and trolling
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The use of small talk within virtual discourse
communities
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Politeness strategies used by various
participants.
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24.
Read David Crystal’s comments on blog style Language and the Internet (2006). Investigate a number of
personal and corporate blogs. Can you account for their style by considering
their linguistic features and their intended audiences and purposes?
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25.
Read one of the books- could be part of a
book!- on Language and Technology or a similar topic in the library and make
some notes on the content to recommend to other linguists. Was there any
mention of topics covered in lessons, any examples to simplify terminology or
ideas covered in lesson?
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Exam- Grouping
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26.
Print and annotate the June 2012 Past paper
Categorising texts question. Read the student response- in the back of this
guide- and using the mark scheme on www.aqa.org.uk
or in your handbook, make notes on what went well in the answer and what the
student could have improved on.
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Exam- Power
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27.
Print and annotate the June 2012 Past paper
Power question (Q3). Read the student response- in the back of this guide-
and using the mark scheme on www.aqa.org.uk
or in your handbook, make notes on what went well in the answer and tips for
improvement.
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Exam- Technology
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28.
Print and annotate the June 2012 Past paper
Technology question (Q4). Read the student response- in the back of this
guide- and using the mark scheme on www.aqa.org.uk
or in your handbook, make notes on what went well in the answer and what the
student could have improved on.
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