Linguistics

EDU4UET Understanding English for Teaching
Assessment 2: Language Analysis (70%)

READ THIS BEFORE STARTING
Please submit your Assignment on LMS by 10pm.

As this assignment is based on the analysis of your own language use, there is no requirement to run the assignment through Turn-it-in.

For all parts of your assessment, you must use relevant literature to support your claims. The relevant literature should be properly referenced and you should include a list of references at the end of your assignment. The references should be formatted according to APA6.

Assessment 2 Guidelines

HURDLE TASK (To be completed in the first week of class, or earlier if possible)

For this task you will upload two files on to the LMS site for EDU4UET: a picture and an audio file.
The picture should be a picture that is important to you (e.g. a favourite picture of yourself, a picture of your family or a pet, a picture of your home or your favourite location etc).

Your audio should be 3-4 minutes in length.

The audio should
• describe the context in which the picture was taken (e.g. why did you take this picture, where was it taken).
• describe the picture (e.g. what is it about, who and what is important in the picture).
• describe the significance of the picture (e.g., what does this say about you, your interests, sense of humour, sense of family, sense of adventure etc)
Your audio recording can be recorded ‘free style’ or you may prepare a script and read it. Your choice should reflect how you wish to present yourself. There is no set structure for the audio recording. There is only one criterion: a substantial portion of your introduction must be in English (any variety). You may translanguage (use another language) for a small part of the text, if you so wish.

Test your recording device prior to recordin and ensure that your recording is completed in a semi-quiet location. You may have an audience if you wish.

 
LANGUAGE ANALYSIS (70%)
For Assessment 2, you are required to respond to a series of questions about the grammatical structures embedded in your audio recording. There are seven questions and each is worth 10 marks. To achieve a high mark in this assessment, you must actively 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 this work discussed three syntactic criteria of noun phrases).

QUESTION A: CONVERSATIONAL ANALYSIS (10 marks)
1. Provide a transcription of your text, as recorded, with all of the usual features of naturally produced spoken language (i.e., incomplete words, incomplete sentences, hesitation markers and pauses).
2. You must provide an accompanying table listing the conversational transcription conventions that you have used to transcribe your audio-recording (e.g., … ‘long pause’), and provide the source of these conventions (e.g. Heritage et al 1984).

HINT: If you have prepared a written script for your recording, please do not rely on your original script as this is unlikely to be 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)

1. Define coherence.
2. Provide a detailed analysis of how your text coheres. Consider how the words of your text, the digital nature of your text, and your picture affects your text’s overall coherence.
3. Explain why and how you might use a digitally mediated and multi-modal text for English language teaching.

Hint: There are many ways to achieve coherence. You may have achieved coherence through 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

1. Transcribe your audio text using phonetic (IPA) transcription.
2. Divide each word that you have transcribed into syllables and mark the primary lexical stress of each content word.
3. What is most frequent syllable onset in your transcription? (i.e.,. a vowel, a stop, a sonorant, a CC etc).
4. Using words in your transcript to illustrate, explain how a phonemic analysis would be different from a phonetic analysis.
5. Would you ever want to teach your learners phonetic transcription? Why and/or why not?

QUESTION D: MORPHOLOGY (10 marks)
Morphological analysis

1. Make a new copy of the text that you used for Question A. On this copy of the text, highlight all instances of inflectional morphemes in yellow font, all instances of derivational morphemes in green font, all compounds in red font, and any other word formation processes in purple font.
2. Write a paragraph or two explaining the basis of your decisions in (1). For example, why do you think that selected morphemes are inflections, why do you think that selected words are compounds?
3. Which morphological features are the most common morphological features in your text, and which ones are rare or missing altogether?
4. Which morphological feature (inflections, derivations, compounding, neologisms) do you think is most important for learners to learn and why? There is no right answer. Your answer will reflect your view of what is most important for your learners.

QUESTION E: WORDS (10 marks)
Word categories and meaning

1. Provide one example of every word class in your transcript that you prepared for Question A. Present your findings in a table with three columns labelled: word class, example and justification.
(a) In your justification, provide a detailed explanation of why your chosen word belongs to that selected word class, and state whether your example is prototypical or non-prototypical and why. HINT: A prototypical word behaves exactly as you would expect a word belonging to that category to behave.
(b) Provide an analysis of a hesitation marker or unfinished word in your text, if any. What kind of word is it? How do you know? If you do not have a hesitation marker reflect on why this may be so.
2. State whether you have any ‘flat’ adverbs in your transcript and explain why or why not. (One of the readings in our Reading List is about ‘flat’ adverbs).
3. Explain why (and/or why not) word classes might be useful for a learner of English to enhance their communicative competence.

QUESTION F: PHRASES & CLAUSES (10 marks)
Phrasal and clausal categories

1. Reanalyse your text in Question A.
Provide three examples of each of the following phrasal categories. If you are confident that there are fewer than three examples in your text, write N/A (not available).
a. Noun Phrase
b. Prepositional Phrase
c. Verb Phrase
d. Auxiliary Phrase
e. Adjectival Phrase
f. Adverbial Phrase
g. Clause

2. Which types of phrases are the most common in your text? Why do you think this is so?

3. What are the three most common types of clauses in your text? Provide an example and an analysis of these three clauses from your text. For your analysis, you could complete a tree diagram or write a paragraph.

4. Explain why linguists consider a clause to be a type of phrase. Explain why some teachers may think that a clause is not a phrase.

QUESTION G: UNDERSTANDING ONE’S LINGUISTIC SELF (10 marks)
Understanding of the essence of your linguistic self
1. Find two examples that illustrate “your way of speaking” from your audio file. You may refer to your use of sounds or hesitation markers, or words or bundles of words that you tend to use, or aspects of your sentence structure or word meaning or even your text structure.
2. Explain why you think these examples illustrate “your way of speaking”.
3. Explain how you might teach your students about their individual ways of speaking, and why you might do so.

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.