Minutes - 14th November

We met at 3-4pm in the Mason Lounge in the Arts Building. Those present were Alice, Sufia, Emily, and me (Daniel).

We came to the meeting having further researched our topic over reading week, thus extending our knowledge of the speeches, and what available relevant literature there is surrounding our research question.

During the meeting we refined our literature choices, and identified the exact books/journals we would use. We agreed to take these out of the library or find them online - whichever is most appropriate.

We delegated which exact topics each individual would be covering, and they read as follows:

• Alice - field, tenor, mode, personal pronouns
• Dan - structure, format of the speeches
• Emily - adjectival phrases, semantic fields
• Lucy -language used to highlight the speakers' roles, including quality of faction information vs honesty
• Sufia - literary features of the speeches

We then discussed which methods we would use to collect data, including questionnaires regarding language over time and the persuasiveness/effectiveness of the speeches.

Agenda for next meeting (2 hours in week 8)

• Everyone draw up a survey, including 5-10 questions (open and closed).
• Think about a corpus investigation, perhaps contrasting the words 'defend' and 'attack' against one another.
• Bring references from relevant reading to the meeting.
• Finally, sign up for progress review meeting with Alison (done).

Daniel

Minutes- 31st October

For this meeting, we met from 1-2 pm in room E of the Library and those present were Alice, Lucy and Sufia.

We came to the meeting prepared from having looked closely at our two speeches under analysis: Chamberlain's declaration of WW2 and Bush's of the war in Iraq. There was a shared positive attitude about the two speeches where we each felt they would prove interesting to focus on and thus be effective in our research. 

Each of us had many insightful thoughts about the language features of both speeches including:

• The recurrent use of 3rd person pronouns reflecting a sense of unity which we've identified as a semantic field shared between both declarations.
• Typical uses of language i.e tripling, antithesis, parallelism, hyperbole
• The input of factual information (more apparent in Chamberlain's declaration which highlights an interesting change across time)
• 'fantastical' speech which cleverly disguises the horrors of war (very tactical way of gaining support, especially with Bush)
• The use of topic sentences which introduce each paragraph in a similar way between both speeches
• Despite the similar role/responsibility Chamberlain and Bush shared, the way they portray it to the audience is surprisingly different. In short, Bush is glorifying the war and portrays himself as someone in complete control of everyone and everything whereas Chamberlain is displaying a more honest and sorrowful approach.
• Both employ references to faith/religion
• in terms of format, there is a major contrast between the introductions of each speech. Chamberlain gets straight to the point (actually declares they are at war) Bush on the other hand, doesn't actually declare.
• Interesting use of 'fellow' to refer to listeners- possible focus for a corpus investigation into the way each speaker addresses listeners
• evidence of adjectival phrases
• semantic fields of 'unity' 'success/victory' and 'peace'

*Both figures have the ultimate aim in these speeches, to inform the public. What is being highlighted when analysing them is that language features are being inputted in contrastive ways which thus ignites the thought process that perhaps language has changed over time in this context and this will be referred to throughout our research.

Some other points raised in the meeting were:

• Which speech is more effective in terms of measuring their aims?
• It is worth noting the contexts in which these declarations were delivered. For example, the patriotism of the Americans combined with the destruction of the Twin Towers will have had a direct impact on Bush's declaration.
• Questionnaire idea- take lines from each speech but don't state which they are from and ask the participants to rate their effectiveness/impact

We agreed it was time to delegate roles to each member of the group. It was quite difficult doing so because not all of us were there so these are preliminary:

Sufia- to look at the literary features of the speeches

Alice- the relationship between the speaker and audience (tenor)

Lucy- language used to highlight the speakers' roles including the quantity of factual information vs honesty.

Agenda for next meeting (week 7)

• Maintain contact with group through email/facebook group
• To brainstorm what exact research methods we are going to use and how we will use them in relation to our investigation so that we can create a distribute a questionnaire and begin a corpus investigation
• Read relevant literature in order to aid analysis whilst being critical

Minutes from 29th October Meeting
- (meeting held in computer cluster room 2 in the Arts building: 12pm - 1pm)

Preparation for this meeting involved:

*All group members watch youtube videos and take notes on interesting language features with the sub questions in mind to report back for next meeting.
*Daniel's meeting with Alison to talk about new proposal.
*Start thinking about related literature to use for our project.

Today's meeting:

(Lucy)

Today's meeting allowed us to discuss our thoughts and ideas that came from watching the 4 youtube videos. After Daniel's meeting with Alison, we came to the conclusion to narrow our project down further by focusing mainly on comparing just two declaration speeches:- Chamberlain's declaration with Bush's, bringing in other related videos for further related comparison.

We also decided to delete the two sub questions so we could do a more thorough analaysis comparing the two speeches of a similar genre. This way we decided we could analyse the language features in greater detail as well as looking at if and how the language has changed over time, being in familar contexts.

From this we transcribed both speeches into a word document and posted on our groups Facebook page for all to access.

After this meeting we all felt a lot more positive about our new project proposal as it feels more focussed and a more stable idea for a project on language. We feel this way we could all talk about linguistical features more specific to the areas of English Language we are interested in.


For next meeting: (Thursday 31st October: 1pm - 2pm Library study room E)

* Each member of the group will become familar with both by reading and taking notes on interesting language features that stand out and also highlight differences between the texts.
* We will discuss the language features we found and from this draw out 5 main features so that over reading week we will each have one to study in detail - and begin to look at the related literature.
* We will have a look at the roles of the different speakers in the two youtube videos.
* Identify who the different audiences are in each clip.
*Take notes on how these audiences and similar or different.

Minutes from 24th October Meeting

Preparation for this meeting involved:

*Allocations were made in order to spread out the work across the group
*At the time these allocations were made, those available were Alice, Sufia, Lucy and Daniel

• Daniel, Lucy and Sufia to watch the remaining V-lectures and take notes accordingly
• Alice has Sealey (2010) coursebook so to read/re-read any relevant sections
• Alice posted a discussion on Canvas in response to Alison's feedback along with typed up notes for the rest of the group to look at and consider:

Discussion:

(Alice)

"I've listened to the feedback Alison has given us and typed up points she raised that we need to rethink/reconsider. The general feedback been given is that it is a project that can work as long as we do a close analysis but it's not very exciting and doesn't demonstrate any deep interest into what we want to find out. So in short, what can we research that we don't already know? I am going to attach what I've typed up so you can all look at it and think about it for our meeting tomorrow. I personally think we need to have a major brainstorm and reevaluate what we're doing because I don't think our project is good enough now we've got the feedback."


A few examples of corresponding notes/points:

• Why have we decided to carry out this project?/ what is the intrinsic interest in this research?/what will find out that we don’t already know? 
• Fairly predictable result. We would just be searching for answers to justify our intuitions 
• Basic project, it can work but it would be more successful if we thought about what we want to find out, why and how. 

The meeting:

Today's meeting involved us rethinking our research question where the feedback we received from Alison made us aware that our project needs to be more specific and an investigation into something that we don't already necessarily know. Effectively, we should choose a research question that didn't come with a unanimous pre-determined answer. Our previous research question was too broad.

We didn't want to start from the beginning and choose a completely different topic as we don't have time to start again. Therefore we decided to stick with the topic of the news but investigate how language has changed over time by looking at the coverage of two major events: the Second World War and the Iraq War, in particular the declaration of each war.

The language features we would scrutinise would include:

• Phonology - rise, intonation, pitch (supra-segmental features)
• Format - how the speeches are structured, how this affects the listener/general public
• Lexicography - word patterns, tripling, antithesis etc
• Formality

Sub-questions:

1. Specifically, which linguistic features illustrate such changes, if any? 
2. If the language of broadcasting has changed, what are the reasons behind this? 
3. What are the effects that these changes currently have or have previously had on society? (socio-linguistic aspect) 

Below are four clips that will be used to help us answer our research question. They shall be studied in detail as our four 'core' research clips.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtJ_zbz1NyY Chamberlain declaration

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHnEGqEoMsM King George VI stammer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEHuek0w5e4 George Bush declaration of war

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CHgm8Bc0_Q Hugh Edwards coverage of war in Iraq

*Present at this meeting was: Alice, Lucy, Sufia and Daniel

Research proposal

Research question: To what extent does the use of language in two contrasting news channels affect their broadcasts of the same story?

We have decided to research the way language is used in the contrasting news channels BBC One and MTV in their presentation of the same story, for example, the on-going story of Madeline McCann’s disappearance. The reason we have decided to investigate this is because this will clearly demonstrate any differences they possess in their approaches, such as the BBC’s more formal approach versus MTV’s more informal one. We will also briefly look at accent and dialect as this can impact the way a certain broadcaster or story is perceived.

The three elements which are of great importance to our research are: Ethos, whether the speaker is fair and honest, Pathos, whether the speaker has evoked emotion from the audience and Logos, if the audience is persuaded by the speaker’s argument. This is because these elements can be seen within the language of broadcasters, for example, in their word choices. Also, in the case of Logos, a broadcaster’s accent or dialect may affect the persuasiveness of their argument, as people may make general assumptions based upon these such as associations with intelligence or friendliness.  

Literature- There is a wide range of literature available on the language of the news/ media. They offer a range of theories regarding the effects and importance of the use of language in news broadcasts. The texts we will use to start our research project are:

·         Bell, A. The Language of News Media

·         Conboy, M. The Language of the News

·         Cotter, C. News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism

·         Durant, A and Lambrou, M. (2009) Language and Media. London: Routledge

· 

Methods- Our methods will include observing these particular news channels. This will allow us to see whether a broadcaster’s particular language choices and their accent or dialect affect our perception of the broadcaster and the story being told. For example, more emotional stories will contain word choices which create a serious tone, in comparison to more light hearted news. We will use a corpus in our project, as this will allow us to see which types of words are used more frequently within these contrasting channels and the connotations they possess. This should highlight any differences in register of these channels aiding our comparison of them. Another method of gaining data is to conduct questionnaires, as this would allow us to gain an understanding of viewers’ response to the presentation of a certain storyline, including the effect of the broadcaster’s tone and language choices. Also by asking a range of ages from young adults to older viewers we may be able to see which age groups watch the BBC or MTV and why. Does the language used by these contrasting channels purposefully appeal to specific age demographics?

Our final goal is to present our findings in our power point presentation during the exhibition. By this stage, we should ideally be able to answer our research question through the use of a range of data.

Minutes for First Meeting

Our first group meeting took place on 8th October in Room G of the main library. Very conveniently the room had installed a large interactive screen that enabled us to access the internet.

The first thing we did was watch Alison's virtual lecture of 'choosing a topic' to aid us in our decision of what to conduct our research on as a group. What was particularly interesting was knowing what topics previous students chose.

Once we watched that, we each exchanged what topics we felt particularly interested in or passionate about and of course the opposite. For example, a few members didn't feel a literary based topic like the language of Shakespeare's plays would be suitable. Nevertheless, it became apparent that each of us had a shared excitement about language variation and socio-linguistics. Two of us spoke about the idea of conducting a project centered around speech and language impairments in young children but the ethical issues and depth of research that would come with such research, made the project seem impractical and extremely complex.

Eventually we all agreed that it would be interesting to have televised news as our topic especially because keeping up to date with the world is such a significant part of our lives which in turn makes the project seem more approachable and exciting. This topic raised a large discussion where each of us were highlighting key linguistic areas of televised news that have an impact on viewers.

So this is what we discussed:

• The variation in accents and dialects of broadcasters
• Formal vs informal language
• The comparison between different news channels
• How the time of day the news is shown can affect the language used.
• A comparison of language used in different types of news stories.
• The difference in power relationships between co-broadcasters shown through their language.
• The influence of the broadcaster's language upon viewers and also the differences in language use in contrasting news channels such as the BBC and ITV vs. MTV and BBC Three with their specific viewers.

After completing the task set previously on our experience during Independent Study, we all realised that our research project would benefit from the methods we learnt and developed on during our first year module.

For example:

• We could create and distribute questionnaires to gather opinions on the language use of certain news channels and whether a broadcaster's accent or dialect has any impact on the way stories are illustrated to viewers
• A Transcription of the same/similar news stories aired by contrasting news channels in order to understand their different uses of language and thus the effect on how these stories are delivered and received 
• A Corpus Investigation - may allow us to recognise and therefore analyse certain lexical choices of news broadcasters.

*each of these methods would be advantageous in the way that they will interlink and generate strong findings within our research

To conclude:

We left the meeting feeling positive about our chosen research topic and able to go away and have a think/plan of how to specify our research and what literature we can use.

*Present at this meeting was: Alice, Lucy, Sufia and Daniel

Minutes of second meeting

We decided during the meeting to focus our research more for our research proposal and have decided to centre our research on a comparison between the news of the BBC and MTV:

Supra segmental features
format of news stories

Three useful elements to consider for this comparison include:

1. Ethos: the audience believes the speaker is fair and honest.
2. Pathos: emotion is aroused in the audience by what the speaker says
3. Logos: the audience is persuaded by the reasoning contained in the speaker's argument.

We have also decided to look at the affects of broadcasters' accents and dialects for these two channels as it may significantly impact the three elements mentioned above.

By possibly focussing on the 10pm BBC news and a currently on going stories such as the disappearance of Madeline McCann, we can compare this to a contrasting story from MTV news with regards to their language use and the accent of the broadcasters telling these news stories. A corpus may be useful for doing this as it will allow us to see which particular words are used by these contrasting news channels when reporting a similar news story.  

The research question we have decided to investigate is:

To what extent does the use of language in two contrasting news channels affect their broadcasts of the same or a similar story?

*Present at this meeting was: Alice, Lucy, Sufia, Daniel and Emily