Writing the analysis
We have covered what an introduction and methodology should do, so what does the analysis involve?
This is the most important part of your students' investigations, and it is where main findings across the data should be analysed using linguistic methods.
It's important that in doing this, your students demonstrate that they can use a range of linguistic methods. You have spent time teaching your students how to analyse the lexical, semantic, grammatical, phonological, prosodic, pragmatic, morphological, syntactical and discourse features of texts, and taught them lots of terminology that relates to these methods. It's time for them to show off their knowledge and skills. If your students only include analysis of one method in this part, such as semantic features, it will imply that that is the only method of analysis that they can apply to a text.
With that in mind, I am going to take you through how you can write sub-sections of analysis using three methods: lexis, semantics, and grammar. This post will deal with examining lexical features of a text
Analysing lexis
To demonstrate how to approach this, I decided it would be easiest to write an example investigation. In the interests of authenticity, I pretended I was a teenager again, and imagined what the sixth former version of me might have chosen as his investigation. Here is my title:
An investigation into how Thrash Metal album titles have changed over time.
My English teacher - let's call him Mr Brawford - had advised against focusing on things like lyrics/song titles/album titles, claiming that I ran the risk of making it into an English Literature essay. As he's a boring saddo, I decided to ignore him and go ahead with my Thrash Metal project.
First of all, sixth-former-me gathered some data. Using Google, he searched for the most popular Thrash Metal album titles of the 1980s and 1990s. He recorded the first 30 that were listed for each decade.
You might think that this data set is too small, but remember - this is an A Level investigation. They have limited resources and time. 60 pieces of data will work fine for the purposes of this. Here is his data:
As I am trying to do a lexical analysis of this data, I need to focus on words. The first thing I did is to have a look to see if any words were the same, or similar. It didn’t take me long to notice that there was a pattern to a lot of these album titles: many use words like ‘of’, ‘in’, ‘by’, and ‘to’.
Now, at the moment I am in role as a sixth former who has probably forgotten everything they learned from the lesson on word class, so I am going to pretend that I don’t know what type of words these are. Let’s have a look on Google…
All of these words are prepositions. Yes, it is true that they can sometimes be used differently – for example, the word ‘to’ can be an infinitive marker – but I just need to make sure that I check my data to see if these words are being used as prepositions.
Very quickly, I have identified a pattern in relation to the lexis of the text. That will help me to decide what this section of my analysis is going to focus on. You should clearly label each sub-section with sub-headings, and they should be as specific as possible. The sub-heading for this section of my analysis would probably be 'use of pronouns'.
Some students might think that they should put 'lexis' as a sub-heading. This is far too general. The audience for this text is you - an A Level English Language teacher - and a moderator at the exam board. Both of you will understand that by commenting on the use of prepositions within the text, lexical analysis is being used by the student.
Now, I will go through every title, for each decade, and identify each preposition that has been used. I will then tally them in a table:
It's worth pointing out that I ignored the use of ‘to’ in the album ‘Pleasure to Kill’ by Kreator. That’s because the word ‘to’ in that title is not a preposition – it is being used as an infinitive marker.
An important thing to note is that not everything about this data will be interesting – you should only write about the things that stand out. With this in mind, you might have noticed that the preposition ‘of’ has been used more than any other. Here are all the titles that use it:
Whilst my data set is quite small, there is still a clear similarity between the album titles of the 1980s and the 1990s that I can write about:
It was found that in both decades, a similar amount of prepositions appeared within the song titles. Interestingly, the preposition ‘of’ was utilized more than any other preposition in both of the decades, for example in Metallica’s ‘Master of Puppets’ (1986) and Anthrax’s ‘Persistence of Time’ (1990). The use of the preposition ‘of’ in these examples creates a style of syntax that is more common to Romance languages, such as French. For example, in English, we might commonly use the noun phrase ‘puppet master’, which would translate to ‘maître de la marionnette’ (literally, ‘master of the puppets’). It could be argued that the bands have used the preposition in this way to create album titles that sound more serious and prestigious. In 1066, the Normans invaded England, and for over 300 years, French was the language of power, spoken by royalty, aristocrats and high-powered officials. Thrash Metal, and its parent genre of Heavy Metal, often focus on serious or taboo subject matter, such as death and religion. Furthermore, it is typically associated with masculinity. In fact, research revealed that no band included in the data included a female member. Therefore, it could be suggested that this male-dominated genre of music sought to appeal to its mainly male audience by representing themselves as serious and powerful within their album titles. It could be argued that this view would be supported by Tannen’s Difference model, as she suggested that men typically use language to build status.
I have managed to write almost 250 about the use of the preposition ‘of’. I haven’t even begun to discuss the other uses of prepositions yet. If I was to write the maximum word count of 2500, I have already completed 10% of the total. There are a number of things that I have included in this paragraph that will help me towards fulfilling the assessment criteria.
Firstly, I am writing in a secure academic register. This is helped by the use of passive voice in the past tense (‘It was found that…’). Secondly, whilst it is difficult to demonstrate that I am using a ‘wide range’ of language methods, I have actually not only applied lexical analysis, but also began to think about grammar too (‘…the preposition 'of' in these examples creates a syntax that is more common to Romance languages’). Thirdly, I have used lots of linguistic terms, such as: ‘preposition’, ‘noun phrase’, ‘syntax’. Furthermore, I have gone into a lot of detail about just one type of word – that helps to show that I am being ‘incisive’, as I am saying a lot about a little. In my next paragraph, I would move on to talk about one of the other prepositions that has been used, which would help to show that I am being ‘systematic’, and discussing one aspect of language in detail at a time.
In addition, I tried to link my findings to concepts and theories that I have learnt about in lessons. I thought that some of Tannen’s work was relevant here, so I included it.
I also tried to comment on contextual factors. These are things like: who wrote the text, when was it written, where did it appear, who is the audience etc. In this case, it was relevant to talk about the fact that all of the bands were male, and that the target audience for this particular type of music is often male too. It linked quite nicely with the reference to Tannen’s work, helping to explain why I had included it.
Your students need to make sure that they include content that will help them to fulfil the assessment criteria. Each paragraph should:
1. Include analysis relating to a language method.
2. Use terminology associated with that method.
3. Link the findings to research/theory
4. Contextualise the findings against a range of factors.
2000-2500 words is not really a lot to work with when it comes to writing a language investigation, so students must ensure that they do not waste any of the word count. Every single part should help them to achieve marks.
Next time, I will demonstrate how to analyse semantic features within the data.
The views in this blog are not necessarily shared or endorsed by the centre that I currently work at or the examining body in question.
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