Research Topics - Unit 2: page 3

Presentation of the materials and research exercise for assessment

This unit will be presented through 3 seminar sessions (Wednesday 9 am, Oct 7, 14 and 21) with associated practical exercises, seminar notes, and sets of guided readings. These materials are all directed towards equipping you to complete the research exercise at the end of the unit. The assessment exercise for the unit (due Friday Oct 30) is as follows.

Research exercise

Compare and contrast you own manner of speaking with that of a speaker from a contrastive regional, social, national, language etc background. The point here is to find someone whose manner of speaking is clearly different from your own. This may be because

• they come from a different region of the UK (they speak with a different regional accent),
• because they come from a different class background (perhaps you speak with a working-class accent and they speak with a middle or upper class background),
• because their speech reflects a different social identity (older generation versus younger generation, different ethnic backgrounds etc),
• because they come from a different country (The US versus the UK, India versus Australia, for example),
• because they are second-language speaker of English and therefore speak with a `foreign' accent,
• and so on.

The point of the exercises is to analyse only differences in sound, in the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, in stress and patterns of intonation, and not differences in grammar and vocabulary. (We are interested here in accent, in features of pronunciation, not in the totality of differences which make up dialect variation. Dialect, of course, includes grammar and vocabulary as well as pronunciation.) More precise details of the exercise and guidance in how to go about collecting this type of data will be provided in later session. In general terms, you will need to tape yourself and your subject engaged in both casual and more careful speech. You will then analyse the tapes for pronunciation differences.

You will not be expected to provide a complete account of all the differences which might be present. Rather, your task will be to discover at least some of the key features which separate your speech from that of your subject. You will be expected to be able document these using, for example, the International Phonetic Alphabet (which will be presented in the course of the seminars and readings) and other systems which will be introduced through the seminars and readings.