Assignments: Group Reports

The group reports should present a profile of the kinds of English and the ways they function in your particular site. The in-class presentation of the profile should be build around a web-site (a View in our class Workspace). The reports should:

  1. present data about the spoken language as it appears (transcribed) in the ICE corpus and on line on internet radio programs (news, talk, call-in, even pop music). This data can be in the form of clips gathered from the Web, but should also involve some analysis and description of the data and how thick the accent is in various kinds of speaking situations.
  2. similarly for the syntax of the written and transcribed examples of the variant found in ICE, paying particular attention to those which have been noted by scholars working on your variant (see Schneider for your area, Wikipedia, and the journals). Are they illustrated in your data?
  3. likewise for the vocabulary special to your variant, including word lists and dictionaries for your variant
  4. and for discourse features particular to your variant, including discourse markers noted in the literature and perhaps others as well and noticeable stylistic features
  5. evidences of a complaint tradition in your area and some details about it
  6. a list of notable writers employing the local variant--titles, perhaps even samples
  7. a collection of comments about the variant showing that the speaker or writer is conscious of using the variant.
  8. Some indication of major questions or issues facing users of the variant.

It should be possible to build these web sites as Views in our Workspace for ENGL 473. There each group should create a View for their area (I have put up Nigeria as a test bed). If you need administrator powers to do this, I can grant them. You can add many kinds of data, including YouTube clips, Google Maps, pics, and audio files.