Project Proposal

Research Skills English Language Proposal

Members of Group 1:

- Natalie Amies

- Jay Glover

- Anil Abbas

- Chloe Burcham

- Jenny Joice

English Language Group 1 Research Question:

‘How do people use language to create identity through ‘lonely heart’ advertisements, with particular focus on the extent to which the use of adjectives differs between genders?’

Research Question Design:

We chose this topic because we originally came up with a theme surrounding newspapers or printed medium which led us to focus on a more specific topic.

After discussing many ideas as a group we wanted to focus on the differences in language and gender. We all did individual research into this topic, and looked through the books referred to early on.

In our project we aim to investigate how the ‘lonely heart’ advertisements give the writers an opportunity to create an identity for themselves and in specific how this differs between males and females, referring to adjectives in particular.

Methodology (type and amount of data and how we will process it):

We aim to look at 2 different newspapers (the telegraph and the observer) with different political audiences and we will have a total data collection of 10 newspapers (5 of each).

We will take different samples from these newspapers and analyse roughly 10 samples from women (5 from each newspaper) and 10 from men (5 from each newspaper).

The samples will be picked from the first advertisement printed under the section of 'men seeking women' and 'women seeking men'. For this study we will only look at the language used from the sections.

This also solves the issue of masculine and feminine traits and we are almost sure they all have the same sexual orientation which allows our study to be more specific.

Related Reading:

We have started looking through some background reading which will help us to build on our thoughts on this topic and either lead us to agree or disagree with certain conclusions. We can also learn from previous topics on what is best to research in this area of language and gender and any problems encountered which we can possibly avoid.

Core Textbook:

- Researching English Language; a resource book

o Sealey, A.

Books:

- Words and phrases: corpus studies of lexical semantics

o Stubbs, M.

- Language and desire: encoding sex, romance, and intimacy

o Harvey, K. and Shalom, C.

- The handbook of language and gender

o Holmes, J. and Meyerhoff, M.

- Gender and Language Research Methodologies

o Harrington, K. et al

- Language and Gender

o Talbot, M.

- Men Talk

o Jennifer Coates

- Physical appearance and gender: sociobiological and sociocultural perspectives (pages 58, 193, 245)

o Linda A. Jackson

Journals:

- Let's make a deal: An analysis of revelations and stipulations in lonely hearts advertisements.

o Harrison, Albert A.; Saeed, Laila

Extra:

- Carol Marley's PHD work on this topic

Things to take into account:

- We are going to have a relatively small amount of data which could be seen as inaccurate and not precise enough. However we have limited time.

- We will have to take into account the fact that there may be different readership due to different newspapers, and this will have to be discussed in our final conclusions of our project

- Although our investigation is based on gender, we will take into consideration all other factors we are presented with that might influence their language use, such as age and other factors. This will give us a more accurate and truthful representation of the language use of men and women.

- Despite the fact that this topic allows us to not have close contact with the individual and therefore not infringe on ethical issues we must realise what is being analysed is personal and we must respect what is said in these advertisements.

- However the benefits of using this medium is that there is plenty of available data, we don’t have human error from the transcription process and using previously published data avoids any occurrences of the observer’s paradox

Presenting our Data:

Rather that present our project in a single video, we want to take a more original approach and create a project based website. The project could be divided into 3-5 minute video or voice clips, with accompanying data, tables, pictures etc. displayed on the same page. This overcomes the problem of standard video formats, such as Youtube, and the size restrictions that come with them. In this format, all information would clearly laid out and easy to read.

We will meet in advance of the presentation to discuss all our findings and ensure we have all understood what our final conclusions are and are happy with what needs to be conveyed, respecting all contributions from each member.