Narrated PowerPoint

RSEL presentation

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Minutes for 03/12/2013

In our group meeting yesterday, we surpassed our expectations in completing more work than planned.

We began the meeting by catching up on our progress: 

• Philippa and I showed the group our results from the questionnaire 
• Kerry, Matt and Leanda presented the literature to the group.

From this, Kerry, Matt and Leanda continued to research relevant literature which could be applied to our hypotheses and wider project. 

Philippa and I began to analyse our results and present them in our Powerpoint presentation using a mixture of percentages, pie charts and quotations from participants in order to produce an engaging, interesting presentation.
This took up a large proportion of our time due to the large amount of data and hypotheses we had. 

 

Next, we went through our list of 'things to include in the power point' and began to complete these slides. These included: 

• An introduction to our project 
• Our research question
• Literature 
• Hypotheses 
• Methodologies 
• Results
• Conclusions 
• Credits

What we have left to do: 

Matt and Kerry picked up the headsets from Alison's office in preparation for our recording on Saturday.  

Agenda for our next meeting

03/12/2013
Tomorrow we will be meeting as a group in the group study room in the main library to begin our presentation.

Last week Philippa and I successfully distributed our questionnaire. We did this by starting off in the Mason Lounge in the Arts building collecting data from Arts students and then did the same in the Watson building. We found that participants were co-operative and willing to participate which allowed us to gain a large amount of data.

In terms of the Literature side of our presentation, Matt, Kerry and Leanda have been researching various academic and non-academic articles which we will relate to our project in the meeting tomorrow.

Minutes from 25/11/2013

Minutes from 25/11/2013

This week in our meeting, the group arranged to meet in the main library where we aimed to discuss and organize a number of elements of our project. 

The questionnaire 

After carrying out our pilot study there were a few issues we had to take into consideration. One being the length of the questionnaire. We had originally planned to use 20 images then 3 questions for each image. The participants in the pilot study were finding this to be too lengthy as the questionnaire is highly repetitive, so in order to maintain focus and interest in the participants we cut back to 10 images again. 

    Another issue we faced was the distribution of our questionnaire. The length of the questionnaire and the number of participants we wanted to ask meant that the printing would be economically and financially problematic. Therefore, Alison suggested that we looked as using an online system such as Survey Monkey but we struggled to upload images onto these sites. In order to overcome this, we decided to use a tally method where we would show the participants the images of the apostrophe misuses and verbally ask them the questions marking down their answers in a tally form. 

e.g. Is the apostrophe use in the image: 

a) accurate II
b) unsure
c) inaccurate IIII

We then discussed in the meeting the division of work. We decided that Philippa and I would distribute the questionnaire, whilst Kerry, Matt and Leanda compiled the literature and articles and applied it to our project. 

The presentation 

As we are currently in the process of collecting data, we have arranged to meet as a group on 03/12/2013 and analyse the results and see whether our original hypotheses were met. We will then relate the data which Kerry, Matt and Leanda are currently working on. 

What we have done and what we have left to do

What we have done and what we have left to do

 

What we have done:

• We have made the first draft of our questionnaire which contains 20 images of examples where the apostrophe is used in a non-standard form. For each image we have then asked 3 sub-questions.
• Each member of the group has also read relevant literature on the topic of our project. We started by distributing the literature suggested by Alison between the group and from this we have then researched and read further literature.

 

What we have left to do:

• After completing our questionnaire, we are going to carry out a pilot study in order to get feedback from participants and make any relevant changes from this
• We are then going to begin our research by handing our questionnaire. Our method of doing so, either paper hand outs or online methods, is yet to be decided.
• The data from our questionnaire will then be coded, analysed and then be displayed in our power point presentation



Minutes from 13/11/2013

Minutes from 13/11/2013

Philippa and I met in the Library today to discuss the progress of the project. In this meeting we mainly focused on the development of the questionnaire in order to begin our pilot study. 

Example question: 

1.a) The usage of the apostrophe above is:
a) accurate
b) unsure
c) inaccurate 

Minutes - Meeting 28th October 2013

Our main priority for this week’s meeting was to discuss and reflect on Alison’s feedback regarding our project proposal. Our topic of apostrophe usage on a whole is a manageable topic, but our research question needed some attention.

Research question:
When looking at examples of apostrophe misuse in social media, text messages and written work, why are people incorrectly using apostrophes?

When discussing our research question, we concluded that ‘everyday usage’ was far too vague. For this reason we have selected instances including, social media (Twitter and Facebook), text messages and written work where apostrophe misuse will be displayed.
Furthermore, instead of looking at ‘attitudes’ towards punctuation misuse, we have altered this to specifically looking at the reasons why people aren’t using apostrophes correctly.

Methodologies:
Altering our research question has inevitably led to changes in our methodologies.
 1) With ethical considerations in mind, we will be looking closely at social media, text messages and any friends’ lecture notes or work and pick of instances where apostrophes are misused. To do this we will take a print screen shot or note down any examples.

2) From picking out these mistakes, we will then gain informed consent from the participant who made the mistake asking them to take part in our covert ‘punctuation test’ – (we won’t tell the participants that it is a punctuation test)

3) Finally a questionnaire consisting of open and closed questions will be given to the participants, measuring the reasons for their apostrophe misuse.

Literature

During this week’s meeting, we also distributed the readings Alison suggested between us. These are as followed:

·       Me (Ellie) - Wardhaugh, R. (1999) Proper English: Myths and Misunderstandings About Language. Oxford: Blackwell

·       Philippa- Burridge, K. (2005) Weeds In The Garden of Words: Further Observations On The Tangled History Of The English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

·       Leanda- Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt & Lars Hinrichs. 2007. Recent Changes in the Function and Frequency of Standard English Genitive Constructions: A multivariate analysis of tagged corpora. English Language and Linguistics

·       Kerry - Zwicky, Arnold M. & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 1983. Cliticization Versus Inflection: English n't. Language

Garrett, P, Austin, C (1993) The English Genitive Apostrophe: Judgements of Errors and Implications for Teaching Language Awareness