Summary of First Meeting

1. Brainstorm of topic ideas - we each talked about the topics which we found particularly interesting. 

• Child Language Acquisition - We all had a particular interest in child language acquisition and it was the topic we originally thought we would focus on. However, when we discussed it in more depth we realised we might struggle to find an appropriate method of gathering data, especially considering the short time period we have to carry out our research, so we decided that it wasn't going to be a practical choice. 
• Attitudes to accent and dialect - We realised that no one in our group shared the same accent and we found it interesting to compare accents, talk about the reactions people have had towards our accents, the phrases we use that are commonplace at home but unheard of elsewhere etc. So we considered looking into attitudes to accent and dialect. We thought University provided a large pool of different accents/dialects which could be useful for collecting data. However, when we discussed it further, we realised we couldn't pin down exactly what it was we were hoping to find out or what it was we were hoping to gain from the study and so we thought our project might end up lacking a clear focus.
• Grammar/Prescriptivism - We began discussing the way people use grammar. We agreed that we've all seen examples of non-standard usage of punctuation. We had to consciously call it "non standard" because our instinct was just to call it "wrong". We agreed that we all know someone who is extremely strict about the "correct" use of the apostrophe. But equally, we also know people who don't really worry about it. We then began thinking about the fact that often there are times when, although punctuation is non-standard, we can still understand the message because we know what was meant. So we started to question how relevant or necessary the apostrophe is, if people use it differently. We wanted to look into both opinions and actual usage of the apostrophe. For example - whether people say they care about the "rules" and then whether they can spot a "non standard" use of the apostrophe. 

Brainstorming Methods

We began to think about the ways we could look into this. We thought that a questionnaire would be a good way to gather data. We can ask overt questions about opinions and then we can also include a section which tests participants use of the apostrophe by asking them to spot non standard uses and asking them where they think an apostrophe is needed when given cues such as 'The house belongs to Ben... where would there be an apostrophe in the phrase "Bens house"?' We thought this might help us to see how many value the apostrophe and how many people fully understand the point of it. 

Designing a Question

We have not finalised the phrasing of our question yet, because we wanted to read around the topic a little bit first. We thought this background knowledge might help us hone in on exactly what we're trying to find out. Our initial ideas for a question were along the lines of - "To what extent is the apostrophe still necessary/relevant/used?' 

We wanted to make sure our question included a phrase such as "to what extent" because we thought this would help to focus the results. We want to make sure that we are collecting data that can be easily analysed. For example we might have results along the lines of "60% of people said they did not know the correct use" and  "70% of people could not identify the non standard usage". 

Getting Going

Now that we have selected a broad topic, we are going to spend this week researching it in more depth. Some of us are going to read around the topic of grammar, prescriptivism and apostrophe usage. Others are going to collect examples of apostrophe usage - for example on signs, in newspapers, on social media. We want to get an idea of how the apostrophe is being used and make sure it is something worth researching before we dive fully in to this project. 

Once we have this information we will try to finalise our question and begin to plan our research methods.