Dan Clayton's blog - Analysing patterns and structures post - summarised
https://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/#!/2019/10/analysing-patterns-and-structures.html
In a previous blog post, Dan Clayton looked at what examiners said about pattern and structure in last years A Level exams; they noticed that 'those students who had a clear sense of each of the texts as a whole were far more coherent in their responses' Clayton agrees with this as he says 'it's more useful and interesting to focus textual analysis on structures and patterns than single words or even single sentences' - looking at patterns is also more effective under limited time conditions, like in an exam, and he teaches this to his students. He says that if students wanted to avoid the disjointed one word at a time approach in the exam, they should look for a range of features in each text they have to analyse, including semantic fields and extended metaphors, lexical patterns and repetition, syntactic patterns, modality and structure of the whole text.
Analysed newspaper article
Modality - the adverb 'sometimes' helps to show modality in this article because it suggests that not everybody finds life too fast-paced or has a fast-paced life and in some cases people do find the time for 'old-fashioned politeness.' Additionally, the adverb 'perhaps' in this article also helps to show modality because it suggests that there are other reasons for politeness disappearing in society, for example a rejection of ‘straitjacketed customs and courtesies’ that were common in Britain pre-WW2 rather than just the quickening pace of life.
Discourse markers - the discourse marker ‘to top it all off’ used in the beginning of the article gives the article a colloquial tone and helps to emphasise the chaos and stresses of modern life, as it suggests that there are multiple extra stresses we have to deal with today that didn’t exist for the previous generations, like a loud phone conversation happening on public transport, for example. Furthermore, the discourse marker ‘in addition’ used later in the article adds formality to the article as it is less colloquial, and by doing this it emphasises to the reader just how serious this issue is, reminding them that whilst today’s society is perhaps more flexible than society used to be, it is still important to be polite to others and appreciate personal space.
https://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/#!/2019/10/analysing-patterns-and-structures.html
In a previous blog post, Dan Clayton looked at what examiners said about pattern and structure in last years A Level exams; they noticed that 'those students who had a clear sense of each of the texts as a whole were far more coherent in their responses' Clayton agrees with this as he says 'it's more useful and interesting to focus textual analysis on structures and patterns than single words or even single sentences' - looking at patterns is also more effective under limited time conditions, like in an exam, and he teaches this to his students. He says that if students wanted to avoid the disjointed one word at a time approach in the exam, they should look for a range of features in each text they have to analyse, including semantic fields and extended metaphors, lexical patterns and repetition, syntactic patterns, modality and structure of the whole text.
Analysed newspaper article
Modality - the adverb 'sometimes' helps to show modality in this article because it suggests that not everybody finds life too fast-paced or has a fast-paced life and in some cases people do find the time for 'old-fashioned politeness.' Additionally, the adverb 'perhaps' in this article also helps to show modality because it suggests that there are other reasons for politeness disappearing in society, for example a rejection of ‘straitjacketed customs and courtesies’ that were common in Britain pre-WW2 rather than just the quickening pace of life.
Discourse markers - the discourse marker ‘to top it all off’ used in the beginning of the article gives the article a colloquial tone and helps to emphasise the chaos and stresses of modern life, as it suggests that there are multiple extra stresses we have to deal with today that didn’t exist for the previous generations, like a loud phone conversation happening on public transport, for example. Furthermore, the discourse marker ‘in addition’ used later in the article adds formality to the article as it is less colloquial, and by doing this it emphasises to the reader just how serious this issue is, reminding them that whilst today’s society is perhaps more flexible than society used to be, it is still important to be polite to others and appreciate personal space.
Comments
Post a Comment