Assessment Task 2: Individual Written Report (A Critical Reflection) (2000 words) 20%

Aims · To gain a deeper understanding of one theory · To start to think about issues around data and methods of analysis · To consider how your selected data serves as evidence in support of theoretical claims

Specific Details ：Select ONE of the theories from your Group PPT for your individual written report.（I choose Gee’s theory, in this essay I need to use my data to support Gee ‘ theory, Big D Discourse and small D discourse） Choose three or four examples from the data that you collected in your online group discussion in which you were an interlocutor(I will give you my chat history and you can choose some example). Use this data and only this data as your evidence. Consider what your current data offers. Issues that you might or might not consider are: · In looking for examples to support theoretical claims, do you have multiple examples of the same type of evidence, or cases of overlapping and complementary types of data? Are there particular types of data that are missing? · Is your data sufficiently robust to answer key claims? Why (not)? · If not, what other types of data might be useful for your purposes? In answering these questions, you should consider the quality and type of data rather than the amount of data that may be available to you. In your reflections, consider whether there is any evidence in your data that might cause you to question the premises of your chosen theory. This might be useful later for Assessment 3B.

Mechanics： Write a 2,000 word reflective analysis of your data. In a reflection, you should use ‘I’ and write active sentences. You should use selective ‘quoting’ to highlight the important issues in the theory that have caused you to select the data you have chosen for your individual written report. You should choose short examples, highlighting within the text the exact points that you wish the reader to focus on through standard conventions such as those in conversational analysis. In discussing your examples, you should focus on why particular words and other aspects of the communicative event are important in supporting claims (e.g. the context). You should number your examples and present them in block format. Your reflection should end in a perfectly formatted bibliography according to APA6 conventions. The bibliography and the examples are part of your word count.

Teacher’ suggestion for me : you must also look at the methods that are used or could be used for the data analysis. For the  methods, you should start with the cited work that you have been researching for Assessment 1 and in some instances, this will be enough as the types of data that are used to support the central tenets/main points will be clear.   For some of you, however,  data analysis may be more difficult and you may have to present your own interpretations about the type of data that would be appropriate to illustrate the major tenets and main points of your chosen theoretical perspective. If this is the case, you might want to look on you-tube or search the web to see the kinds of data that your author/s have used and the kinds of data that others have used in their analysis of your chosen author. Be careful when you do this however, as information on the web can be posted by anyone (e.g. a high school student) and even if it is a reputable source, the writer may be referring to a different work published at another time. Authors sometimes change their minds about details of their own research. So what an author writers on their website may be different from  what they believed at the time the article they wrote was published.

Please ensure in your writing that you indicate the thinking that you have used in making any decisions about the suitability of  your examples. Use sentences such as “For this particular point, I chose this type of data as an example because in my chosen work, the author had a similar example.”  OR “I had a look at other research by the same author and in this more expanded analysis of her/his theory, s/he provided a similar example”. Then add a sentence or two to explain why these examples are similar.

It is not important to have an extended list of references for Assessment 2. If there is enough data in your chosen work to clarify the central tenets/main points and the type of data that you need as examples, you can have a single reference in your bibliography.

Teacher’s email for me: Dear

If you are choosing Gee as your theory for Assessment 2, you should be considering both big D and little d discourse because you need to consider the theory as a whole. For Assessment 2, you can read a little more widely to look at examples of how others have considered Big D discourse. In some cases, you may not have the requisite data for comprehensive Big D analysis (no bodily movement), and in other cases, you may have to make assumptions about what is intended. In such cases, you can explain the limits of your data.  I’ll have more to say about methods in the next class.

Best,

Donna

Important literature is An Introduction to Discourse Analysis : Theory and Method—-James Paul Gee

I cannot download so I just give you the name of the book. All the theories and methods are in this book.

My chat history is here. This group is built to talk about our assessment. Words in blue are mine. Of course you can make up some examples as data to help you analyze the theory.