Media Text New Idea

Newspaper Article –

New idea

How to understand women

Plan

Include theories on language and gender in speech – e.g. that women use more politeness when speaking than men do, as well as less swear words and allofunctional implicature. Allofunctional implicature is when what is being said is not all what is being implied. The real meaning is something quite different to what is being said. I believe this will be an interesting topic for discussion in my newspaper article media text because I can inform the audience of an interesting area of language and gender study, but also entertain them through subtle humour and the essays subject.

Media Text

Newspaper Article –

How has the representation of women in the media changed in the last 50 years?

Many may say it hasn’t changed at all. Many may say it has changed dramatically. Some say for the better, some will say for the worst. But isn’t it now the case that women have equal rights to men and we, as a society, no longer have a dominant gender? This is always up for debate. Isn’t it widely believed that women are portrayed as far stronger and independent individuals. If that was the case, then why was Cindy Lauper skipping about gracefully like a school girl in the 1970s while Rihanna struts about stages as a sex object to men? These unanswered questions make sexism a difficult subject.

The Phonological Development of Children

All language learning begins with sounds. Grasping the concept of sound is the first step of language learning and is key for language to develop at a normal rate. This is often why parents subconsciously use 'babytalk' whilst speaking to their infants, making sounds and noises rather than saying whole words, and when they do say whole words, speaking them very slowly and emphasising each letter. But why do children learn language in the way they do?

- Children have to learn to distinguish different sounds and to segment the speech stream they are exposed to into units - which eventually become meaningful and useful to language development

- When you read, there are spaces between the words. No such spaces occur between spoken words. So, if an infant hears the sound sequence “thisisacup,” it has to learn to segment this stream into the distinct units “this”, “is”, “a”, and “cup.” This can be an extremely challenging aspect of language development.

- However, once a child assigns meaning to certain words language becomes easier to learn and more natural to use. Overgeneralisation is common here though, as sometimes a child can assign the wrong meaning to words. For example they may assign 'Daddy' to all men rather than just their father in particular.

Apparently, the acquisition of native language phonology begins in the womb and isn’t completely adult-like until the teenage years. Perceptual abilities (such as being able to segment “thisisacup” into four individual word units) usually precede production and thus aid the development of speech production.