Minutes for Friday 4th October

Minutes

Friday 4^th October 2013 10:00 – 11:00

As a group we met on Friday 4^th October to familiarise ourselves with the RSEL project and to establish certain job roles and requirements.

Firstly we identified a time that would be convenient for all of us and decided on Fridays at 10:30 until 11:30 with additional meetings being constructed as and when we needed, such as nearer the deadline or if there was difficulty with extracurricular activities. We thought that it was good to have a certain time put in place so that we collect our data and readings and bring them back to the group weekly.

In the first VL Alison mentions that the first point of interest is to think of a topic of interest. We brainstormed our ideas and found that we all enjoy Child Language Acquisition and want to base our research question on Child Language. This pulls on two important motivations; instrumental, whereby we will gain something from the project i.e a pass mark and an intrinsic motivation whereby we enjoy our topic.

Next in our meeting we decided to think of a question we could investigate and brainstormed ideas of what interested us. I (Jenny) thought of expanding on an investigation I had done previously looking at screen media on child language acquisition. The group were intrigued by this idea and we decided on a draft research question:

Are the effects of televised interaction greater than face to face interaction on child development?

Within this research question we decided on 3 sub questions to focus our research question and get the most out of our studies, these were as follows:

Does the repetitive structure in televised interaction help more than face to face interaction?

Does the phonology in televised interaction help more than face to face interaction?

Do the paralinguistic features in televised interaction help more than face to face interaction?

We all noted the need for data protection when acquiring our own data in the research project. We realised that we would need 2/3 different groups of children to test on in order to get comprehensive data. Catherine noted that she had younger family members that she could analyse. I (Jenny) work at a primary school and nursery so with the consent of the school could analyse a group of children. Frazer, Jodie and Hannah also noted that contacting local schools and nurseries and asking if we could have access to a group of children for university studies could also be beneficial.

We have all done questionnaires within the Independent Study setting so know how to approach people in regards to filling out questionnaire studies. Questionnaires are interesting sources of data which we could all equally distribute.

Agenda for next time – Friday 11^th October 2013:

·         Discuss any progress fine tuning the research question

·         Look at Alison’s comments and review them

·         Decide on 5 key books/texts/journals each of us could read over the following week

Note to Alison:

Please feel free to add any comments on our thoughts and ideas from our first meeting and we will take each of these on board. Thank you!