English Language Coursework

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Minhaaz Patel

Analysis – change in language of newspaper sport reports.

The aim of my A2 English Language coursework is to investigate the changes in language between sports reports from newspapers over a period of about fifty years.

The texts I have chosen to use for my investigation are:

  • “Perry wins at Wimbledon” (1934) – I will refer to this text as Text A.
  • “Federer takes crown for a forth year but Nadal leaves his nerves in shreds” (2006) – I will refer to this text as Text B.

The difference in time between the two texts is sixty nine years.

I have chosen to analyse these two texts because of my interest in the topic of tennis and they are also similar in that they are both of the same genre and the subject and source of the texts are the same. Both texts are from “The Guardian” newspaper and are written on the well known tennis competition called “Wimbledon”. This tournament is one of the longest running tournaments in sports and has been running since 1877.

In my investigation I will be looking at the similarities and differences between the two texts and how the language has changed over a time period of about 70 years.

The purpose of writing newspapers is to inform and entertain. Readers of newspapers can vary and can be read by all types of people, therefore they need to be written to suit all types of people to attract a wider audience. Readers of these articles will be people who have interest in tennis and have some knowledge of the rules and the game of tennis. For this reason subject specific lexis of tennis can be used in the texts. Examples of these from the texts are, “three deuces in it”. A person who does not know much about tennis would have little or no idea of what a deuce was.

After conducting a word count of my texts, I realised that there was quite a difference between both of them. Below is a table of what I found from my investigation.

 

The above table shows that there are more words, paragraphs and lines in the older text, compared to the more recent text. The reason this may be is that not many people had televisions as they were too expensive, so many people would read the newspaper as their main source of information. For this reason the articles would have to be much more detailed then nowadays when we have lots of information sources like, the internet, satellite TV, radio etc. the number of paragraphs in  the two texts are similar with Text A having four more paragraphs then Text B. This is because of the length of the text. Text A has a lot more lines then Text A. The main reason I think for this, is that Text A has more advertisements around the texts, making the lines shorter. After seeing and reading other newspapers, I have noticed that adverts and images are a key feature of modern texts. The images are not present in the texts with this analysis as it is not from the newspaper itself, but from the Internet.  

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The headline in Text A is considerably shorter than the headline in Text B. Comparing this to the length of the article where Text A is longer than Text B. The main reason I believe this is, is because the older text has a sub headline underneath the main headline, whereas the newer text does not have this so puts all the information in the headline.

The key feature of both these texts is proper nouns. An example of this from Text B is, “Tim Henman might”. This is predictable because the text is a newspaper article. ...

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