Text A is spontaneous speech extracted from an interview with Jane King, a history teacher at JM Campus (Sutton Coldfield College), a local college in the Erdington area. Speaker A is responding to a question asked and is voicing her views and opinions on the war in Iraq and what the intentions were of invading. The content of Text B is a planned speech delivered by former Prime Minister, Winston S. Churchill commonly known “Their Finest Hour”. He is addressing the House of Commons on The Battle of Britain to come. Text C’s is a scripted speech for a fictional character from the movie “Lord of Rings - Return of The King” and is performed by Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, who is rallying his troops before battle because there is tension among them. This is because the different armies from different places need to be unified to make them fight to the death, as it is the war to end all wars.
Text C has two audiences because it is from a movie. One audience is the army itself that Aragorn is addressing and leading, while the other audience is people watching the film. Text B’s audience at the time it was delivered, is Members of Parliament and people present at the House of Commons in London when the speech was made (MPs, coalition members…), whereas today’s audience would be historians researching Churchill or just people generally interested in him. Text A’s audience is only two people who were present at the time. I was present because I was the doing the interviewing. Another person present was a fellow student called Joel Francis. Due to the speaker in text a being a teacher a certain level of professionalism had to be held by Jane King because it was a student interviewing her. Text B is one of three speeches given by Churchill and is considered to be of great inspiration to the United Kingdom at the time as we entered what was probably the most dangerous phase of the war. Text C’s contextual factors is that the speech, spoken by Aragorn, has been accused of copying fragments of Shakespeare’s Henry V speech in scene 3, whereas some people would argue that Henry V’s speech was used to give a historical impact and was used as an inspirational template.
The speaker of text A, does not have a Manchester accent (Jane was born in Manchester). This could be due to the fact that Jane King went to a public school. Also she has been living in Birmingham very long now and if she did have an accent it would have withered away as she has been teaching at JMC longer than 6 years.
