Haydon School English Faculty

English Language | AQA B

ENGB4 Investigating Language

Title: How does gender affect the language used in sporting
commentary, specifically in the world cup?
Good practice is to have a two part title. The first part acts as the main title and the second gives a
more specific insight into the area of the work. These are normally split with a colon. E.g. Growing
Up With Potter: How language changes from Philosophers Stone to Deathly Hallows reflect a more
sophisticated audience.
Name: Harrish Nathan
Candidate No.:
Teacher:
Haydon School: 12924
Submission Date:

1 Front Matter
1

1.1 Abstract
Summary of your report
1.2 Key Words
stereotype: a simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning
Mean length utterance (MLU): the mean number of morphemes produced in a sentence..
Pauses: this are silences in live speak, this can be done with purpose or completely by accident, but
it can show hesitation in someones speech.
Lexis: this is the terminology the commentators use, for my investigation it would be footballing
lexis.
Vocal expression: this is used to show emotion even when the listener cant see the person talking,
in this case commentator using emotion to describe a goal. Etc.


1
Front Matter is not included in the overall word count
1.3 Contents

1 Front Matter ................................................................................................................................... 2
1.1 Abstract ................................................................................................................................... 2
1.2 Key Words ............................................................................................................................... 2
1.3 Contents .................................................................................................................................. 3
1.4 List of Tables and Figures ......................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
1.5 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. 4
1.6 Abbreviations .......................................................................................................................... 4
1.7 Definitions ............................................................................................................................... 4
2 Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 5
3 Methodology ................................................................................................................................... 6
3.1 Design ....................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
3.2 Participants / Data (delete as appropriate) ............................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
3.3 Ethics ........................................................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
3.4 Methods ................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
3.5 Procedure ................................................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
4 Analysis ........................................................................................................................................... 7
4.1 Research Question 1 ................................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.2 Research Question 2 ................................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.3 Research Question 3 ................................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
5 Conclusion and Evaluation .............................................................................................................. 8
6 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................... 9
7 Appendices ....................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.



1.4 Acknowledgements
Shout out to Mumzy.
1.5 Abbreviations
If the nature of your report demands a lot of abbreviations, then they should be listed here
alongside the full definition.
1.6 Definitions
If there are any words which may be considered unfamiliar to the reader then they can be defined
here.
stereotype: a simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning
Mean length utterance (MLU): the mean number of morphemes produced in a sentence..
Pauses: this are silences in live speak, this can be done with purpose or completely by accident, but
it can show hesitation in someones speech.
Lexis: this is the terminology the commentators use, for my investigation it would be footballing
lexis.
Vocal expression: this is used to show emotion even when the listener cant see the person talking,
in this case commentator using emotion to describe a goal. Etc.










2 Introduction
Hypothesis: How does gender affect the language used in sporting
commentary, specifically in the world cup? I have done this
investigation because I like sport and would like to see how gender
affects the language we use in sport. I am very interested in
football and language + gender, so I decided to combine the two. The
field of academic linguistic research would be gender as I am
investigating how gender affect the language we use in sport. The
style of my research will be longitudinal. I will explore how
genderlect affects commentary in sport. The main purpose of my
investigation is to find out if what type of gender we are affects
the way we portray football. The second purpose of my investigation
is classification as I want to find out whether there is huge evidence
to show female features of language my investigation will help to
make this doubt clearer. To support my investigation will use some
of the theories and approaches of different types of theorists,
for example: Lakoff, Tannen, and Grice.

3 Methodology
Design: I will be using cross sectional and comparative research as my means
of gathering my data (design). This is because I am comparing the language
used when commentating over a mens football match and a womens football
match.

Participants/Data: I will be using a transcript as I am analysing commentary
which is being spoken so therefore I will need to use a transcript as part of my
work. I will use more than one commentator to make the investigation reliable
and wide scaled; they will also be chosen at random to reduce the chance of
bias affecting the investigation.

Ethics: my data will come from the public domain as it is commentary that we
all can hear or have heard. So there is no worry about ethics as my text is a
commentary transcript and also has no bias.

Methods: I will be using focus groups as I am comparing the focus groups of
men and women in football commentary. I will also be using statistical analysis
to find out how language used in commentary is affected by the gender playing
the sport.

Procedure: I will do all this over the summer holidays as that is my time frame,
I will be sorting my data into tables, with two headers men and women. I will
take notes of my findings and put them on a word document and then
eventually upload them onto my blog.




4 Analysis
Sources:
Female commentator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmghPQOXxnw
Male commentator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOf1RPLU3CY

Both commentators use a lot of nouns due to the fact that they are talking
about football so words such as ball goal and player names are used. Both
commentators use verbs such as Shoot and cross due to the nature of what
the commentators are commentating on.
The female commentator uses less lexical terms than the male commentator
maybe showing that gender affects the knowledge of vocabulary of the sport.
The female commentator also doesnt react as wildly as the male
commentator when the team has a chance, the male commentator tends to be
the more lively of the two maybe also indicating that men have more passion
for football than women.
The female commentator also speaks the more formal of the two, this may
suggest that females take commentating over football more professionally and
the males use less formal language to indicate their passion for the game. The
Male commentator also uses more descriptive language to describe the
football match.

5 Conclusion and Evaluation
to conclude gender does affect language used in sport but only slightly as the
only factors affecting this are the amount of descriptive language used, the
amount of lexical terms used, the expression of voice, the tone of voice and
formality of the speech.
I feel my investigation hasnt been as much of a success as I have hoped for as I
was hoping to find more differences in the language used my males and
females when commentating over a football match, but never the less a
decent investigation.

6 Bibliography
A full list of all sources of material (web pages, books, journals etc).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmghPQOXxnw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOf1RPLU3CY