Assignment 2
1. A 1,000-word commentary or review essay due on Friday after reading week of Term 1 (i.e. 20th Nov.) 30%
2. A 2,500-word project due on Friday of Week 2, Term 2 (i.e. 22nd Jan) 70%
Assessment for PG students
1. Report or review (1,000 words) (40%) due on the Monday after reading week of Term 1 (i.e. 16 Nov.) 40%
2. Essay (3,000 words) (60%) due on Tuesday, Week 2, Term 2 (i.e. 19 Jan) 60%
Assignment 2
See the documents on writing essays and ethical review in the General Information secton.
Be sure to read the General SOAS marking criteria – these are useful guidelines for essay-writing too.
You are encouraged to choose your own topic, and to design and carry out your own project for this assignment. In general, this is much more rewarding for you and generally leads to better results. For MA students in particular, it’s an opportunity to do some groundwork or a pilot project in preparation for your MA dissertation. The pandemic does make it harder to conduct original research and gather data, but there are lots of things one can research online, for instance interviews done by phone/Zoom, or online surveys or forms (Survey Monkey, Google forms etc).
Below are some essay titles which you could adapt to your own purposes:
1. Give an overview of at least two major research foci and findings relating to the sociolinguistic study of language and gender.
2. What is the difference between a language and a dialect, and why does it matter? Illustrate your essay using examples of sociolinguistic contexts.
3. What are ‘pidgins’ and ‘creoles’ and how do they arise? Discuss, using examples from any language(s) familiar to you.
4. Discuss what is meant by the terms ‘diglossia’, ‘code-switching’ and ‘translanguaging’. Explain the differences and give examples of situations in which each may occur.
Here also are some titles of essays/project which students have written on in the past to give you food for thought.
Language mixing in K-Pop; Language mixing in Persian advertising; Moralising language and the law – a feminist readinɡ of judicial language in British criminal cases involving sex workers; a sociolinguistic survey of Spanish second-language learners; A sociolinguistic study of quotative and discourse markers in Welsh; Language attitudes and Verlan; Language policy in Iran;
