Category: Teaching and Learning

Introduction

The incredible processing power of computers and the ability to efficiently scan and digitise books offer new ways to scrutinise how we use language to communicate ideas and messages. With the help of software, such as Microsoft Word and some of its basic functions, we can search for patterns in any novel or measure the frequency of words in a poetry anthology. The data we collect could lead to innovative and interesting interpretations of writers’ techniques and our language choices in the real world.

This approach is known as corpus linguistics.

The following lesson plan will guide you through the process of gathering data and how you can explore the language used in popular music. Hopefully, we might gain some interesting perspectives on their construction, themes and representation of the world. You will also develop your use of mathematics and ICT skills.

Step One – Gathering Data

If every student in the class selects one pop song to include in the sample, you should have a large “body” of language to analyse. Of course, the lyrics need to be more than yeah, yeah, yeah! Anything over 5,000 words should be enough to provide a meaningful and significant set of results.

Copy and paste the lyrics into a Word document. To keep the songs neat and tidy, it might be worthwhile to “Select All” and format the lines, so the typeface and font are consistent throughout the document. These options are available from the “Home” ribbon at the top of the screen:

Step Two – Finding the Word Count

We are going to look at the frequency of certain words and then express them as a percentage. Therefore, you will need to find the total number of words in the sample. You can locate this information at the bottom left of the Microsoft Word interface:

If the figure is not available there, click on “Review” and the “Word Count” option should appear in the new ribbon. For this lesson plan, we are going to use the 6478 total from the image above.

Step Three – Word Frequency

To search for the number of times a word occurs in the sample, begin by selecting the “Find” function at the top right of the screen and identified by the magnifying glass symbol:

You can also the shortcut Ctrl+f to also open the navigation pane:

When you enter a word into the box, Microsoft Word will search the document for that particular query. In the following example, we searched for the word love and selected the results tab:

As you can see, the word “love” occurs 31 times in the sample. Practise using this function with any other words you think might be important.

Step Five – Percentages

To work out the percentage, take the number of times the word occurs in the sample and divide it by the total number of words. You then multiply it by 100. For our worked example, “love” appears 31 times so we divide that figure by 6487 and multiply the answer by 100.

0.5% might not seem statistically significant but it is interesting to note.

Search Tips

If you are looking for the frequency of the pronoun “I” and you simply type “i” into form, the navigation function will return every occurrence of the letter, even when it appears in the middle of words. To get around this problem, you can add a space before or after the letter: ” i “. In our worked example, this reduced the figure from an inaccurate 1698 occurrences to a more realistic 235.

Similarly, if you are looking to count the number of times “she” appears in the sample, you would need to cheek that words such as “shell” and “sheet” do not get included in your tally. You can add a space after “she” to exclude these words but you might miss instances of “she’s” or “she’d” so you just need to be careful.

Tasks – Identity

A lot of pop songs focus on the themes of love and relationships. Some of these lyrics will will have a romantic tone. Others might be more despondent or angst-ridden. However, it might be interesting to find the different words used to define the identities in the stories.

Search through your sample and complete the following table.

Word Type	Example	Number	%
Gender identifiers	Boy
	Man
	Girl / Girly
	Woman
	Baby
	∑

Pronouns

In terms of love songs, it might be interesting to find the proportion of pronouns in the sample because this might give some indication to what extent the songs focus on the characters.

Word Class	Example	Number	%
First person singular pronouns	I / Me / Mine / My
Second person singular pronoun	You
First Person Plural pronouns	We / Us / Our
Third Person pronouns	They / Their
Third Person Singular Pronouns	She
Third Person Singular Pronouns	He
	∑

Fillers

There are some words and sounds in English that do not communicate an obvious meaning. For example, if you are talking to someone, you might use “eh” and “ah” to indicate to your listener that you are simply pausing before you complete a thought or sentence. These meaningless sounds are called fillers. The phrases “you know”, “yeah” and “like” are increasingly popular fillers used by young people.

What percentage of the lyrics is made up of these meaningless words and sounds?

Step Six Page Results

There are some easy criticisms of the approach we have taken to analyse the sample of song lyrics. Our results could be skewed by the number of songs collected or the narrow demographic used to select them for the study. One song could repeat a particular word a ridiculous amount of times and this might impact our ability to interpret the results.

You can check where our search results occur in the document by selecting the “Pages” tab in the navigation pane. If you find the majority of your results come from one or two songs, you will have to include that information in your conclusions.

It is also interesting to work out if there are common themes in the lyrics. Do the songs share certain imagery? Are there any motifs used to describe the characters and their situations? Do the writers rely on obvious clichés? Again, the “Pages” tab can help.

In our search for “love”, the word appears on five different pages. After a quick check, it is easy to confirm they are five different songs. This result might be statistically significant.

You should try searching for these common images: night; dark; light; sun; rain; wind; high; low; eyes; and hands.

Step Seven Interpret the Data

1. Is there any significance in the percentage of words classified as pronouns?
2. What conclusions can you draw about the representation of people from the various pronouns used?
3. What percentage of words could be classified as grammatical?
4. Are there any common themes, especially with the images the lyricists employ?
5. What conclusion can you make from these figures?
6. Has this research changed your perspective on songs?
7. Does this research have any implications for how you study and revise for your English examinations?

Download the File

If you would like to try this lesson plan but don’t have the time or opportunity to collect the sample material, you can download the Word document of music lyrics used create this guide. It is important to note that the songs were selected by a class of young girls – could this skew the results?

Introduction

Microsoft Teams and Google Classroom have become the two most popular online collaboration tools used by teachers and students because they offer a shared workspace where we can access files and resources, deliver meaningful feedback on assignments, and engage with pupils who are unable to attend class. We hope that our guides and exercises can help support your teaching and learning. We also appreciate that it is very useful to view our pages without leaving Teams or having proper links embedded into your Classroom Assignments and Posts.

This step by step guide will explain how you can integrate our website into your own channels or streams with just a few simple clicks.

It is important to note that subplotter.com uses encryption technology so our site is secure –  all of our web pages will integrate safely into these platforms and will not be blocked by your school servers.

Microsoft Teams

Step One: Some teachers like to include a link to our website in the chat section of Teams, especially for last minute exam revision, but you can actually embed the website. If you look along the list of tabs at the top of your channel, you will find [+] icon. Click on this button to open the “Add a Tab” dialog box.

Step Two: This box lists all of the templates available. You can scroll down to find the Website app but you can search for it by typing the word into the text box.

Step Three: Simply select the Website app by clicking on the image.

Step Four: Another dialog box will appear on your screen. You need to enter a name for this new tab. In this example, we are labeling the tab “Subplotter”.

Step Five: You also need to add the specific web page address to the URL input box. The easiest way to get the correct address is to copy and paste the location from the address bar at the top of your browser.

Once you click the Save button, the relevant web page should appear under a new tab and your pupils will be able to access the site.

Google Classroom

Step One: Most teachers click the “Create” button in the Classwork Tab. Of course, you can include a link in the Stream section, but these can get lost in the conversation. That is why we would recommend you share our guides under the Classwork tab.

Step Two: You can then choose if you want to share the web page as an assignment or resource. Some teachers prefer to use the Assignment option if they are going to mark the comprehension exercises from our guides. If it is a pre-reading homework or simple research, then the Material option will work best.

Step Three: You can then add a title and some instructions for your students. Select the “Link” option from the dropdown menu.

Step Four: You will be taken to an input box where you will have to add the URL. However, if you want to make sure you get the correct address, copy the link from the address bar in your browser first. Simply hover over the web page address and press Ctrl+C or right click on your mouse and select copy.

Step Five: In this example, we have copied the full address for our guide to Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth”. You can then paste the address into the text box using Ctrl+V or right click the mouse button again to select the paste option.

Finally, click the “Add link” button and you should see a screenshot of the relevant page and a snippet about the result. You are ready to post or assign our guide in your own Google Classroom project.

Conclusion

Adding any web page to the main collaboration tools is relatively easy. If you have any difficulties, let us know in the comments section below and we can help find a solution.

Introduction

Although we might not fully appreciate all the rules and exceptions, we still expect words to appear in a certain order in a sentence for its message to be meaningful. We have a good instinct for what is and what is not acceptable. If you are developing your understanding of word classes and conventions of English language, this exercise will help you focus on words and their function.

This task is also useful for improving your ability to dissect images in an unseen poetry examination because we are looking at how meaning is created through the syntagmatic relationship of words. Put simply, you can focus on how the writer’s message is conveyed through key words rather the entire sentence.

We are going to analyse a sequence of words in terms of their word classes, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives, by simply writing the category underneath each word. The following diagram is a good example of the process:

Although this approach to understanding communication might seem unusual at first, it is quite straightforward with some practice. The procedure is often called parsing or syntactical analysis. However, picking out the nouns and verbs is much easier than determining if a word is an adverb or a preposition. Even verbs and adjectives can look very similar so it is vital you consider the function of the word in the sentence.

Download our pupil worksheet and let’s get started.

Step One – Definitions

Before we begin, it might be useful to revise some key terms. Of course, you can ask your class for their definitions of the various word classes and they can share them on the board.

A noun is broadly defined as the name of a person, place or thing, and a verb is the action performed by that noun. An adjective helps to describe the noun and an adverb modifies verbs, adjectives and other adverbs. These are useful definitions because they reliably explain most sentences so we will use them as guides for this exercise.

Less well known are prepositions, conjunctions and articles, which we also need to consider. Prepositions help clarify the relationship between different people, places or things by defining the space and time, conjunctions are used to link different parts of the sentence, and articles help identify the noun.

Finally, auxiliary verbs help shape the meaning of the main verb by modifying his tense and modality.

These are the abbreviations you can use in this task:

Part of Speech	Code	Part of Speech	Code
Adjective	Adj	Noun	N
Adverb	Adv	Preposition	Prep
Article	Art	Pronoun	Pro
Auxiliary Verb	Aux	Verb	V
Conjunction	Con

Step Three – Analysis

You are going to identity the parts of speech used in the nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill”. Of course, if you are not too sure about a word’s function, you can leave it blank and go on to the next one. Knowing the relationship between words can help you decide their word class. The first line of this exercise is done for you:

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

Up Jack got and home did trot,
As fast as he could caper;
And went to bed and bound his head
With vinegar and brown paper.

Extension Activity (1)

Demonstrate your syntactical analysis skills by labeling the following nursery rhyme:

Incy wincy spider
climbed up the water spout,
Down came the rain
and washed poor Incy out,

Out came the sunshine
and dried up all the rain,
and Incy Wincy spider
climbed up the spout again.

Extension Activity (2)

If you think you have mastered parsing and you have a detailed understanding of word class, especially if you are an older student, try analysing the opening verse to Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Step Four – Check Your Answers

You can check the accuracy of your responses by downloading our suggested answer sheet.