Task brief: Discourse analysis

Choose a text from each of the following media areas:

• Magazine cover,
• Radio show,
• A website.

Use Fairclough’s model of discourse analysis explained in the textbook to analyse each of these media texts.

1. Conduct a textual analysis of your chosen text; consider the rhetorical devices employed.
2. Conduct an analysis of the discursive practices of text production, distribution and consumption.
3. Analyse the social and cultural practices which frame these discursive practices and your chosen texts.

Your response should be no more than 500 words.

View student responses to this task here and here.

Task brief: Collating an analytical toolbox – reading texts

Compile a list of all the technical, analytical terms introduced in the textbook and explore the idea further.

Whether fully secure in your understanding or not, you can explore these concepts best through application. Find a full-page advertisement from a magazine and briefly write up what it means to your group. Then, using the terms introduced in Long and Wall et al (2009), develop this into an analysis of meaning that pays close attention to rhetorical organisation and how the advertisement addresses its audience (what affect does it seek to produce?), along with its semiological meanings.

What ideas about its subject and context does it invoke in support of its product? How are signs selected and combined? How does it anchor meaning? How is polysemia controlled? What myths are implied in your chosen text?

Your response should be between 500 words.

View some student responses to the task here.

Task brief: Exploring genre and narrative

Choose a text from each of the following media areas:

• newspaper article,
• print advertisement,
• pop song.

1. Identify the specific sub-genre that each of your chosen texts belongs to (within newspapers there are lots of different types of article, while advertisement genres are often determined by the product).

2. Itemise the generic features (codes and conventions) of each of your texts, as well as some features of the wider genre to which they belong that they might not exhibit.

3. Explore the extent to which these features present a narrative, the way that it is plotted and the rhetorical devices used to narrate and convey the story told.

4. Evaluate the extent to which the concept of narrative is useful to explaining the meaning of such non-filmic media forms.

Your response should be no more than 400 words.

Read some student responses to this task