Order Description
ASSIGNMENT
This assignment is to be completed in groups of three and comprises twenty per-cent of the
marks for this course. There are four questions each worth five marks each (approx. 2000 words
in total)
Assessment Criteria:
Student work will generally be assessed in terms of the following criteria:
1. Effectiveness of communication – i.e. readability, legibility, grammar, spelling,
neatness, completeness and presentation will be a minimum threshold requirement for
all written work submitted for assessment. Work that is illegible or incomprehensible
and does not meet the minimum requirement will be awarded a fail grade.
2. Demonstrated understanding – This will be evidenced by the student’s ability to be
dialectical in the discussion of contentious issues.
3. Evidence of research – This will be evidenced by the references made to the statutes,
auditing standards, books, journal articles and inclusion of a bibliography.
Note:
1. All written work must conform with the Federation University General Guide for the
Presentation of Academic Work.
2. For all written work students must ensure that they submit their own original work. Any
act of plagiarism will be severely penalised.
Plagiarism is presenting someone else work as your own and is a serious offence with serious
consequences. As set out in the University Regulation 6.1.1, students who are caught
plagiarising will, for a first offence, be given a zero mark for that task. A second offence will
result in a failing grade for the course(s) involved and any subsequent offence will be referred
to the Student Discipline Committee. Student must be aware of the University Regulation 6.1.1
Student Plagiarism.
Students must:
? fully reference the source(s) of all material, even if you have re-expressed the ideas,
facts or descriptions;
? acknowledge all direct quotations; and
? not submit work that has been researched and written by another person.
Auditing

Question 1.
Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, also known simply
as Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors, is a work by Thomas Browne challenging and
refuting the ‘vulgar’ or common errors and superstitions of his age. Browne’s three determinants
for obtaining truth were firstly, the authority of past authors, secondly, the act of reason and
lastly, empirical experience.
E.J. Merton summarised the ambiguities of Browne’s scientific view-point thus
“Here is Browne’s scientific point of view in a nutshell. One lobe of his brain wants to
study facts and test hypotheses on the basis of them, the other is fascinated by mystic
symbols and analogies.”
Discus in terms of accounting first and then in relation to auditing

Question 2.
Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to fix.
What does this say about the auditor/management relationship?

Question 3.
This is Martin Shkreli
Who is he and what does his story tell us about corporations, shareholders, accounting and
auditing – if anything.

Question 4.
“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my
ax.”
Abraham Lincoln
What does this mean in the context of auditing and auditors
Part A: Write about 1000 words on Question 1. 40 points.

1. Write a description of the speech community in which you live. This means the set of networks that you have contact with. Include the following:
• Your repertoire of languages and/or language varieties, and the circumstances of their use, as well as your knowledge of the repertoire of those around you
• Sociolinguistic variables that are markers of membership in a particular social group
• Some information relating to language attitudes

The facts about your language situation, what languages are used and when 10
Information about sociolinguistic variables that are markers of membership in a particular social group 10
Some information relating to language attitudes 10
Complete, original, and insightful 5
Fits in with terms and concepts from class 5
Part B: Choose three questions from the ones below. You can only choose one question from each bracket. They should be about 500 words each, or about two pages, depending on how you use charts and graphs. 20 points each.
Bracket 1: Unobtrusive observation
Variation and formality
Try going to three different places and listening for yep, yes, and yeah. The three places should reflect different formality levels. Be sure to justify your choices — why do you think a certain place is more or less formal? The observations can take as much time as you need, but it’s important to decide on the starting and stopping times before you start. Arbitrary starting and stopping times skew your data.
What do you expect to find? How does the variant of yes change in different situations? Is there a significant difference between more formal and less formal places, according to your data? (I’ll provide some stats help for those who choose this option.) Do you have any other insight into why some people use the different variants?
You don’t have to do variants of yes. If you have another idea that you’d like to try instead, run it past me.
Language and gender
It’s an oft-repeated stereotype that women talk more than men. One way to examine this claim is to count the number of times women and men get interrupted during conversation.
Try some unobtrusive observation on conversations where people are talking together. Keep track of the interruptions. An interruption would probably be something more disruptive than the normal ‘yeah’ or ‘uh-huh’ that speakers typically say during a conversation. You can use a table like the one at right.
What do you expect to find? What do you find, and are your results significant? (I’ll provide some stats help for those who choose this option.) How do these results pertain to your work in the classroom?
Again, decide in advance on a specific time for observing. If you hear an instance, and decide to start observing then, it can skew your sample. Be sure to generalise from your results.

Um and uh
Mark Lieberman of the blog Language Log made a rather startling and intriguing observation: men tend to say uh, while women tend to say um.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13713 http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/08/dudes-say-uh-ladies-say-um.html
Can you replicate this finding? Try observing people and listening for who says what. Use a chart like the one above to keep count.
Compliments
Collect ten examples of compliments in English. Don’t cherry-pick; write down the first ones you hear. Here’s the information you should gather:
• The exact wording of the compliment (as close as possible), and the response
• The age, sex, and role of the two participants
• Whether the compliment caused embarrassment or is misunderstood
When you’ve gathered your data, have a look at the syntax and the wording. Does there seem to be much variation in the wording of the compliments, or do people pretty much use the same words and sentence structures?
How do compliments in English compare to compliments in another language of your acquaintance? What would an ESL teacher need to explain to students about complimenting?
Greetings and leave-takings
Observe greeting or leave-taking interactions between two women, two men and a man and a woman. How are they similar? How do they differ? Would there be differences in the interactions if you were in a different country?
Calling someone love
Not just anyone can call anyone love. It can actually be kind of socially dangerous. So who can pull this off, and in what situations?
Collect as many examples as you can (10 would be ideal) of someone calling someone else love. Make notes of the following:
• Who says it (gender, age, occupation, relationship)
• to whom (same)
• under what circumstances
• and possibly the effect
Be sure to generalise across your cases. Are there any patterns?
Alternatively: Do the same for mate.

Bracket 2: Language change in the media

Accent in news readers
Have accents changed over time on Australian broadcasting? Gather a number of clips from now (about three, say), and a similar number of clips from a certain time period in the past using archives on the Internet. They can be audio or video. Try to ensure that your clips come from a range of people, so you’re not just picking up on one person’s peculiarities.
Then do an analysis of accent. Do certain sounds seem more present in one time period than in another? What about intonation, stress, cadence, or other prosodic features? How do you account for these differences? Be sure to discuss specific examples.

Accommodation in talk radio
Listen to recordings of a talk radio show. Does the presenter change the way he or she speaks to people of different backgrounds? (They say Geoff Hutchison is good at this sort of thing.) If there is a shift, how would you describe it? What specific linguistic features can you identify that mark a person’s background?
Australian celebrities
Find videos of two Australian expatriate celebrities (Hugh Jackman, Kylie Minogue, or others) at different stages of their career. Does their accent change? Do the changes correspond to where they were living at the time? Or could they sound different in the same time period, depending on who they’re talking to? How can you explain this?
Bracket 3: Observing student behaviour
Do male students talk differently from female students?
Do male and female students at your school speak differently, or the same? Collect and discuss examples
— but beware of confirmation bias, or only seeing what you expect to see. If you don’t think a difference in speaking is because of gender, it’s okay to say so.
Alternatively: How do teachers respond to male students? female students? students of their own gender? or the opposite gender?
Joking
Find three examples of students joking and discuss them in detail. How do students signal that the act of joking is happening? What function does joking have for these students? Is the joke ever misunderstood? What have others said about the nature of joking?
Alternatively: If you’ve had to learn English (or maybe another language), can you think of two or three times when you missed a joke? Have there been times when everyone thought something was funny, and you didn’t? Why didn’t you get it? Was it because of word play? Cultural or real-world knowledge you didn’t share? Something else? Talk through what linguistic, sociolinguistic, cultural or real-world information you needed to understand to get the joke.
Code-switching
How do students at your school speak differently in different situations? Have you noticed them doing any code-switching or code-mixing behaviour? What do you think is triggering the shift? Find examples and discuss them using the information presented in lectures.
Greetings
Greetings can range from hello to good morning to What’s up? For this question, you will observe and write down the exact wording for ten examples of students greeting you, and ten examples of fellow teachers greeting you. Before observing, how do you expect the instances to differ and why? Also observe ten examples of students greeting each other. How are these different from the others?
Which greetings seem more formal or more casual? How do you account for these differences? What implications might this have for your teaching?
Be sure to count only the instances where the other person greets you first! Otherwise, your greeting might influence what they say.
Bracket 4: Various
Terms of address
Holmes shows a chart from Laver on page 282 of the text (or Figure 11.1). It’s a chart of terms of address for British English in the 1970s. But this chart is a little out of date. Design your own chart for Australian English today. You can use Laver’s chart as a starting point but yours may have different categories and parameters. Justify your choices. Make your chart as simple as necessary, but no simpler.
Include these terms: mate, you guys
What implications could this information have in teaching?
Language change
Linguist Arika Okrent has written an article (tinyurl.com/4englishchanges) in which she names four very subtle changes in English. Choose a couple of these changes, and provide empirical evidence for them using online corpus-based resources (for example, Google Ngram Viewer). Once you’ve done that, find a fifth way in which English has changed, and show evidence for it in the same way.
What implications does this have for language and language attitudes?
Religious use of language
Observe the language used in a religion (other than one that you follow). The newer the religion, the better. You can watch YouTube videos, or lurk on public discussion forums. Try not to use promotional material that’s intended for an outside audience. Instead, try to find material intended for the members themselves. What words and phrases do the adherents use that seem unusual or different? Do any of the phrases seem confusing to outsiders? Do the phrases seem to mean more than the combined meaning of the individual words? Do you think these words or phrases serve as markers of the religious community? How so?
Remember: the religion must not be your own. This isn’t about whether the religion is true or weird or culty or not. Try to approach it like an anthropologist and see how members use language.
Bracket 5: Write your own question
During the semester, you may get an idea for a project like some of the ones in Part B. By all means run it past me, and you can do it as a Part B question.
There are some things you are allowed to do in a project, and some things you’re not.
You are allowed to do unobtrusive public observation. If you’re simply making note of things that anyone could see and hear in a public place, then you’re fine. You can also use publicly available data, like corpora, data from the web, or video. You can use data from social media if it is explicitly public. Be extremely careful about using Facebook data, and check the privacy levels. If in doubt, don’t use it. Twitter is fine.
You are not allowed to interact with people. This includes asking questions, doing surveys, or doing a Labov-style elicitation on unsuspecting people. For those things, you’d need ethics approval. Just keep it simple, use data that’s out there, and above all, do not get me in trouble.
Notes
Use an ECU cover sheet (available on the Major Assignment tab in Blackboard). Make sure your name does not appear anywhere else in the paper.
Turn in your paper using the Turnitin link, available on the Major Assignment tab in Blackboard. Turnitin can handle most file types. Make sure you submit as one file. You can combine PDFs into one using the tip on the Assignments Tab on Blackboard.
Any references must be cited in APA 6th. You should put all the references for all your questions together, at the end (before any appendices, of course). Check the ECU Referencing Guide for how to do this. Endnote is a great way to cite things, but if you want an easy website that does the same thing, try bibme.org

Marking criteria
I hesitate to give explicit marking criteria for the Part B questions. Every question is kind of different, some especially so. I like to encourage creativity in the range of topics you can tackle, and a one-size-fits-all grading metric may not be the most appropriate for every question.
On the other hand, you need to know what to expect when you answer a question. So while this won’t be an overly-specific criteria set, here are some things you should cover in your Part B questions. You could not cover these explicitly, and still do a good job, but these items should be on your mind as you’re writing. Obviously this won’t fit for some of the questions. Treat these areas as a guide.
The research question. Give some background. What are you looking at? How does it relate to sociolinguistics? Does this relate to anything we’ve discussed in class?
The literature. Has anyone else written anything about this before? What did they say? Are you taking this question farther, or tackling it in a different way?
Your method. A discussion of how you’re going to examine the question. Why is this a good way of dealing with it? Are there any limitations, or things you’re not going to cover?
Your results. What did you find? In some cases, showing your statistical work would be appropriate here. Some analysis and discussion would definitely be appropriate. How did it go? Would you do anything differently if you were to try this question again? Sometimes it’s appropriate to discuss how this relates to your teaching.

A good answer (about 14 points) will handle these questions capably. It uses terms and concepts we’ve discussed in class. Where there are claims, they’re backed up by evidence. It goes about as far as we did in class, but not much farther. The basic idea is there. The author shows a command of Standardised English, and is able to explain their view.
A great answer (16 points or more) will look at the issue in a new and interesting way. It’s fresh and insightful, and it raises more interesting questions in this area. It seems aware of what’s going on in linguistics, and cites relevant work as support. It advances the topic a little bit, and says something smart. There are sometimes different ways of explaining things, and the author seems to get this, discussing multiple points of view. In some cases, the work could be publishable if it were expanded a bit.
A poor answer (12 points or less) gets it a bit wrong sometimes, skates over some of the issues involved, and seems unaware of concepts we’ve discussed. It seems lacking in thought and reflection. There are some obvious plot holes, or questions that haven’t been answered. Assertions are made without evidentiary support.