Football commentaries

I have always had a keen interest in football, both as a player and spectator. Recently, though, I have begun to notice that the two main methods of media presentation, television and radio broadcasting differ quite substantially. Therefore, the focus of my coursework will be to examine the common linguistic features found in both radio and television presentations of football matches and how they differ.

I think this is an interesting focus for my coursework and it will be interesting to look at how important visual aids are, and how this tends to affect the language used by speakers when carrying out a spontaneous commentary of a live game happening in front of them.

I have also decided that to further my investigation to gain further detail, I will focus upon how the two media methods, television and radio present the same game. This will allow me to examine how the same events are portrayed linguistically by television and radio commentators.

I have developed a working title for the piece of coursework from this; ‘An investigation into how football is portrayed linguistically on television and radio and how language used differs in each agent of the media. ‘ Methodology I have noticed that due to the duration of a full football match, analysing a commentary from a whole match would give me more data than I need to carry out this investigation. Therefore to focus my project further, I have decided to use extracts of the commentaries. These will focus on important moments and incidents during the duration of the match.

Using my existing knowledge of listening to commentaries, I have pin-pointed one period of a game which would be useful to analyse. The most eventful piece of action during any game of football is a goal. Therefore to gain an accurate reflection of the language by commentators in each media type , I will use the 60-120 seconds before the goal and the 60-120 after the goal, then compare the television and radio commentaries with each other. Once I have collected the data using videos and audio recordings of each match, I will firstly have to transcribe my preferred extracts of the match.

This will inevitably be a quite time-consuming yet worthy area of my investigation in order for me to obtain valid transcriptions. This will basically involve me continually rewinding and playing back both the audio and video tapes so as all prosodic features are taken into account. I will also have to examine the features that I will also need to take into account when transcribing spoken English including pauses, fillers, false-starts as well as intonations and prosodic features.