Task 13: A Set of Guidelines on Recording Spoken Language

Recording spoken discourse can prove quite difficult as two things can happen and either way can ruin the whole thing in collecting data. Either you can tell the people you’re recording that they’re being recorded, resulting in what is primarily known as the ‘Hawthorne Effect’ – this is when people start to change either behaviour or the way they speak because they know someone is watching or trying to analyse one of their characteristics. However, you do have the option of not telling the group of people you’re recording that they’re even being recorded, but this can lead on to having some ethical issues.

Make sure when you’re collecting results you make it a fair test, for example, if you plan to record a group of girls and how they speak over one another in a conversation, you must do the same for a group of boys to compare and get more reliable results.

Once both conversations have been recorded, then it’s time to transcribe the two, a piece of transcription looks like this:

The numbers in brackets represent the pauses and how long each one was. If one of the speakers interrupts the word of the new speaker will be directly underneath the previous speakers, last word spoken.