Language is a Manipulator

Using Keywords

Keywords (see http://home.sprintmail.com/%7Edebflanagan/prepare.html) enable students to do ‘smart searching’. 

Keywords should be used to search indexes of books, electronic databases and the internet. 

A knowledge of simple Boolean search strategies (see http://home.sprintmail.com/%7Edebflanagan/engines.html) will be useful here. 

To find primary sources (see http://www.lib.washington.edu/uwill/research101/basic03.htm) for analysis, useful keywords/phrases might be:

·	“George Bush” +Iraq 
·	“American presidents” + “inaugural addresses”
·	“Helen Clark” + “customary rights”
·	suffragettes + speeches 

To find secondary sources (see http://www.lib.washington.edu/uwill/research101/basic03.htm) as commentary on language or as background social/ political/ historical information, useful keywords/ phrases might be:

·	“language as a weapon”
·	“semantics of war”
·	“suffragette movement” +NZ 
·	“iraq war” + reasons 

As students are searching for information they need to use their scanning and skimming skills (see http://www.eduscapes.com/42explore/skim.htm) to determine whether the information or sources they have found are relevant to their questions (see evaluation.rtf). They also need to be aware of evaluating (see http://english.unitecnology.ac.nz/evaluation/) their sources. 

They should record relevant information by taking notes. A suggested approach here is to draw up a sheet like the Student Worksheet (see worksheet.rtf). As well as this they may want to draw up a frequency chart to record how often particular language features are used in their sources. 

Once they have assembled their information they will need to scan and skim (see scan_skim.rtf) it to find the information they need. 

© Ministry of Education, Wellington, New Zealand (First published 1998)