English A2 Practice Investigation - Football Reports

1. Football Reports
Holly and Ben

2. Hypotheses
Similarities:
• Genre specific – There will still be football related lexis.
• Chronological order – The match will still be reported as it
happened.
• Graphology – It’s still a newspaper article, therefore there’ll
still be logos and photographs.
• Facts and figures – It will still feature statistics and
descriptive/detailed language.

3. Differences:
• Graphology – The photographs featured will be black and
white and of a lower quality.
• Less battle/war terminology – The article will be less loaded
with semantic fields of battle/war
• Facts and figures – Stadium capacities, viewing figures, etc.
will be different.
• Less dramatic – less intensifiers, and overall less dramatic
lexis
• Nationality of the players – There will more likely to be
more English players in a team like Chelsea when looking at
previous articles.

4. Methodology
• We used The Times Digital Archive and we found the articles by searching for key
words. The search terms that produced the best results were ‘football’ paired with
‘association’ and ‘final’ as we were mainly looking for FA cup final matches.
• The best resources that we gathered were from The Times Digital Archive because
we could search back a long time and they were all newspaper articles, which is
what we were looking for.
• Most of the other sources we tried were non profitable and basically a waste of
time so we focused on the times archives to find the majority for the task.
• We gathered most of the articles from the times and we also had one from the
mirror which was our modern comparative piece.
• We selected these texts because they were the highest quality articles (and the
only ones that we could read). This is a valid comparative text because they’re
both newspaper articles of a football match report.

5. Systematic Analysis - Lexis
• Polysyllabic lexis is found in the old article such as ‘ensued’,
‘solicited’, etc.
• More old fashioned phrases are found in The Times’ text, such
as “most brilliant matter”

6. Systematic Analysis - Grammar
• The old article features long sentences with no
paragraphs. Whereas, the modern article has
short sentences that are spaced out in
paragraphs.
• The old article also features passive sentences
such as ‘The kicking of the forwards’.

7. Systematic Analysis - Semantics
• The article from The Daily Mirror features
semantic fields of war and battle such as
‘defying the odds to overcome Napoli’,
‘beating Bayern on their own soil’, ‘greatest
European campaign of them all’, etc.
• The word ‘scrimmage’ was used, which is a
modern day Rugby term for players, not used
in football.

8. Systematic Analysis - Spelling
• There are no differences in spelling between
the two texts.

9. Systematic Analysis - Discourse structure
• Both articles follow an analysis discourse
structure, as they explore and evaluate
the football matches.

10. Systematic Analysis - Graphology
• There are no graphology features such as photographs or
colour in the old article, whereas photographs and logos can
all be seen in the modern article.
• There are also no subheadings on the old article.

11. Systematic Analysis - Pragmatics
• There are many football references in both
texts, to which readers (who are likely to be
football fans) will have a shared meaning of
and be able to easily understand.
•

12. Conclusion
• The language used was genre specific, which we predicted
in our hypotheses.
• There was no graphology, which we did not predict.
• Facts and figures were there, but most were written in
words instead of numbers. They were also a lot lower, as
predicted.
• The match was written in chronological order.
• There was still battle/war terminology, but it was less
dramatic.
• The text was less dramatic, with fewer intensifiers and
modifiers.
• The nationality of players appeared to be less European
than the modern day article.

13. Evaluation
• What worked well
• The topic of football matches was quite interesting, and we didn’t
have much trouble finding similarities/differences.
• We managed to find a good source, The Times Archive, which had
match reports dating back to the 1800s.
• What didn’t work well
• Finding old articles proved to be difficult as a lot of them were hard
to read.
• The website we used only had the articles as pictures, and so we
couldn’t just copy and paste words when we did our quantitative
analysis’.