For this assignment, watch one hour of TV news--preferably one half-hour local broadcast plus one half-hour national. It may help if you can record this hour, but it should be possible without recording if you practice for a while taking notes while watching news broadcasts.
Make a list of people who speak on the news: broadcasters and people interviewed in stories and people in commercials; try to record as much information as you can about their geographical location and apparent age. You're listening for whether or not they pronounce postvocalic /r/ in words like bear or beard (see Aitchison, pp. 50-54; Barber, pp. 210-214). Simply note whether this /r/ occurs in the speech of the people who talk on the news. Note as well if it occurs inconsistently.
Write a 1-2 page report summarizing your findings and noting any patterns that emerge.
Read Aitchison's chapter 12 and Trask's chapter 7, both on aspects of children's acquisition of language, and write a two-page critique of the notion that children's imperfect acquisition of language is responsible for language change. Critique the notion (positively or negatively) with special attention to any of the data that we've developed in the previous nine homework assignments.