Tuesday, April 25, 2006

The dying art of conversation

The BBC website magazine featured an interview last week between Ron Carter (top linguist) and Ros Taylor (psychologist and business advisor) about the supposed death of "proper" conversation.

It's worth a read , I think, for a couple of reasons: firstly, it offers a broad discussion of what makes conversation work (good for ENA3 essay questions); secondly, the format of the interview could be of help to those of you working on radio scripts or web site articles for ENA6.

Have a look here for the article and here for another article about what we talk about in the office. Well, I don't work in an office. And you probably don't either... so I suppose it's what people in offices talk about then...

Spilling your Ts

Seeing an article about language use appear in Michael Gove’s The Spectator is usually a bad sign to begin with. Seeing that its title is ‘...