ENGA3 - Accent & Dialect revision

Accent and Dialect is one of the topics that could appear in Section A for Language Variation but also in Section B for Language Discourses. Over the last few months, I've added lots of links for this topic for the students taking the new A-level (where the topic appears in the 1st year of the course) but all of these are relevant (and some are really excellent) for your work on ENGA3. Here's a selection of useful posts and links:

• What's happening to regional accents and dialects? Some interesting articles based on the work of David Britain and others involved in the English Dialect app. Here's one from the i about the findings of the survey, one from the Telegraph on the same and another from The Guardian offering an opinion piece on dialect levelling (for that's what it is).
• Attitudes to accents - if you listen to this Thinking Allowed episode from about 14 minutes in, you get a good discussion between Paul Kerswill and Alex Berrata about attitudes to regional accent and dialect in the teaching profession and more widely.
• "You don't sound like a professor" - a recent article on prejudices about regional accents and the class assumptions made about them. And here's one on a similar theme about northern accents (mistakenly) signalling social class and why that might be.
• Here's Susie Dent on UK accents as "spoken birthmarks"
• And here's a really excellent edition of Word of Mouth called Accents Will Happen which is full of good stuff about how accent and dialect are part of our identity/ies as users of language. Interesting on performance, code-switching and identity - all top band AO2 concepts, usually.

ENGA3 - Language Discourses revision

Language Discourses

• This Word of Mouth episode featuring Oliver Kamm (who we talked about recently) is useful for debates about pedantry and 'proper' English.
• This Salon article about online communication making us more stupid is a good read and offers some opinions about language change that could be explored (thanks to @QEEnglish for the link).
• These articles (this one and this one) by Robert Lane Greene focus on arguments about language and offer a linguistically descriptive perspective on such changes. Ideal for exam revision.
• Jean Aitchison's original Reith Lectures about language can be found here. If you want to hear what she really said about crumbling castles, damp spoons and infectious diseases, go no further than A Web of Worries.
• An old blog post from here about the prescriptive - descriptive debate is worth a read, especially if you're interested in exploring arguments about views belong along a continuum.
• Finally for today, Stan Carey has written an excellent article about why slang is not a broken down form of 'proper' English and you can find it here.

ENGA3 - World Englishes revision

Sorry to neglect you ENGA3ers out there. I've been busy with the new AS level, so put the A2 stuff on the backburner a bit. Here are some things that I hope will help...

World Englishes

• Have a listen to this Word of Mouth episode about English as a Lingua Franca to get a grasp of what's going on with English around the world.
• Think about the ideas in this article which suggests native English speakers are often the problem in international conversations using English.
• This article is also interesting about the ways English is used around the world.
• David Crystal talks in this clip about the future of English around the world.

Paper 2 today - good luck

Hope it all goes well today. Plenty of revision tips on the blog should you want to do any more!

Paper 2: last few revision pointers

Paper 2 is on Wednesday, so good luck with it to everyone. I won't be blogging or tweeting about the AS for a while after then as I'll be marking it and will need to keep my head down and prime my red pen for lots of (I hope) ticks.

I've posted loads of stuff about Paper 2 here and via the Twitter feed, but if you're looking for a few last-minute ideas, why not have a look at the following?

Accent and dialect: Paul Kerswill and Alex Barrata were interviewed on Radio 4 last week and if you listen from 14 minutes in to this link, you'll get a nice overview of some of the attitudes to different accents.

There's been some interesting material emerge from the team behind the English Dialects app and if you want to see how some of their work has been reported have a look here and here.

The area of social groups is perhaps a bit more slippery than that of accents and dialects, so you might want to look at some ideas around social class here and about slang and young people here. Julie Coleman's The Life of Slang is a great book about slang and how it emerges, so a look at some of the reviews of it might help with your revision. Here's one.

There's already a lot about gender out there, but reading and referring to recent posts by Deborah Cameron on her fantastic blog are a great way of showing your examiner (maybe even me!) that you've gone beyond the usual reading that everyone else will be name-checking. This article is great for interaction and gender, while this takes a different tack by looking at gender representation (both of which could appear on Paper 2 for AS and/or A level).

For occupation, have a look at some of the tweets from the last month or two, including this one and this one.

Anyway, good luck; I'm looking forward to reading and marking lots of ace answers.