Argument & counter-argument

While marking my students' recent work for the directed writing task on Paper 2 of the new spec, I've been jotting down a few ideas about how to address the main areas that need improvement. Apart from some of the stuff I've blogged about recently - making the opinion pieces accessible to non-specialist readers, including enough language knowledge to hit the higher levels of AO2 and developing effective openings and conclusions - one thing that has struck me is this part of the mark scheme for AO2:

Under the 'Performance Characteristics' heading (i.e. the general expectations of what students will be doing to be in this Level, rather than the more specific 'Indicative Content' for each paper), the key thing seems to be the notion of identifying different views, approaches and interpretations.

If we assume that students already need to have "show detailed knowledge of linguistic ideas, concepts and research" (Level 3), then what Level 4 seems to be asking for is a sense of alternative ways of looking at the issue and an awareness that other views exist. In an opinion piece, there is clearly an argument that needs to be developed and the Directed Writing Guidance document on the AQA site makes it clear that "students’ writing will necessarily have the purpose of conveying opinions and arguing a case" while "marshalling points and presenting them in a coherent form". But, perhaps most importantly for Levels 4 and 5, "Students can show that they can deconstruct others’ arguments and present their own".

My reading of this is that a single-track opinion piece which ploughs a fairly narrow furrow and doesn't look up, or around, at alternative arguments or opinions, might find it hard to go much higher than Level 3. I might be wrong... and we probably need to remember that the paper hasn't been marked (or even sat) yet.

Anyway, from looking at my own students' work, I've decided that they need to do a bit more work on addressing different opinions and showing awareness (at least), understanding (preferably) and evaluation (optimistically) of other views.

Style models are good for this and some of these are useful for showing how different opinions can be flagged up and then knocked down. David Crystal does a good job of this in his review of Simon Heffer's (awful) Strictly English:

Heffer hides his tastes behind the idea of what is logical, using variants of the word more often than Spock. "Rules in language are made by logic, not by a democratic vote," he writes. If only that were true: it would save grammarians so much bother. In fact, there is no logic behind his recommendations, other than the usual kind favoured by pedants: if I like it, it's logical; if I don't, it isn't.

By quoting Heffer, Crystal can respond directly to the argument, but perhaps remembering a quotation and then deploying it effectively is a bit of a tall order for an AS student in an exam (although, it's always nice to see it happen).

An alternative approach is a little vaguer, but quite effective in its own way. Lindsay Johns' Ghetto Grammar article, which is a favourite of mine for class analysis, takes a lighter touch:

Some educators take a position of cultural relativism. They assert the legitimacy and value of street talk, or at the very least, the importance of teaching young people to "code switch" - how to differentiate in which milieu it is socially acceptable.

I have no time for such an approach. In my experience, young people find it very hard to code switch. Text-speak, poor grammar and street patois routinely pervade the essays I set them, let alone their conversations with me.

What's interesting about this approach is that it's a bit vague about:
a) who the "educators" are (names would help);
b) how what they say can be defined as "cultural relativism";
c) why Johns' own "experience" should trump these educators' assertions.

On the plus side, it's effective in keeping his (for me, almost entirely wrong-headed) argument on track.

A quick task I'm setting my students after Easter is the one below, in which they look at an idea from one side of a debate (in this case, work we've been doing on dialect and slang bans in schools) and then try to come up with a counter-argument. I'm going to encourage the students to come up with a source, quotation or reference point for each argument too, so they can draw on what they've studied in class and support their views, where possible. I'd be interested to see if anyone else has ideas for different arguments that could be brought in or where else to take this.

Opinion pieces: doing the knowledge with style

Over the last week or two, we've been working on the Directed Writing part of Paper 2 and thinking about ways to make the opinion pieces both rich in language knowledge - so the reader is actually informed and educated about language - and able to grasp the main ideas without being a specialist.

Having set a task on the language of social groups in which quite a few students erred on the side of catchiness and style over language content, with a few swinging the other way and writing things that were more like essays than articles, I put together the following as a worksheet for the best part of a double lesson. We're going to use it next week and see if we can get the opinion pieces a bit closer to what I think the mark scheme can reward.

Obviously, there's more to this kind of writing than just aiming to hit the different bands on the mark scheme and I'd encourage students to read as wide a range of opinion pieces - op-eds in papers, online articles like those on Comment is Free and Indie Voices and perhaps a few pieces from better blogs (eg Deborah Cameron's brilliant Language: a feminist guide) to get a real feel for the ways arguments and opinions are structured and shaped, but in the classroom we probably need a bit more scaffolding, so here it is...

Part of your job in the Directed Writing task is to explain linguistic concepts to a non-specialist audience.

This means that
a) you need linguistic ideas to explain and
b) you need to develop a way of making them clear and intelligible to your readers.

In practice, this means you will need to do the following:

• explain who people are and why you are quoting them or referring to them 
• give a clear explanation of a technical term (and show an example of it in use) 
• untangle different ideas and make them more straightforward for your audience 
• present different arguments and identify where they are coming from 
• show an overview of issues from which you can then select relevant examples 
• demonstrate language practices in use with examples that your readers will understand 
• show your own line of argument and guide your readers through the topic 

In the example below (taken from here), there are some important linguistic ideas and technical terms, but it’s not very accessible.

How would you deal with it to make it more relevant and clear for your target audience?
What are the key bits to focus on?
Which bits can you ignore, summarise or just mention very briefly?
How would you make this relevant to a reader of a broadsheet newspaper in the UK in 2016?

Penelope Eckert (2000) studied the language use of American high school students who called themselves Jocks and Burnouts. These two subcultures were associated with sharply contrasting personal styles. Jocks participated enthusiastically in extra-curricular activities, played sports, served on the school council and hoped to graduate to college. They took the school as their community and hence the basis of their group identity. In the 1980s, when Eckert did her research, they wore smart designer jeans, the girls used candy coloured make-up and the boys had short hair. 

The Burnouts, in contrast, did not participate in school social activities and resisted the corporate identity of the high school and what it stood for. They wore bellbottom jeans, rock concert T-shirts, sweatshirts and auto-plant jackets, and expected to work in local industry when they were older. They were more likely to be out at an all-night party in the town than at the school dance. There were differences, too, in the language styles (pitch, pronunciation and grammar) used. Eckert sees these two subcultural groups as representing two different kinds of response to the school institution, and as involving students in alternative ways of negotiating their individual identities, their ‘meaning in the world’ (Eckert, 2000, p. 41). 

She suggests that Jocks and Burnouts are two different ‘communities of practice’, each involving students who have come together to share ways of doing things and ways of talking, beliefs and values, as a function of their shared engagement in the activity. Individual identity is constructed in collaboration with others in and around these communities of practice. 

How would you then link what’s here to some of the ideas that you covered in your own opinion piece about the language of social groups? Which areas would link to this and provide you with a paragraph before and a paragraph afterwards?

The flipside of this is that you also need to have enough language content to secure plenty of AO2 marks, so you need to do more than just recycle generalised, common sense ideas about language in your piece.

The following extracts are accessible and clear but don’t really tell the reader much that they won’t already know. How can you build on the ideas here with some relevant language studies, references to research and linguistic concepts?

For each of the sections below, think of a relevant linguistic reference and a way of integrating it effectively into the article.

Many people use language in different ways because of the different social groups that they belong to. For example, you could argue that people who are members of one social class (e.g. working class) would use language in different ways to those in a different social class (e.g. upper class). 

Class is one factor in language use, but not the only one. All of us belong to different social groups that relate to our age and activities we engage in. One such group might be young people - a group everyone belongs to at some point in their life – and young people generally use language in different ways to their parents’ generation. One style of language is slang and this is often used by young people to show their own identity and signal their membership of a particular group, as well as showing their distance from others outside their age group. 

The activities we engage in are also an influence on our language patterns. Those who work in certain professions or who engage in leisure activities with others are likely to develop a way of speaking that is different. Doctors, teachers, police officers and lawyers all develop their own ways of using precise, technical language. 

We don’t just behave in fixed ways with language though and often we might choose to alter our style of language to show that we are closer to others (or to distance ourselves from them). An example of this is when the Chancellor, George Osborne used more colloquial speech when addressing Morrisons workers at a warehouse while campaigning in the 2015 General Election. Instead of pronouncing better and got to with the usual ‘t’ sounds, he used a ‘d’ sound and elided the sounds of separate words to create gotta.

AS Directed Writing - finding style models

Section B on Paper 2 of the new AQA AS-level sets a directed writing task which means that students will need to get used to writing in a different way about language topics. In Section A of the paper, they will be writing an essay in response to some stimulus data and a "Discuss the idea..." essay prompt.

The sample material on the AQA site has one task (you can find it here and a student response to it with examiner commentary here) asking students to "Write an opinion article in which you discuss the issues surrounding people changing their accents". The stimulus text is a short extract from the Mail Online looking at media celebrity Donna Air changing her working class Geordie accent to something closer to her posh boyfriend's accent and it's pretty clear that this is not the kind of article that students will need to write for themselves, because a) it's very light on language issues (and AO2 is worth half the marks here) and b) it's a very short extract.

We've just been looking in class at possible style models for opinion pieces and come up with a few possibilities for the kinds of articles that appear in the broadsheet press or on their websites, and which offer some solid language content as well as arguing a case effectively. Here are a few ideas:

Julia Snell in The Independent responds to the Sacred Heart School dialect row: plenty of serious language content for AO2 and some nice shaping of an argument for AO5.

Michael Rosen in The Guardian taking on grammar pedants and those who teach a "right and wrong" way of dealing with grammar: a strongly argued piece that picks up a debate from elsewhere and explains the ins and outs of it, making language ideas accessible to a non-specialist but interested reader.

Robert Lane Greene in The Economist's language blog looking at accent prejudice: a range of linguistic references integrated effectively into a clear explanation of the main issues for a non-specialist audience.

In many ways, the kinds of opinion piece that appear as potential Media Texts for the old ENGB4 and Language Interventions for ENGA4 are also worth a look. Various examples of these have been collected here and here on this blog.

If you have found any others that you think are worth a look, please let us know via @EngLangBlog.