Getting the Word Out 2022

WOTY (Word of the Year) Season is in full swing and the lists from the various dictionaries and organisations who produce them, along with the blogs, the explainers and articles in the press about them are always a useful resource for the A Level, especially when looking at Language Change. 

I'll put together a fairly comprehensive set of links next week to all the stories I've come across, but in the meantime, here's a link to a piece I wrote for The Independent about WOTY2022. 

These stories (that aren't mentioned in my article) are also worth a look:

Gaslighting

Woman and woman again

Goblin mode and more goblin mode

Hybrid work

There's also the American Dialect Society's WOTY2022 to look forward to which is probably one of the most exciting dates on the linguistic calendar. Last year's overall WOTY for them was insurrection. 

Paper 2 Section A: marrying AO1 and AO2 in an 'evaluate' question for language change

In this new guest blog, Donal Hale takes a look at how he and his students deal with both the content and linguistic register needed for good 'Evaluate the idea...' answers in Paper 2 Section A. Donal is Assistant Subject Leader i/c KS5 English at Huntington School, York and can be found on Twitter here.

One of the issues that many students appear to face with the ‘evaluate the idea that’ question is: how do you ensure students still develop an argument, and sound like a linguist as they do so, when evaluating a viewpoint of language change, for instance? Especially without a data set to draw from (like in Child Language Development). Whilst the primary use of AO1 is to assess the structure, fluency and shape of the argument in this section of the exam, rather than analysing data, we do need to also ensure students are using subject/topic-appropriate vocabulary as part of this linguistic register to create a more convincing argument.

Although the majority of marks for this question (20/30) are for AO2, AO1, like much to the AQA Language specification is the bedrock to any decent evaluation of language study. So, how can we support students in a happy marriage of AO1 and AO2?

Perhaps a specific example might be useful to illustrate some hints and tips, so I will use the following question as the basis of my approaches to this section of the exam:

Evaluate the idea that language is decaying slowly.

Keeping evaluation at the forefront of all ideas

My first tip, which albeit may appear to be a very simple one, is to evaluate the proposed viewpoint very concisely, in a single sentence, before students zoom off and bring in the concepts and references (AO2) for their line of argument – in essence, ensuring they guide the reader in their development of an argument for AO1. For the question above, I may offer the following as an example of how they do this and ask them to reflect on how this aligns with their own views:

I maintain that language change is a neutral process, rather than a process of slow decay, that neither indicates evolution or deterioration. 

We then spend time unpicking what argument is being put forward here, and shaping their own argument around this (whether they agree or disagree!).

The next step concerns exemplification of this key line of argument i.e. what supporting evidence will we use to “prove” these ideas. To do this, I might offer some support to students’ thinking in the form of frontloading the ‘indicative content’ might be useful for this question, to act as a springboard for them to judiciously select what knowledge of language study can be drawn into this question. For example:

Students are likely to:

• conceptualise nature and causes of language change as a process

• explore views of language change (e.g. decay metaphors, evolution views, progress, functional theory etc) using specific examples

• evaluate and challenge descriptivist stances

• evaluate and challenge prescriptivist and decay views 

Students use this to then explore their class notes, and select what is most relevant in supporting them to answer this question – this, in essence, formulates their planning of their responses.

The missing bits: linguistic register

When I ask students to feedback their ideas based on what we have planned so far, it is always AO2 focused and centred on concepts and references that help shape of the debate, and it is rare that students support these ideas of, let’s say Aitchison’s ‘crumbling castle’ metaphor, with what we might term a linguistic register to reinforce their argument. This is fine, for now, I say, before I present this introduction that expands upon our singular sentence evaluation from earlier (which I underline below):

The English language is an entity that is continuously changing, and the notion that this process is one of decay is not new to discussions among linguists. The use of language can be an emotive issue, and those harbouring prescriptivist attitudes often attribute ‘language decay’ to societal changes, such as the behaviour of the younger generation and technology. Aitchison (1996) has categorised these prescriptivist views into three categories: the damp spoon syndrome, the crumbling castle view, and the infectious disease assumption. The crumbling castle view resonates most closely with the idea that language is decaying slowly, comparing English to a beautiful old building that is collapsing. Conversely, descriptivists may argue that language is evolving, and that changes only enrich it. However compelling either argument may seem, I maintain that language change is a neutral process, rather than a process of slow decay, that neither indicates evolution or deterioration. 

Students, broadly, are happy with this, and confident, until I ask the question:

How do we develop this argument cogently and still maintain a linguistic register?

Errrrr…

A happy marriage

I use my own metaphor to introduce a model paragraph regarding a ‘marriage’ of AO1 and AO2 to signpost to the students that they are not separate entities in evaluative questions, nor do you need a data set to develop a linguistic register (AO1) when shaping a critical debate using theories (AO2).

I use this model for this question, which I explain will be a main body paragraph within the whole essay response:

Moreover, a change that is occurring within the vocabulary of the English language is the use of portmanteau. For example, the blending of the proper noun ‘Britain’ and the simple present tense verb ‘exit’ forms the term ‘Brexit’, which expresses the idea of Britain exiting from the EU. This term has emerged as a neologism in recent years, after first being coined by Peter Wilding in a blog post (2012). The crumbling castle view dictates that portmanteaus indicate laziness, as they shorten a concept to make it easier to say. However, it has been suggested by linguists that ‘Brexit’ was central to ensuring the success of the Leave Campaign in the 2016 referendum; in this way, the portmanteau can be regarded as a powerful tool that helped to shape decisions of society. This concept is supported by Halliday’s Functional Theory (1975), which states that language changes to meet the needs of its users. The blend ‘Brexit’ was used by the Leave campaign as a psycholinguistic technique to attract support from voters, showing how it has functioned to meet the needs of the Leave campaign. Therefore, language change can be seen as catalyst of social change, rather than a sign of languor. 

AO1

AO2

We unpick this model and consider not merely what aspects of linguistic register the paragraph covers, but more importantly, how it connects and reinforces the AO2 ideas. Students pick out the moments they feel this occurs and we examine the relationship in greater detail. This helps sharpen their focus ensuring the fluency of their argument is inextricably linked to a linguistic register, rather than examining ideas as a psychologist or sociologist might do.

As you would expect, students then use the model as a style model to create their own paragraph that marries these two elements effectively. Before they submit this for feedback, I ask them to underline where the relationship occurs in their writing, and I focus my feedback on how happy the marriage is! 

Note: feel free to use your own metaphors for this.

Whilst deceptively simple, some might say, I have always found this highly effective. Indeed, as teachers this is fundamentally how we ensure learning takes place – making complex cognitive process seem simple and manageable to allow students to write essays with success.

Thinking big: planning and structuring Paper 2 essays

This is a guest post from Jon Palmer who is an English teacher and language geek based in Oxfordshire. Thanks a lot to Jon for writing this.

Having read a recent post on EngLangBlog, which discussed AQA Paper 2 Section A AO1 and advised on using sentence stems, connecting phrases and the like in order to help students grasp the idea of evaluation and construction of a guided argument, I made the mistake of responding with a brief mention of how I’ve been developing using AO2 subject knowledge to help plan responses to potential questions and arm my charges with the best possible chances upon entering the exam.  Dan responded with a suggestion that I write a contribution to the blog and - short story shorter - here we are.  Go easy on me: I’m new round these parts.

My planning sessions (always with Year 13) revolve around the class identifying the potential questions that could come up in the exam and explicitly discussing how we would respond to these in the exam.  This is always teacher-led (visualiser is key) and can take several weeks from start to finish.  Because we’re going over course material in order to create our plans, this also forms a part of our revision process, so I’ve found the best time to do this is the first half of summer term.  We should also note that the below is intended to be used in conjunction with, not in opposition to, Dan’s AO1 guidelines.  Using both together will help students understand the requirements and rigour of evaluation.

Considering this, it’s important to establish, at this point, that what we’re not doing here is creating a series of identical essays which pupils memorise and then regurgitate in exams.  If nothing else, having worked as an examiner and marked dozens of essays starting ‘language is not a static monolith’, I have too much respect for my fellow teachers than to make them sit through a whole centre of identical responses.  Moreover, it inevitably doesn’t work.  Exams aren’t designed for that, and neither are Year 13s.

Instead, what we do is try to crystallise the course into the Big Questions that we ask at A-Level Language study.  Identifying these helps us to recognise that, whilst there are many different areas that we study, the interconnectedness of language study and discourses means that there are overlaps, and, whilst questions can be rephrased and different vocabulary used, essentially we are often being commanded to perform the same tasks.  This’ll usually take 10-20 minutes of the first lesson (also useful to assess understanding, knowledge of the course and misconceptions) and will leave us with a list that might look something like this:

Evaluate the idea that…

-    language change is destructive/damaging…

-    language change is accelerating due to technology/social change/movement

-    language can/should be controlled

-    women and men speak differently

-    some accents are better than others

-    world English is a family

-    the language used to (self) represent social groups is significant

-    social groups affect language

That last one, I know, is broad.  But so far, on the A-Level at least, that’s about as specific as we’ve had in terms of Language Diversity outside of gender.  Although the possibility that a question like ‘Evaluate the idea that Occupation Register is anathema to civil discourse’ isn’t zero, I’m confident that, with the choice of questions, it is unlikely that pupils could ever be stung by the choice between two such ‘write what’s in my head’ essays that push them to answer based on knowledge of a specific and limited part of the course.  In general, we know that it’s the interaction between various elements that make language study so interesting, and we should encourage our classes to reflect this in their essays.

So, having done this, we move onto my planning method for arming each student with potential essay plans for their exams.

The idea is that we choose standard discourses that we can use as a planning tool for a generic essay template to cover each potential topic, with the explicit understanding that it will inevitably need tweaking on the day of the exam depending on the exact wording of the question.  As above, it isn’t a case of ‘learn an essay by heart’ but rather the creation of an adaptable revision resource that will pre-arm students with the basic building blocks for ensuring that their AO1 organisation is fully supported by an embedded AO2. It’s a modular system that means that we can insert the relevant paragraphs where we need them in order to create a guided, conceptual evaluative response.

Within the plan each paragraph needs to have the opportunity to explore the area in depth and evaluate, offering support or challenge from other theorists as appropriate.  It needs more than anyone would ever write in an exam so that the right choices can be made depending on the nature of the question.  Each reference to research or theory needs a variety of real-world examples that can be used depending on the argument – we don’t want to be dreaming these up in exams, we want them easily accessible in long term memory.

After coming up with our plans we then practise writing a series of paragraphs and essays using them, to practise how we could modify our approach depending on what’s expected by the question and what our thesis is. In the past few weeks, I’ve trialled using the AO1 techniques from the last EngLangBlog entry and have found that these two approaches to work together excellently. If you haven’t yet used a visualiser, I’d like to take a minute to sing their praises.  Writing an essay out in full, by hand, whilst providing a commentary on my thought processes to classes has been the single most effective change in my teaching in recent years.

Before I show you some examples, a word on introductions and conclusions.  I’ve found these can be some of the most difficult parts of the essay for students to engage with.  Essay structure isn’t really taught pre KS5 (in English at least) beyond a quick two sentence summary at the end, and maybe a signposting intro.  So, if they write introductions at all, they tend to be vague and task-focussed, maybe looking a bit like ‘There are lots of opinions about X.  I will look at these opinions in this essay and try to decide which are best’.  At best these are pointless, at worst they are obfuscating word salad that can prejudice examiners against anything that follows.  I explicitly teach the formation of thesis statements early in the course. These one or two sentence argument summaries mean that a student can front end their essay with a focussed argument from which the rest of their essay can proceed – helping to secure props for AO1 guidance.  So, for the questions posed above we may come up with a series of statements looking like this:

-    language change is destructive/damaging…

·   Despite negative attitudes toward language change, there is very little to suggest that there is anything negative about the process; the English Language is instead characterised by its diachronic history.

-    language change is accelerating due to technology/social change/movement

·   The changes made to our culture by technology, such as internet communications, easier global travel and the need for lingua francas within multi-lingual communities, do suggest that language change occurs at a faster rate than it did historically, when changes such as the Great Vowel Shift took place over centuries.

-    language can/should be controlled

·   Attempts to control language have, with a few notable exceptions, been unsuccessful, and resistance to these attempts themselves create new forms of language and discourse.

-    women and men speak differently

·   Any perceived differences in language between genders reflects on cultural expectations within society rather than any biological differences.

-    some accents are better than others

·   The nature of language means that it is in a state of constant change; any notion that some accents are more prestigious than others can, at best, only be temporary.

-    world English is a family

·   The collection of pidgins, creoles and koinés that make up World Englishes have far more in common with each other than differences and are better regarded as a family than individual languages.

-    the language used to (self) represent social groups is significant

·   Language use forms a huge part of personal and group identity, and the language used to represent those groups can have huge effects, both negative and positive, on their perception by others.

-    social groups affect language

·   Sociolects are evident in many different social groups, such as socio-economic class, occupation and age, and it is clear that a person’s language use, and by extension their idiolect, can be significantly affected by these.

Once we have a thesis statement, the formation of a coherent introduction becomes much easier: state your intentions, give an overview of the subject in question and signpost your arguments for the rest of the essay. For my more able students I may encourage them to consider how a creative metaphor (again, nothing related to geology) can add cohesion to their essays, and, when fully considered in advance of the exams, can help them to start their responses running.  Successful pupils have generated sporting, literary, performance and masquerade metaphors to introduce their essays.

For conclusions I preach brevity.  Summarise the argument again, discuss some other ideas (if appropriate) and add a final thought.  A couple of sentences, four at the most. Much like this paragraph.

In the spirit of Rosenshine, I’ve provided a worked example for the first plan and reduced my input as I work through some of the questions above.  With some areas I’ve shown what sort of questions I may ask my classes while we write our plans.  These may prove to be more useful – I’ve rarely found any classes to have the same ideas as others – and helping them to individually formulate their ideas is far more useful and productive than prescription.

 

Language Change

The obvious structure here revolves around Aitchison’s metaphors.  A paragraph each focussing on the discourses that surround each metaphor and evaluating their success.  There are some debates over the usefulness of Aitchison, and a tendency by some weaker pupils to mistake her for a prescriptivist (no matter how many times they’re told…) so these can be planned as ‘attitudes to language change’ rather than framed within Aitchison’s ideas if necessary.  I believe Dan is looking at exploring this area in future, so watch this space.  In the plan below the sentence in parenthesise for each paragraph is the ‘safe’ option.

 

My plan may look something like – with potential examples in italics:

1 – Damp Spoon.  (Language change is due to laziness).

Support – prescriptivist viewpoints in general, existence of style manuals, people like Lynne Truss, the historical Grammarian movement, Mackinnon’s contrasts. Examples: droppin’ of consonants in speech, glottal stop, h dropping is ‘osptial’,

Challenge – Halliday’s Functional Theory, Lexical Gaps, Deutscher’s model of language change, Examples: Great Vowel Shift (current pronunciation not considered incorrect), rebracketing (‘an eke name’ became ‘a nickname’ whilst ‘a napron’ became ‘an apron’.

 

2- Crumbling Castle. (Things ain’t what they used to be).

Support – veneration of Shakespeare & Dickens et al, rise of taboo language and swearing (Dr Love’s work on the spoken corpus is useful here) John Humphrys, Goodman’s Informalisation Theory. Examples – can be useful to have a couple of hallowed phrases from literature here – ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ (Shakespeare), ‘The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again’ (Dickens), increased use of ‘fuck’ between 1994-2014 as identified by Love.

 

Challenge – Milton’s Golden Age, Tide Metaphor. Examples: worth noting that Shakespeare himself is credited with inventing (or at least being the first to write) dozens of words and phrases into the language.  Differences between Chaucer (‘And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche’) or even earlier works (‘If ȝe wyl lysten þis laye bot on littel quile’ – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) to demonstrate the changes even between 14th Century and Shakespeare’s 16th/17th. Paul McCartney wrote ‘take these broken wings and learn to fly’ long after any supposed Golden Age had passed.  Newer functions of swearing (again from Love)

3- Infectious Disease. (We pass on language change: we all know how diseases work these days…)

Support – Substratum Theory, Hockett’s Random Fluctuation, Chen’s S-Curve. Examples: Haitch, on tender hooks, slang, contractions.

Challenge- Wave Model, Postal’s Random Fluctuation. Examples: eponyms, anthimeria (changing functions of words) e.g. to google, to text)

 

Gender

Two choices here, you can choose 3 of Tannen’s contrasts or use a basic Deficit, Difference, Dominance plan.  I’d veer to the latter, but it may depend on your group.  Tannen’s contrasts run the risk of pushing conclusions toward a Mars/Venus dichotomy.  I prefer to work through the models in turn but ensure that the plan allows for clear evaluation of each one rather than just writing a potted history.

  

Attitudes to accent

Here I’d lead the conversation to identify what those attitudes are (as in the planning above with language change).  The conversation will help us to formulate our plan. I may ask questions such as:

What does dialect levelling suggest about attitudes to accent?

Why might convergence or divergence (Accommodation Theory) be something people feel are necessary?

What does Matched Guise research suggest about attitudes to accent?

 

Social Groups –

In which ways does a person’s occupation affect their language use? Is this permanent?

How does socio-economic class affect language use?  Do people take pride in how their sociolect reflects on their origins?

How does language change with age?  Do people change how they talk when they get older, is it a system of constant change, or is there some mixture between the two?

Guiding the reader: essays for Paper 2

Following on from the last post on essay writing for Paper 2, I thought I’d have a look in a bit more detail at the idea of ‘guiding the reader’ and what this means for essay planning, construction and execution for these questions on Change and Diversity. 

I don’t remember ever being taught how to write an essay in English. That might just be a symptom of my cognitive decline as I’m now over 50, but at least I’ll get a Covid vaccine jab before many of you reading this, so I suppose every cloud has a silver lining. Where was I? Oh yes, clouds… 

Having developed my own essay writing by osmosis over the years, when I came to teach English, I had to start from scratch and work out what essays are supposed to do and how they should be organised. Along the way, I realised there are lots of different types of essay and no one-size-fits-all approach. Plus, it also depends a fair bit on the ‘command words’ in the question. 

If you’re a super grammar sleuth, you’ll also realise that – grammatically speaking – the questions for Section A aren’t actually ‘questions’ at all: they’re commands. I wouldn’t advise refusing to ‘answer’ them, because you can see through the lies beneath the surface of the exam paper and the whole rotten system (you’ll get zero marks and referred to Prevent), but I would advise that you think carefully about the command word you’re given and what that means.

‘Evaluate’ is a word we looked at here and in the last post. How do you evaluate? You need to look at different arguments and evidence for and against the ‘idea’ in the question, weigh up the relative merits and come to some kind of conclusion. 

As I said in the last blog on this, I think it’s important to have a plan in mind (and probably on paper) before you start to write your essay, and part of that plan should be a clear roadmap of where your argument will take you. Writing an essay where it appears that you have just stumbled upon a recently understood idea about language is not a great way to approach this, so I think it’s often a good idea to flag up your main arguments quite early on and then guide your reader through those arguments towards an end point that you’ve already mapped out. 

So, what do we mean by ‘guiding the reader’? I think it can take different forms. 

1. You can use the whole structure of the essay to take your reader through a number of ideas, directing them to the conclusion you’d like to offer. 
2. You can use discourse markers to signpost your journey through the argument, indicating how one idea, theory or piece of evidence links to, or stands against, another idea. 
3. You can use paragraphs to organise your different arguments and ideas, structuring them in ways that present arguments, examples and opinions – along with your own developing evaluation of the idea in the question – so that the reader can see how your thinking is evolving.
4. You can use the opening and closing paragraphs to define, restate or perhaps even challenge the terms of the question; to make clear your understanding of the ‘idea’ in the question and present your overall argument. 

I’m not a believer in the idea that there’s a right way and a wrong way to write an essay, and I’m not about to start pushing one approach here; I’ve set, marked and moderated so many essays over the years that I know there are many different ways to do well (and equally, quite a few ways to do badly). But let’s look at the mark scheme for these questions and think about what is likely to be rewarded. 

Because there is no data to analyse in these questions, the main descriptors of AO1 that we need to focus on are the second bullet points in each level. 

These are: 

• Level 0: nothing written 
• Level 1: present material with limited organisation 
• Level 2: express ideas with organisation emerging 
• Level 3: communicate with clear topics and paragraphs 
• Level 4: develop a line of argument 
• Level 5: guide the reader 

We can also look at the 2019 lead examiner’s report on these questions to see what was said about entries that year:

There’s quite a lot of help provided here and what it shows is that the AO1 and AO2 are quite closely linked in questions like this. The better your structure and the more coherent your organisation of an answer is, the more chance you have of dealing with the ideas and reaching the higher levels of AO2. I mean, you have to know stuff as well and have examples to use, so there is also that… 

It’s evident that the intro paragraph needs to be clear and effective if you’re going on to write an evaluative response and I’ve often told my students to use the intro to define their terms and show their understanding of what the question involves. It’s also important to actually spell out your key arguments early on, rather than leave them to the very end. The detail of your argument will come as the essay develops, but get your main points in here as that will allow you to prepare your reader for what’s to come. 

One clear point from much of the advice published in the examiner reports is that to get into levels 4 and 5 for AO2, you need to have an essay structure that allows you to look at different arguments. How can you do this? One idea might be to structure your answer so that (after your intro paragraph), you look at one argument in one paragraph and another, competing argument in the following paragraph.

That can work, I think, but what you would also need to do is make sure that you don’t leave the evaluation of those ideas until the very end of your essay. In other words, you might need to slot in an extra paragraph after these two paragraphs to weigh up those ideas and show that your argument is more than just a series of different points that you’ll tie up at the end. 

An approach that I think I prefer, but won’t be to everyone’s tastes, is where the evaluation of different ideas is done in each (slightly longer) paragraph. The benefit of this approach is that you can weigh up the different ideas as you go and show a developing argument taking shape. It also allows you to guide the reader in a way that shows where you are heading in your evaluation of the overall question and where these ideas might fit. 

To an extent, what you do will depend a bit on how comfortable you are about the question that’s been set, the knowledge you have at your disposal and the angle you’re going to take. What might this actually look like? Let’s look at some examples. I’ve trawled through three years’ worth of exemplar responses on e-AQA (you can find these yourself if you are a teacher and have an e-AQA log-in, by looking at teacher support materials and the feedback session from 2017 – 2019) for these questions and extracted what I thought were some interesting and potentially useful ways of writing effective paragraphs, using discourse markers and showing an evaluative and thoughtful approach to the idea in the question. 

If we do the simple stuff first, here are a few discourse markers and cohesive devices that worked well. Some are pretty obvious and others perhaps less so. Largely, they are adverbs and prepositional phrases deployed at the start of paragraphs to provide focus and link one paragraph to another. In a few cases, they are adverbs/adverbial clauses that are used in a kind of deictic sense to sequence events and ideas in relation to each other. 

• Firstly 
• Secondly 
• Additionally 
• Furthermore 
• Overall 
• Nevertheless 
• However 
• Again 
• In conclusion 
• To conclude 

• For a long time, x was… 
• Since the early days of x… 
• If we consider x… 
• When looking at x… 
• While some have argued x… 
• In many ways, x is… 

• An argument that people make about x is… 
• There is much debate over x… 
• Another country with different attitudes towards x is… 

Turning to other ways of guiding the reader, a few that I thought worked particularly well are reproduced here (and in a few cases, slightly edited or tweaked). What we’re looking at here is not the AO2 content (that’s been stripped out) but the AO1 elements that help the writers of these essays structure an answer and guide the reader. 

Example 1 

This is quite a nice way to start an essay on language diversity. 

Attitudes towards non-Standard English are often very negative. While many people believe x, the linguistic evidence suggests that y is actually the case. As a result of this, it’s impossible to agree entirely with the [idea in the question]… 

What I like about this approach is that straight away there is some kind of challenge made to popular perceptions of language and you get a sense that, using linguistic evidence, this student will be offering some real insight. There’s also an implicit challenge to the terms of the question, suggesting that while the idea might be one that can be debated, it’s not quite that simple. 

Example 2 

These are actually three separate examples, from three separate answers. 

One way in which [the idea in the question] could be viewed as true is… 

When evaluating if [the idea in the question] is true, it is important to consider… 

When arguing against [the idea in the question], one key idea… 

On the other hand, it is important to consider… 

These might not look particularly striking, but they represent an issue in style that I think is quite important to think about in essays like this. They appear open-minded and tentative in their approach, and we get the impression that the student is considering different perspectives and their relative merits. It’s the start of an evaluative approach, I think, and a useful model to develop. 

Example 3 

These are simple but effective examples from two different essays. 

[Linguist A] describes [language feature] as x and it could be argued that… 

On the other hand, [Linguist B] describes it as y… 

One variety of language that can be explored is… 

However, a factor that needs to be considered is… 

While these aren’t earth-shatteringly original, they are effective ways of introducing different views. 

Example 4 

These are taken from two separate answers. 

For a long time, x was the case… However, in recent years, y has happened… As a result of this, z has been proposed… 

Many would claim that A is not the case any more… Instead they would argue that B is more likely and that [the idea in the question] is open to challenge… 

Both of these offer an evaluative template that can be developed as the essay goes on. I quite like the way that the first one uses a narrative overview to explain changes in thinking about linguistic issues and how positions have adapted as a result. And with the second example, there is also a sense that ideas have had to evolve. 

Example 5 

All of the above arguments might lead us to take a view that… 

This strikes me as quite a neat way of starting to evaluate ideas in a paragraph, with the added suggestion that we ‘might’ not want to follow the view we’re being led towards and might want to choose a different view. 

Example 6 

On the surface, it could be argued that… As stated however, this view only looks at the surface and it could be argued… 

This stands on its own merits, I think. I really like the feeling that the idea we’re being offered in the question is only a superficial one that can be finessed and explored with some real linguistic knowledge. It suggests we’re going to learn something from what follows. 

So, to conclude (and let’s be prescriptive here: don’t say ‘Conclusively…’ when you open your final paragraph), what have we got here? There’s a fair bit to unpick and think through and you might need to work out an approach that works best for you as an individual, but I hope there are enough ideas and examples here to get you started.

‘Topics’, topic areas and overlap

Following on from the last blog about AO2 on Paper 2, another aspect that I think it is important to address, for hitting Levels 4 and 5 in particular, but more generally in terms of an understanding of language across the board is that of the overlapping nature of the ‘topics’ on Paper 2. I use ‘topics’ in slightly wanky quote-marks because I think there’s often an issue around the word that I hadn’t really twigged until the new spec appeared. For some, ‘topics’ are just blocks of content, often optional ones from a wider list, so if you used to teach the old AQA B spec, you could choose from 3 topics on ENGB1: language and technology, language and power and/or language and gender. A few centres taught all three, most seemed to do two of the three and I think some might have just done one and crossed their fingers and hoped that it was a nice question.

This is clearly very different with the new spec; the topic areas (if I can call them that without falling into the ‘topic’ trap) are all related in various ways. We have areas such as occupation, class, gender, ethnicity and world Englishes all floating around in various forms and there’s a lot of overlap between them. For example, where does social class and language fit in? Is that part of social groups or is it more related to region? And what about language & occupation? Is that part of social groups or a different area entirely? I think the simplest thing is to actually go back to the spec and see how it’s laid out there.

The specification outlines the following: sociolect (specifically mentioning social and occupational groups, gender and ethnicity), dialect (including regional, national and international variation) and change.

To me, it makes sense to use this as the starting point and to think about the overlapping nature of all these areas before really going into detail into all of them and considering the most relevant examples, studies and theories to explore. By that I mean – a bit like I mentioned in the last post – to think about the core concepts to begin with and then map the detailed knowledge back from there.

Before we even look at the areas that we might cover for language diversity, let’s step back and look at the bigger picture for Section A of Paper 2. If we look at the nature of language variation and change to begin with, we can see that the two big areas (which get divided into a choice of two questions in Section A of Paper 2) themselves overlap.

An example of this is UK dialects and the ways in which they have changed over time. If you look at work carried out by the Universities of Cambridge, Zurich and Bern in 2016, they have traced dialect change using an app and compared the findings of their survey to the Survey of English Dialects gathered between 1950 and 1961. While there are differences in their methodologies and some variables that might have altered, what’s really clear to see is that in some areas, dialect terms have almost completely disappeared. What’s also interesting is that accents have changed too but not always as obviously. So, with this dialect levelling we are actually seeing a change taking place over time in the way that English varies. There appears to be less variation now than there was in the mid-20^th Century.

'Backend' and 'Autumn'

Pronunciation of 'arm' with rolled /r/

Another example is that of word meanings. Again, this is ostensibly a change issue – word meanings changing over time – and therefore a change ‘topic’. But how do word meanings change? They don’t just change overnight and in fact at any given point, lots of people will have a very different understanding in their own minds about what words might mean.

Take recent examples like ‘gay’ and ‘awesome’ (both looked at by Justyna Robinson in 2010). At any time, there will be multiple – often age-differentiated - meanings for the same word. 

There are other contentious terms that have different meanings for different age groups. I remember having a heated debate with a bloke at football last year because he’d used the word ‘mong’ to describe a player on the home team. I objected and told him that it was a disgusting word to use, because it was an offensive term for people with Down's Syndrome. He couldn’t see the issue and claimed it meant nothing like that and I heard him grumbling later to someone he was with that “You can’t say anything now”. Who was right? Maybe we both were. I was brought up in a time when the word ‘mong’ was tossed around as a casual slur and it was linked to the word ‘mongoloid’ which had been used to describe the facial appearance of those with Down's. He was younger than me (and bigger, so I’m glad it didn’t come to blows) and denied point blank that it meant anything like that to him. I’ve had similar discussions (although usually less sweary and heated) with students who have used the term and been oblivious to its older meanings.

It doesn’t just have to be slurs and slang under discussion though. Even this week, there has been debate about the meaning of the word ‘sausage’ in relation to Greggs’ new vegan sausage roll. “How can a sausage roll be vegan when a sausage has to contain meat?!” shouted some angry gammons. “Sausage is all about the shape, fam. Allow it!” responded some millennial snowflakes. This is how change often takes place: meanings gradually shift, are contested, complained about and often take a while to bed in. (If you’re interested in this, John McWhorter’s ‘Words of the Move’ is a brilliant book about how and why change happens and a recommended read for everyone studying this course.)

So, there’s overlap between change and diversity, but what about within diversity? The key point for me here is to make sure that before diving into the study of areas like gender and occupation, all students are completely clear about the bigger picture. Most sociolinguists these days don’t subscribe to a ‘pigeonhole’ view of language – that the ‘categories’ you are born into, be they your class, region, sex, race, or whatever, dictates your language use. That’s far too deterministic and doesn’t really reflect the nature of language as we use it in the real world and the variation within groups.

The thinking now tends to be that while these factors might all contribute to your language identity in some way (and perhaps some more significantly or obviously than others), we can draw on different linguistic strands from this pool or repertoire to perform different identities with different people in different situations.

We can perform a friendly and competent co-worker identity with Person X at work, perform a more casual and relaxed identity with Person X and Person Y after work and then perform a parental role with young children at home. All of these will draw on different linguistic resources available to us through our individual backgrounds and the contexts we are using language in.

Rob Drummond and I have talked about this idea about performing identity quite a lot in the CUP Topics in English Language book, ‘Language Diversity’, that we collaborated on but you can also find more about it in sources such as Penny Eckert’s ‘Jocks and Burnouts’ Detroit study, Jenny Cheshire’s Reading study, Kevin Watson’s work on the Liverpool accent and performing a Scouse identity, Carmen Llamas’ work in Middlesbrough and Emma Moore’s Bolton study. There’s a lot of new work going on around it too and it’s a very productive and interesting area for students to explore.

That understanding of language as something that we can choose to use to construct a version of ourselves in different contexts is one that underlies a lot of the ‘interplay’ alluded to in the indicative content on the mark scheme for Level 4 of AO2 in the June 2017 paper and the “different views, approaches and interpretations” in the Level 4 performance characteristics each year.

So, how could you approach this in practical terms?

Case studies are a way to introduce this. By looking at some real (or made up) examples of people’s language backgrounds, you can explore the language they use in different contexts and where that comes from. We included one such case study of a former A level English Language student from south London, Shahnaz, in the OUP textbook and this might give you a flavour of the kind of approach you could take. You could also ask students to start building up a picture of their own influences, but a problem with doing this with A level students is that while there may be a degree of social, ethnic and perhaps even regional and international variation among them, they are all of a similar age and you might be teaching in a single sex school. While you can get somewhere with this and start to help students unpick the different influences on their own linguistic behaviour, it might be more useful to start with a few case studies that allow you to show different features and factors at work. Just off the top of my head, I might look at David Lammy, Maxine Peake, Stormzy, Danny Dyer and Scarlet Moffatt, but there are plenty of others who could be interesting case studies to examine.

The next step might be to gather language from these people used in different settings and to think about what it is specifically and linguistically that’s interesting to talk about. Does David Lammy use the same kind of language in parliament as he does on Twitter? Has Scarlet Moffatt’s language changed in different settings since she first appeared on Gogglebox and I’m A Celebrity? You’d need to be careful to avoid scripted performances, but there’s plenty to look at.

What’s also important with each case study is to really show what you mean by language variation – in other words, the characteristics of language that can vary on a lexical, semantic, grammatical, phonological and pragmatic level and how these can be illustrated.

Once you have looked at these case studies, you’ll be able to think a bit more about the different topic areas and how to approach them, because you’ll no longer be looking at them in isolation, but as part of a much bigger picture of language variation and diversity.

I hope that gives a few ideas about how to deal with the overlapping nature of parts of Paper 2. In the next blog, I’ll have a look at how to encourage students to use case studies, research and examples and to write linguistically about the issues at the heart of Paper 2. It might take a little while, but there will be other blogs along soon from other writers. Huzzah.

Lists, concepts & different ideas: thinking about AO2 on Paper 2

I’ve been at quite a few meetings recently where teachers have asked if the exam board can publish a list of the key theories and studies needed for each topic and that question has got me thinking about what students need to know to do well on the English Language A level, especially on AO2, which at 26% of the weighting of marks across the whole course, is equal highest with AO1 in terms of importance. And while most people are familiar with what AO1 involves – a grasp of linguistic terminology, methods of language analysis and coherent written expression (balanced out differently on different kinds of questions), AO2 isn’t always as clearly understood.

The request for a list to cover is perfectly understandable: there is a lot to cover on the course (including some areas that are new to experienced English Language teachers), many teachers (still) come from a Literature background and the exam boards haven’t always been very clear on exactly what might come up, either in the specifications or in the sample material issued with them. Then again, you might argue that this is just the nature of the beast – English Language is a vast subject, it changes constantly like the language itself and there is always something new to add to the pile to study. That’s what makes it so interesting… but kind of frustrating if you’re also teaching KS3 and 4 and maybe even two or three other A level courses. And I can appreciate that if you’re coming to the course as a new teacher of English Language with little grounding in linguistics, it’s pretty daunting.

But I think that it’s the scope of the subject that can actually help us understand a bit more about AO2, what students need to know and how it’s assessed. My own take on it – and this is very much my own view as a teacher of the subject (alright…sort of teacher of it these days) rather than something that AQA are saying - is that you could actually teach pretty much any studies and theories you like and still see your students do really well. Just so long as they understand the core ideas behind language change and diversity and can relate that understanding to the studies and theories you choose to cover. I’ve thought this through more and think that this is most relevant for Paper 2, but I can also see how it might work for Children’s Language Development on Paper 1 (but more on that another time).

So, how does this work in practice? If we look at the mark scheme for AO2 on Paper 2 (Questions 1, 2 and 4), we can see that the different levels relate to different kinds of knowledge.

• Level 0 is no knowledge at all and I can only see that being applied to a student who has not even attempted to answer the question. 
• Level 1 relates to students who talk very generally and without any specialist linguistic knowledge. In essence, this is the kind of knowledge a total stranger would bring to the question, had they come in off the street, evaded the invigilators and (for some inexplicable reason) sat themselves down at a desk and taken the exam. 
• Level 2 responses would show the beginnings of understanding and might reference a few named researchers, perhaps start to talk quite generally about how language changes or notice that language varies from person to person. The higher you go in this band, the more solid that knowledge would be. It might also be used to allocate marks to those students who have the beginnings of the bigger picture but little sense of detail and probably no examples. 
• From Level 3 upwards, we are normally looking at students who know some stuff and will be able to discuss examples, refer to studies, ideas and concepts to support their arguments and choose material that’s relevant for the idea they’re evaluating. 
• Level 4 work will start to see that language is complex and that there can be different ways of looking at the question, different positions and arguments that might be offered. 
• Level 5 work will be genuinely evaluative, offering “an individual overview of issues” (which to me at least suggests that ‘evaluation’ has to offer a supported personal judgement from the student on the idea they’ve been asked to look at). 

So, obviously students need to know ‘stuff’ and that’s maybe where the desire for a list of ‘stuff’ comes from. But I think we might be better off looking at Level 4 first and thinking about what that means before discussing the ‘stuff’ that can be deployed in Levels 2-5.

The ‘performance characteristics’ for AO2 Level 4 (i.e. the description of the kind of work going on in that level that doesn’t change year to year and paper to paper) states that students will “identify different views, approaches and interpretations of linguistic issues” and I think that’s the key here. What are these views, approaches and issues?

In a way, it’s quite simple. The key things students need to know are:

How and why does language change? 

and

How and why does language vary? 

If they can go some way to answering these questions, using a range of different examples and studies to illustrate what they are saying, they are starting to produce the kind of work that is seen in really good answers. Of course, students will need to answer the questions that have actually been set and address those specific ideas, but at the heart of all questions about language change and diversity, these to me are the key concepts. It can get a bit more complicated when you factor in questions such as “What do people make of these changes and variations?” but that’s still part of the same broader question, I think (again, something I hope to come back to another time).

Once students have a grasp of these questions and some ideas about the answers – and really importantly for Levels 4 and 5, a grasp of the different and often competing ideas that thinkers, commentators and linguists have offered – they are on their way to being able to select from a range of different material at their disposal.

And that’s why I don’t think a list of content for each topic is really that useful. It might make sense to argue that all students should look at the Milroys’ work in Belfast, Trudgill’s Norwich study and Petyt’s Bradford study for UK language variation – and they’re nice studies to teach because they are clear and widely available in plenty of resource and reference books, but there’s nothing wrong with using a completely different study to illustrate a similar point. Emma Moore’s Eden Village Girls 2010 study in Bolton, or Rob Drummond’s 2012 study of Polish speakers of English in Manchester (in this) could be just as helpful. So long as the study is explained and detailed and the significance of it is clear to the question set and the overall argument being offered, I think that’s fine.

The other issue and one that I think is really important for more able students to understand is that language is complex. If they can start to show their understanding of these complexities, they will again offer an insight into the bigger picture and potentially hit Levels 4 and 5. They’ll need to support and exemplify their arguments and ideas, but again that can come from a huge range of different sources. So, for example, one complexity about language is that while our backgrounds and individual characteristics (occupation, social group, ethnicity, sex, gender, region and class) can have an impact on our language, we also have choices to make depending on who we are talking to, the mode of communication we are using, the relationship we have with others involved in the conversation and the uses to which we want to put language. That’s the kind of complexity that can be illustrated by drawing on some of the wider concepts of code-switching and style-shifting, accommodation and linguistic repertoire.

And again, while it can be useful to have a name or theory to hang these on, I think it’s probably more important to understand the principles behind these and be able to illustrate them. How and why did Ed Miliband sound more and more like Russell Brand as his pre-2015 election interview went on? How and why (in the name of all that is sacred) did George Osborne think it would help his cause to sound like Jonathon Ross while speaking to Morrisons warehouse workers? And why did privately-educated Adam Boulton of Sky News try to throw shade on working class Eastender and Labour candidate for Chingford, Faiza Shaheen by claiming that she was “hiding her poshness” by dropping her Ts? These case studies – if well-explained and linguistically explored – can be really useful ways to look at the issues of identity and language use (and indeed language change) that are behind so many of the discussions we have around language on this paper.

So, that’s quite a long blog on AO2 and what I think it involves on Paper 2. I’d be interested to hear what people think and whether or not this chimes with your own experience and thinking.