Listen Up

You don't have to revise with reading and writing alone; there are loads of podcasts and downloads that cover topics and discussions relevant to AS and A level English Language. I've been collating a few of these for my students, so here are some to listen to.

This Radio 4 programme about Cockney changing and dying out is really good for language change & variation.

Lexicon Valley is a regular linguistics podcast. Have a look here for a list of recent episodes.

Lingthusiasm is a new linguistics podcast and you can find out more here.

Michael Rosen's Word of Mouth on Radio 4 has loads of good programmes about language and a few are listed here:

American English: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08g5533

Attitudes to accents: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s4g7g

Emoji and technology: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08ffvp6

Slang: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07z4423

Language pedantry and discourses: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05qgch7

Child language & interaction: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05077ks

Children's first words: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04v382j

Office jargon & occupational English: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03phrwl

Baby Talk and language development: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03mfwjz

From 'discuss' to 'evaluate' between AS and A level

One of the big differences between what you do at AS level and A level is in the "command word" used to give you your tasks.

At AS level, Paper 2 questions use the formulation "Discuss the idea that...", where the "idea" is something that you can then focus on and tell us about. By using "discuss" as the command word, the question (well...it's an imperative really, grammar-lovers, so not really a question at all) is asking you to tell us about what you know in relation to this topic. There's no real sense in the word 'discuss' that to answer the question at a reasonable level that you have to weigh it all up and come to any kind of definitive conclusion, but that's what's expected a bit more at the highest level (Level 5 of the AO2 mark scheme) where last year's main indicative content key words were: explore, assess and "make some evaluative comments".

The way I've taught my students to approach this at AS level is to assume that each level builds on the ones below and adds more:

• Levels 1 and 2 are about basic knowledge. If you want to generalise, then you might say that Level 1 suggests very little grasp of anything to do with detailed study and Level 2 suggests that the student has been to some lessons and remembers a few names and ideas but not necessarily with much real grip. If you are a bit like this, then there is still time to get better!
• Level 3: detailed knowledge - tell us about some examples you've looked at, some studies you've encountered and some concepts and theories that might be relevant.
• Level 4: detailed knowledge of different ideas - tell us about different ways of approaching the topic. What are the different ideas that have been offered to explain how this kind of language works? For example, if you're talking about gender and interaction (as in the sample paper from AQA) can you explain some of the different models - difference and dominance - used to make sense of how women and men use language?
• Level 5: overview and assessment of different ideas - make some sense of those different ideas and explain the most relevant ways to interpret that knowledge for the purposes of this question. Sticking with gender again, if Level 4 is about understanding different models, then Level 5 might be about placing those models in a historical context and explaining why one approach might have significant at one time and another more significant twenty years later. It could also involve you looking at different variables and arguing for their relative importance, while considering ideas around performance and identity. 

For A level, the bar is likely to be shifted up a little, I think. No actual A level papers have been sat or marked yet, so I'm basing this interpretation on how we approached the marking of the AS last year and my experience of teaching the A level this year. The A level is more demanding for a couple of reasons. 

• First, there's no stimulus data, so you have nothing to give you a kick-start should you require it: you have to come with examples and ideas ready to use. 
• Second, the scope of the question could be pretty broad (e.g. "Evaluate the idea that the English language is changing and breaking up into many different Englishes.") where you would need to set your own terms of discussion and choose the most relevant approach from what you have studied, or quite specific (.g. "Evaluate the idea that spoken interactions between men and women are characterised by miscommunication.") where you would be expected to know about miscommunication as a concept right from the start. 
• Third, because the command word is evaluate rather than discuss, I think we are probably asking students for a higher level of engagement with different ideas right from the start. So, it probably means that to get into Levels 3,4 and 5 you'd need to do more than an AS student.

What does 'evaluate' actually mean though? Dictionary.com defines it in three ways (but one of these is about maths, so we'll leave that one out):

1.to determine or set the value or amount of; appraise:to evaluate property.2.to judge or determine the significance, worth, or quality of; assess: to evaluate the results of an experiment.

The Ofqual document from which AQA 'command words' were drawn up, defines evaluate simply as "judge from available evidence". So, what does this mean for English Language A level? My view is that it's about weighing up ideas, assessing the relative merits of different ways of discussing language and showing an understanding of how different explanations can be offered for why language works in certain ways. If we stick to the sample questions, you might weigh up the view that English is breaking up by arguing that it has never been one form in the first place (look at all the accents and dialects that exist now and have done for hundreds of years, for instance). You might weigh up the idea that English is 'breaking up' as if it's a bad thing. Maybe a better metaphor might be the language morphing and adapting, not breaking at all. 

If you are looking at the other question, then you might weigh up/appraise/determine the value of the the whole notion of 'miscommunication' and argue that we all miscommunicate and that it's got very little to do with gender at all. You might evaluate that idea more sympathetically too and argue, as Deborah Tannen did, that because boys and girls have been socialised into different types of talk that there *is* a type of gender-specific miscommunication at work.

At the very top level, this probably means doing more than weighing up alternative views, but critiquing and challenging models and even challenging the terms of the question.

Revising gender: discourses and debates

Gender as a topic area features in both the AS and A level, and can appear in either part of Paper 2. You could get an AS level "Discuss the idea that..." or an A level "Evaluate the idea that..." question in Section A or gender might feature as part of 'language discourses' in Section B.

What is meant by 'discourses'? Well, it's something that I've defined elsewhere as a debate or argument about language, but it can also be treated as a way of thinking about, talking about and describing language. If you want to get academic about it (and why wouldn't you?) here's what the linguist Paul Baker has to say about it in his excellent book about language, gender and sexuality, Sexed Texts:

Language constructs ideas about gender, represents them to us and often helps establish them as 'common sense'. When people write about gender, they often articulate many of the existing discourses - that gender interaction is like a battle of the sexes, a form of combat, or that debates about gendered pronouns are about a form of repression or policing of natural language - and part of your job at both AS and A level is to unpick those discourses and find alternative ways to express them. 

For example, at AS level, you were asked in Section B of last summer's AS Paper 2 to write an opinion piece in which you discussed claims about female and male communication and the stimulus text was an extract from a Mail Online article about how men are supposed to use one kind of filler an women another. Even the Mail article (yes, even the Mail) managed to point out that it wasn't always as simple as saying that men do x and women do y, because they pointed out that there are what they termed 'betweeners' such as David Beckham, Jessie J and Eminem who mix and match their umms and errs. The article also pointed out that age might have a bearing on the kind of filler a person uses.

Why does this matter? Here's the main reason. If the stimulus text shows that it's not quite as simple as saying that men do x and women do y, then why do they use a headline that suggests exactly the opposite and why do they think that is an appropriate way to frame the debate? Maybe because, as Deborah Cameron pointed out a few years ago, difference sells. To paraphrase Cameron, headlines such as "Newsflash: men and women use language in largely the same ways" don't really have as much appeal as ones that propose there's a difference. She talks more about these dubious claims in her (highly recommended) Myth of Mars and Venus and has this to say about such reductive headlines in an extract from that book on The Guardian's site in 2007:

Most people, of course, do not read academic journals: they get their information about scientific research findings from the reports that appear in newspapers, or from TV science documentaries. These sources often feature research on male-female differences, since media producers know that there is interest in the subject. But the criteria producers use when deciding which studies to report and how to present them introduce another layer of distortion. And sometimes headlines trumpet so-called facts that turn out, on investigation, to have no basis in evidence at all.

The other reason it matters is that if you are going to produce an opinion piece about gender and interaction, it makes sense not to parrot the simplistic, black and white discourses of the popular press, but to offer something a bit more nuanced. Not only is this good for getting marks on AO2 (concepts, knowledge about language, theory and research) but it's good for your AO5.

If you can engage your readers and inform them about language in a way that shows you understand the media discourses around gender and manipulate them for your own ends - perhaps even subverting them and challenging them in the process - you can pick up marks for style, structure and shaping of language. If you can show that you have read, tasted and perhaps even digested others' opinions, you can do a better job of expressing your own views.

And when it comes to the A level, where you might be required to pull apart the language of articles and other popular media texts about gender (or sociolect, accent and dialect, world Englishes, language change for that matter, where all these discourses recur) your ability to spot popular and prevalent discourses, and then to interrogate them, could really help you with the text analysis task in Question 3.

Gender sensitivity?

Looking for an example of how language and gender makes the news? Then go no further than these two pieces about the same story. Not only do you get a good sense of how language can be part of a wider battle about gender roles and social inequality but you also get a lesson in language discourses for free.

Just have a look at how The Guardian and Mail Online report the same story, use different sources, experts and language techniques to frame their views.

They're right

Still on the subject of gender, one area which has long been debated and contested is that of gendered pronouns and what we do when we don't want to signal gender. For example, an expression like "Each student should bring his own lunch" begins with an indefinite determiner (each) uses a male (singular) pronoun (or determiner, more accurately here) but assumes that all students will be male. Using his/her is an alternative, but is often seen as a clunky and still puts the male first. "Each student should bring their own lunch" runs into problems with subject and pronoun agreement (singular each and plural their) but has often been seen as an acceptable way to phrase something like this.

However, many formal publications and style guides have ruled against 'singular they' and seen it as a grammatical faux-pas. But even that seems to be changing, and the Associated Press this week announced that they would accept 'singular they'.

The case for 'singular they' is made convincingly here as well, and it certainly seems to be a better idea than trying to invent new pronouns such as hesh, hen and thon which have struggled to catch on.

Edited on 05.04.17 to add another article on this story (thanks to @FKRitson and @a_gadsbey).

Revising gender: representation of gender revisited

Here are links to old posts on this blog that address language and gender from a representation perspective.

Slutwalks
Everyday Sexism
Pyramids of Egregiousness
Calm down, dear

And here are some links to more recent discussions of language and gender (thanks largely to Nicky B and her social media antennae):

Revising gender for AS & A level: legs-it and baby bumps

We've made a start on revising gender for Paper 2 of the A level this week and I've also been finishing off gender with my AS classes before we head into lots of exam revision. There's not a lot of time to teach everything on the A level part of the course after doing the AS last year, so we're relying a fair bit on the material students covered in class last year and hoping they revise the key things themselves, but I've been trying to find a way of approaching it that works.

Anyway, today's Daily Mail front page provided an absolute gift for the representation of gender. If you haven't seen it, it's this monstrosity below.


While the picture and caption make me want to bang my head repeatedly on the keyboard, shouting "This.Is.Not.The.1950s!" there's something in the whole way that this is presented that goes beyond what I've traditionally taught for this topic and made me consider another angle.

A lot of the focus on gender and language (for me, at least) has been on words and meanings: which words and which meanings and how we can raise awareness about what words might connote and how they are unequal - lexical asymmetry and semantic derogation, basically. There's also what language can do in terms of its syntax - constructing male as doer and actor and woman as receiver and patient. There's even what morphology can offer - suffixes that diminish women's roles and those that mark gender where it seems unnecessary (actress...waitress...why not just actor and waiter?).

So far so good. But when I've introduced language analysis to my students, I've always tried to conceptualise it as something that goes from tiny details of language to the much bigger picture, so am I missing something here?

We've got morphemes, words, phrases and clauses, but does any of that really explain what's so offensive and wrong about the Mail headline? It's not really the word 'legs-it' that's bad is it? We all have legs, don't we? The word legs is not really on a par with bad words like slag, sket and ho. No it's something that's working at a higher level than words, phrases and clauses that's the issue here and that's discourse. Discourse - as I've been grappling with in various articles - is a term that has multiple meanings in language study but here it's working as a couple of things: as language used at a level beyond the sentence and as a way of constructing and representing ideas.

The offensiveness comes from the wider discourse that's presented: that women - strong, powerful, political women (whatever you think of their party politics) - are not to be taken seriously and only deserve to be belittled and trivialised by talking about their legs. Their legs. On the front page of a national newspaper.

It's the same discourse that allows other national papers to discuss the human rights barrister, Amal Clooney's appearance at the United Nations in terms of her baby bump and high heels.

So, gender representation works on a level beyond the levels of words, phrases and clauses and on a wider textual and discourse level. That makes it slightly harder to pin down and analyse but it also offers some ways into it, and over the next week or two we'll have a look at different approaches to language and gender (and some other areas) to think about what AS and A level students could say about them.

Sociolect, social groups & social class

One of the areas that we've been looking at in AS classes recently is that of sociolect. I've also been mugging up on the writing and research for this area because of a project I'm working on for something else, so it's been useful to go back to some of the studies that have been carried out into the links between language, the social groups we belong to through choice (communities of practice and discourse communities around work, play and special interests) and those we belong to due to accidents of birth (social class and gender).

One of the things that's particularly interesting to look at is the overlap between what we might call social groups and the other areas on Paper 2 of the AS and A level - gender, regional dialect, occupation - and it's clear to me that you can't really talk about one of these without thinking about the others (and indeed, areas like age, ethnicity & sexuality).

I've set my AS classes the following task recently and we've been looking at ways in which it can be approached from different angles. Here's a structure that we used to look at it. Next week, I'll add some more ideas about approaching another question on the same broad area.

Question 1 
Discuss the idea that the language of some social groups is designed primarily to keep others out. In your answer you should discuss concepts and issues from language study.

You should use your own supporting examples and the data in Text A, below which is taken from an article about teenage slang from the Daily Mail. [30 marks]

Planning and structuring your answer

Start by dissecting the question and explaining its key terms.

Language: think about the different language levels. It’s more than just words (lexis), so consider phonology and grammar (and perhaps spelling, punctuation and graphology as well?)

Social groups: which social groups? Define this term and think of a variety of social groups who you could use as case studies. Think about age, class, interest groups, occupation groups etc. The more the merrier.

…designed primarily to keep others out: what does language do? Think about the functions of the language used within social groups: what is it primarily designed to do? Can you think of examples where it is the primary aim?

How can you make use of the data?

• What examples are there in the data to use? 
• How can you categorise the examples? 
• Can you develop any of these? 
• Do any of these help you address the main question? 

What to do next?

• Draft an introduction to show you understand the question. 
• Map out 2-3 social groups whose language you can discuss and comment on in more detail. 
• Construct a line of argument to guide you through the whole question. 
• Think about the research and theory that you will need to refer to: you will need to refer to work done by others and the research carried out by Trudgill, Cheshire, Moore, Kerswill, Fox, the Milroys and Labov & the ideas put forward by Coleman, Fox, Dent and others when discussing this area. 

Get writing. You have 40 minutes to complete it.

Allow yourself a few minutes at the end to check spelling, punctuation and grammar.

NEA Commentary

As part of the Original Writing section of the NEA, students will be required to produce a commentary on their piece. This blog post will provide some guidance on completing the commentary for the NEA and useful tips.

What is the commentary? 

The commentary is designed to enable you to explain the decisions you have made in writing your piece and the language levels that you have employed and replicated following your exploration of a style model. 

Word Count

The commentary is just as important as the Original Writing piece in that it is also 750 words and the same number of marks (25). 

Assessment Objectives 

This piece will test your ability to employ all of the assessment objectives equally. Below is a screenshot from the criteria on the top band features: 

What does this mean? 

A01: You need to use a range of language levels. Note the key words ‘integrated’ and ‘connected.’

Regardless of the language levels used, aim to cover a range rather than repeating multiple times the use of a particular word class. Do not write about the language levels in a disjointed fashion. You will do better by integrating them, e.g. The attributive adjective “gold” within the noun phrase “the gold surface.” 

A02: Through your knowledge gained from the style model, you will need to demonstrate an awareness of genre. How does your original writing imitate the genre? How have you shown understanding of how individual genres work (and possibly overlap)?

A03: You need to engage in the way language is used to create meanings and representations. Think about how the language levels are used to create different effects.

A04: Within your commentary, you must make reference to the style model. An integrated comparison between the style model and original writing piece is needed.

A05: Throughout the entire piece, you will be assessed on your ability to express ideas clearly and carefully using an effective structure. Note the key word “guide.” You need to provide a clear analysis that is well organised rather than a disjointed piece of work that lacks coherence.

Getting the process started

In order to produce a successful commentary, you should complete the following:

1. As part of your planning for the Original Writing, you will have have selected a style model and looked at the linguistic strategies that it uses. In order to write a successful commentary, analyse the language levels used in your style model. Highlight them in different colours, e.g. red = syntax, green = word classes. This is a really important starting point as you need to make connections (A04) to your style model. Your commentary cannot just write about your own Original Writing piece as you need to justify how they relate to your selected style model.

2. After analysing your style model in detail, you need to then identify the language levels used within your own work. Think about why they have been used. 

• What representation did you intend to create? 
• What purpose does the language level that you have employed serve?
• Ensure that you make a comments on the way the audience, writer and subjected are positioned along the way.
• When you are analysing your work, it is important to consider a range of language levels. Avoid just focusing on the ones you feel most confident with using. A good spread of language levels that are appropriate and meaningful to justifying your ideas is better than repeating the same ones constantly. 

Beginning the Commentary 

As part of your A Level course so far, you will be familiar with the importance of context and how this shapes the meaning and production of the texts. When producing your commentary, your opening paragraph should contextualise your Original Writing piece and making a clear connection to your style model. Consider the following as part of your opening paragraph: 

• You need to contextualise your own piece of work. Ensure that you comment on the purpose, form, topic, audience and how the subject is being represented. Do not generalise here. You need to be very specific. Generalisations will not help you reach high marks.
• You also need to introduce your style model. Why have you selected it? How does it relate to your own original writing piece? 

Example:

"My style model is in the genre of a dramatic monologue. There are different sections in the text with scene changes indicated by 'Go to Black' or 'Fade.' The monologue explores a character who is not fully self-aware and I have reflected this in my Original Writing piece... My monologue is similar to Bennett's in many ways, whilst also having differences..."  

Main Paragraphs in the Commentary

After establishing the context of both your own original writing piece and your style model, you then need to carefully analyse the language levels employed in your own work.

• Remember that you need to integrate linguistic description where possible, e.g. The pre-modifying attributive adjective ‘gold’ used within the noun phrase ‘the gold star’ is used to represent it as ….
• Once you have commented on your own piece of work, you then need to make sure that you make connections to the style model. It might also be the case that there are marked differences in how you have used the language levels. This is equally acceptable but you need to explain why, as this will enable you to discuss contextual factors shaping the production.
• Remember that you need to engage in meanings. Think about the way the linguistic strategies and language levels used create a representation.
• Adopt an interwoven comparison throughout rather than writing about the style model and your own production piece in isolation.
• Referring to the assessment criteria, you will note that it asks you to ‘guide’ the reader through. You will need to develop a coherent line of thought here. In order to guarantee this, you need to avoid leading with A01 features and instead developing topic sentences that enable the reader to understand the connections and points of comparisons being made. 
• Both the style model and original writing piece employ … but to create different representations…
• Within the style model, it utilises … which has been imitated in my original writing piece to …
• Throughout the style model there is use of …. This is mirrored in my original writing piece … so that the subject of … is represented …
• Whilst the style model utilises …. To represent the subject as … I have employed them in a different way so that the topic can be represented as … 
• Ensure that you refer closely to your style model by quoting specific examples from it. Likewise, you will need to do the same with your own original writing piece. If you provide no evidence, credit for A01 features cannot be given regardless of how vast a range of features you have employed. 

Example: 

"As monologues are spoken, it is important to represent speech. Bennett employs ellipsis to make it sound spontaneous and realistic. For example, Marjory says 'Said it was Rawdon anyway." This has been imitated in my own original writing piece through..." 

Concluding the Commentary 

This does not need to be a lengthy part of the piece. A couple of sentences will do here. Your concluding paragraph should very succinctly summarise the overall representation that you have created in your original writing piece.

• Overall, my original writing piece employs a range of language levels that are similar to my style model to represent the subject as … 

Useful Phrases: 

• Emulate / Mirror / Employ / Reflected / Imitated / Utilised / Mimics / Aligns /
• Represents / Portrays / Illustrates / Illuminates / Conveys
• The audience are positioned / This positions the audience to …
• Both / Equally / Similarly / In the same way / Using the style model, I have …
• Whereas / In contrast / Unlike / Alternatively / On the other hand

Good luck with completing your commentary for the NEA and I hope this has helped. 

Happy New Year Y2K+17

Let's hope it's better than 2016, which surely has to go down on record as the worst year in the recent history of the world.

Whatever happens, there will be lots of English Language resources to make use of and we will need to hone our language skills to make sense of an increasingly messed up world.

Tackling the NEA Language Investigation

As lots of students are embarking on the Language Investigation part of the Non-Exam Assessment, I thought it might be handy to pick up a few points which I think will be important. The Language Investigation is unlike anything you have done before (unless you've done an EPQ) and it's not an essay or an analysis, but probably the closest thing to a university dissertation that you will do at this level. What does a Language Investigation involve? Read this.

Think of a manageable project... 
Your aim is to write up an investigation of around 2000 words (excluding data) so your project has to be manageable. You can't ask huge questions about language or try to prove or disprove an established theory about language use. Big ideas aren't a problem - and we'd encourage you to think big on most of this course - but in a language investigation you will need to pinpoint your questions and be really specific. You also need to be able to collect your data in a fairly short space of time. If you are planning something too ambitious and time-consuming, it will be hard to do it.

...on a topic that you are interested in
If you aren't interested in what you are investigating, it will be hard to stick to it. You will probably have the best part of 6-8 weeks to work on this project from beginning to end so it has to be something that floats your boat. If you can't think of an interesting project of your own, check the list here or the ideas here. Ideally, the topic should be something that you feel you can invest a bit of time and energy in. Is there an area of the course so far that you've found particularly interesting? Is there something you do outside college - playing/coaching a sport, online gaming, working, reading a certain genre of books/graphic novels/magazines, TV/films that you are obsessed with - that you can investigate linguistically? Some of the very best investigations come from things that students are really interested in.

Read around your topic
You should aim to find out as much as you can about the area you are investigating. Who has researched in this field before? What studies have been carried out? Are there any approaches or methodologies that you can learn from? Use the textbooks, student handbooks and emagazine archive for ideas.

Narrow down your research questions and think of realistic aims and/or hypothesis
You might start with a fairly broad question that you want to answer. It could be something like one of the ones below:

• How do women and men use language differently in certain situations?
• How do children of different ages show different levels of language ability?
• How does the language of a certain kind of advertising change over time?
• How is immigration represented in different newspapers?
• What language devices are used by people when communicating via social media?

Each of these is fine as a starting point, but they all need refining. So, think of some of the following to help you break them down further:

• What do you mean by language? Which frameworks/language levels will you analyse? Will your focus be on lexis & semantics, syntax & morphology, phonology, pragmatics, discourse structure, graphology, interactional features, or a mixture of these? Will it be specific features of language within these headings, such as adjective use, tag questions, hedging, narrative structures etc? Think carefully about defining what you mean by language. We will probably need to see both depth and range to award the highest marks.
• Which people? You can't make blanket generalisations about women and men, boys and girls, young and old, so think carefully about whose language you might want to explore. If you set out to 'prove' that women do x and men do y, you'll probably come unstuck because different people behave very differently in different situations. Be aware of this and be tentative and exploratory in your approach.
• Which texts and which times? Think very carefully about the texts that you select. Why are you choosing these texts to analyse? What's your rationale for looking at (say) advertising of hair care products for women rather than shirts for men? What do you expect to change in the language used to advertise them and why might this be happening? Which time periods are you going to select and why? Do you expect major changes to have taken place over 20 years? It's possible with some products, but a longer time frame might give you more to work with.
• Which newspapers? Which sections of them? From which times? What kinds of immigration? Don't assume that all papers have consistent lines on these issues. Some of them will argue different positions on the same day, depending on who is writing the piece. Think about delving into older, archived articles; there are loads of really interesting ones online and they might give you some useful reference points. How will you explore the idea of representation and what it means? Will this mean that particular frameworks are more useful than others?
• Which people and which forms of social media? Twitter is not the same as Facebook and web forums are very different to Instagram. Narrow it down and think about what it is you want to explore.

Look at the sample investigations

If you don't know what a good investigation looks like, you will have no idea what you are aiming for. Your teacher will either have provided you with some of these or have access to them. Make sure that you look at them and understand how they have been put together and what you are expected to do.

Think carefully about your data selection

Don't just collect everything and hope to analyse it all. Select the most useful data and explain that selection in your methodology. That doesn't mean that you select the data to fit a preconceived idea of what you will find, but that you consider carefully how much data you need, what type and the context of that data. Think about how you might present your data as well; can you put it in a table, chart or list to make it clearer? If you are transcribing it, how will you show things like overlap, interruption and emphatic stress? Look at this example on the AQA website for an example of what to do and how to approach the first few sections. It's not perfect (it wasn't a final draft) but it is pretty clear. The data selection, in particular, is really effective.

Analyse your data thoroughly

Close focus on both AO1 and AO3 is vital in producing a strong analysis. You need to apply relevant language frameworks (the ones you decided on when you set up your research questions) but you also need to consider meanings, representations and contexts. Don't just pluck single words or phrases from out of their contexts to analyse in isolation: show us where the language comes from and what it means in its context. Think about how it works and what it does. You should also be able to apply your understanding of AO2 language concepts and theories to the analysis you are carrying out.

If you see an example in your data of language being used in ways that fits with, or contradicts, ideas you've seen before about what people do with language, explore this. For example, if research into male language suggests that men "construct solidarity through verbal jousting" - or what we might call 'banter' (urgh!) these days - (Coates, 2003) but you see women doing this in your data, think about why that might be.

Equally, if media articles about texting tell you that young people frequently abbreviate and use non-standard English in their messages, but you find that only 5% of words are shortened in your data set, think about why this might be. Are the articles wrong? They might be. But what has happened to messaging in the last few years and how is the technology different?

If you carry out a survey into the ways in which different regional varieties are represented and find that a dialect judged as being prestigious 30 years ago is now seen (in your analysis, at least) as being less respected, why might this be? Think about the possible reasons for your findings being different? Have attitudes shifted? Is your methodology different to that which was used in the 1980s?

These are all things to think through and consider.

Evaluate throughout

You don't need to write an evaluation at the end of your project, but you are expected to evaluate what you are doing as you go along. Reflect on your methodology: is it a good way to explore your data? Can you think of other ways to do it? What does your data analysis tell you? Can you evaluate what your data reveals about the questions you have been asking?

Make sure your first draft is a substantial, serious piece of work

You do get a chance to redraft but the feedback your teachers are allowed to give is limited. We can't give you a mark for a first draft. We can't offer detailed advice about how to improve what you've done. We can give you the mark scheme and let you decide what you are doing and where you might be able to improve things, but it's vital that your first draft isn't a half-finished, will-this-do, sketchy effort. 

Get going on it quickly

Don't sit around and procrastinate, waiting for your teacher to give you an idea. Think of something you can do and get on with doing it. Once you've got some ideas, we can help you shape them and show you where you need to go. The worst investigations are inevitably the ones where students can't decide what they want to do, have no real interest in it and/or don't really know what they are doing. 

Texts in Time - Analysing the Language of the Past

Although many students (and quite a few teachers!) might disagree, analysing historical texts is one of the great joys of studying A-Level English Language. Admittedly, picking your way through the archaic lexis, grammar and orthography isn't always easy - especially with texts written before the 18th century - but once you're in, you enter a different world. 

The trick to analysing such texts well is to avoid saying boring stuff about certain words not existing any more or that they don't have any grammar. Words don't vanish, they just 'fall from mainstream usage' and the only texts without grammar are ones without any words! You need to get a feel for the texts as living things. They were written by real people with real feelings about the subjects they were discussing. More significantly, the words on the page were as relevant to them at that point in history as the WhatsApp or Snapchat you sent five minutes ago. Importantly, language should not be regarded as more or less important - or superior or inferior - based on when it was produced. Simply, it is what it is.

I especially enjoy diary entries and letters from the past because they were intensely personal. They had no intended audience (at least, not a mass audience) and so they were written frankly, honestly and without affectation. They weren't trying (in most cases) to influence the reader. That said, a letter from a monarch to a politician would probably have contained some ulterior motive. 

The other things that trip students up are the attitudes expressed. It's all too easy to write an essay dismissing a text as sexist, racist, superstitious or ignorant in some way, but this can be a misrepresentation. These texts shouldn't be analysed in terms of social attitudes today or how we think today; they need to be considered as a reflection of the time at which they were composed. Back then, attitudes based on gender, sexual orientation, race, social status, religion, the supernatural and so on were different. Centuries ago, there were no such things as political correctness, equality awareness or cultural sensitivity (as we understand them today) operating in the mainstream arena. Often, people were simply writing what was generally held to be true or, at least, acceptable at the time. There are exceptions of course. Nobody could read the vile rantings of a madman like Hitler and dismiss his words as culturally uninformed just because they written almost a century ago. There are some things that common sense alone leads us to recognise plainly as being only evil and wrong. 

More often than not, you can discern much about the text you are analysing by reading the contextual information provided by the examiner and looking at the year of publication or origin. Sometimes you will see that a text was written in or around a significant year. If so, ask yourself if there are any parallels that can be drawn between the attitudes expressed and the point in history that it was written. Above all, just remember that the attitudes and ideas expressed may only seem ignorant or offensive when weighed against today's knowledge and social values. As ever, historical knowledge is important and context is everything. 

The one piece of advice I would leave you with is this: don't be scared of an old text. Trust your revision and remember that the examiner won't ever ask you to analyse something inaccessible. 

Talking English

Thanks to the British Library Learning Team for putting on such a great day for English Language teachers yesterday. I'll post a few quick things about it over the weekend and a few reflections on what was said by various speakers, but if you are reading this and were there, hello!

Analysing Graphology

Getting the most from Graphology

Whatever exam board you are studying for English Language A-Level, you need to remember that Graphology is not, in itself, one of the higher scoring key constituents / frameworks when it comes to textual analysis. Observations such as, "The text is written in red because it is about donating blood" might well be accurate, but it's also not rocket science. 

Personally, I like Graphology to be described in terms of Text-Image Cohesion. In short, how visual devices or aids are used to support the text in achieving its purpose, appealing to its audience or how it works in tandem with other key constituents / frameworks of language. Let's look at a simple example. 

An early reader book for young children may have limited text on the page, with a sketch of the scene dominating the space. Here we have text-image cohesion because the picture is replicating the actions described by the simple sentences which comprise high frequency, low register lexis. Already, we have linked graphology, syntax and lexis. Now let's add purpose. 

This meets the needs of the reader as it helps to place the actions described in a more familiar context. The young reader's limited experience of life and language is being taken into consideration and the text-image cohesion adds to their understanding of events and sequencing. 

We can extend this to older readers who may enjoy comic strips or graphic novels. Perhaps the call-outs or text use exclamative forms or incorporate non-standard orthography to create phonological effects (think about Batman's famous fight scenes where punches are accompanied with lexical coinages such as 'thwack!'; 'kaboosh'; 'schlumpf'... The list is endless. Here the text-image cohesion allows us to better engage with the text as a 'realistic' recreation of a fight, or it might create humour in terms of the hyperbolic language which accompanies such pained facial expressions. 

In this example, we have managed to squeeze in orthography and phonology. In doing this, we have elevated the status of graphology to a potentially high scoring point of observation. Why? Because we are not analysing it in isolation, but as a component of the text. Ideally, texts should always be made up of complementary techniques. The trick for candidates is to join the dots between each. 

This is not to say that we can't be simplistic in order to bag a few easy points. If a text about an aquarium is predominantly blue and turquoise, it would be foolish to ignore the observation and the reasons for it. Likewise, if a text uses a high incidence of emojis (emoticons, or whatever they're called this week), then make the observation that the text is probably targeting a younger audience familiar with the phenomenon or that it is trying to convey a sense of face to face communication by expressing, visually, ideas that brief words alone cannot convey adequately. 

Graphology can take many forms - even something as obvious as pictorial representations to support instructions on something like a diagram from IKEA. Just try to link your observations to the text as a whole or, at the very least, as something which complements or makes possible another linguistic technique present in the text. 

NEA: investigation ideas part 1

In this, the 1000th post on EngLangBlog (OMG), I'll run through a couple of quick ideas for language investigations based on recent stories in the news or language posts elsewhere.

1. Changing UK accents and dialects. 
The stories in the press and on the radio last week about the Sound of 2066 report were fascinating and worrying in equal measure. The report itself can be downloaded here and is a really good read (and very useful for anyone studying Change and Diversity for the new A level course). It looks at what English might look and sound like in 50 years and traces some patterns that have already been established - abbreviations, borrowing and simplification of sounds - to see what is likely to occur as time goes on.
Here's a nice clip of the report's authors talking about their predictions.
There are several language investigations in there, I think. One might be to consider one or two variables in your own family and the ways in which these might have changed across generations. Another might be to look at these changes in written texts over time: abbreviations cold be a good one as we have used them for a long time (e.g. etc. et al. & err... etc.) but many see them as a recent development.

Another set of investigations (which crosses over with Paper 2 Language Discourses work) would be to examine the coverage of the report. As I (no doubt, tediously) complained about on Twitter last week, the angles taken by various right wing news outlets, were worryingly xenophobic and played on anti-immigration themes. You can make your own mind up about these by looking at the headlines and main thrust of each of the following. Notice a pattern?

Telegraph
Mail (original headline published for this was "Is immigration killing off the Queen's English?"
The Sun
The Guardian

The local media coverage of stories like this is also good to consider. Here's what three regional publications made of it all:

Newcastle
Birmingham
Liverpool

2. Changing attitudes to taboo language
This one has always been a favourite  because it allows you to look at really bad swear words in an academic and mature way ("Ha, that says boobies!"). Every few years, Ofcom publishes a survey of social attitudes to swearing and their latest report can be found here. Looking back at their previous reports (check this blog), you can see some shifting social attitudes towards certain words.

Is this something you could do for your own investigation? An apparent time study (using an age-stratified sample of respondents) might allow you to test how people feel about different swear words and explore some of their reasons for finding them offensive or otherwise. There's plenty of scope for discussion about taboos around various bodily functions, sex and social behaviour, but also a lot of scope for discussion of religion, gender, race and sexuality, all of which feed into other parts of this course.

This article and this one are helpful for providing other angles.

More ideas next week, but if you have any of your own, please tweet them to @EngLangBlog.

Some more Language Change work in progress (or decay)...

Following on from the last post about how I'm approaching the topic of Language Change, here's a rough plan of the question I'm setting as a way to build up skills and knowledge for Paper 2 of the A level and a few ideas that one of my A level classes came up with this afternoon.

We're heading towards an essay question "Evaluate the idea that language change is either a process of evolution or of decay" and we're trying to build a range of different case studies and examples along the way. As well as that, I'm trying to kill two birds with one stone by looking at some examples of older texts in preparation for Paper 1.

What I'm hoping is that this allows us to do some close work on short texts, thinking about how they use language to convey ideas and represent their subject matter (all part of Paper 1's textual analysis focus) and then the same texts can be sources of examples and evidence for the bigger Paper 2 essay questions. One thing that's different between Paper 2 at AS and A level is the absence of any data prompt with the "Evaluate the idea..." cue, so I think it's important for students to have lots of examples and extracts of data that they can use to illustrate their points.

That's the plan... Any ideas/further suggestions/criticisms welcome.

Some Language Change links

We've made a start on Language Change as an A level topic at our college and been thinking about the different phases the language has been through. While 1600 is the cut-off point for texts on Paper 1, it's useful to look back further to see how the language started and the processes it went through to help with Paper 2 and a better overview of the whole topic.

These links from the OED site are really good for explaining the main changes, while the British Library timeline is great for the bigger picture.

The approach I'm taking at the moment is to look through the changes to lexis (word formation), semantics (meaning changes), grammar, phonology and orthography/graphology framework by framework, stopping to focus on a few more detailed discussions of things like semantic reclamation and political correctness along the way.

Welcome to 'NEA', the component formerly known as 'coursework'

One of the new things in the A level, as opposed to the AS level, is the appearance of coursework. Except we're not supposed to call it 'coursework' any more and that's probably got something to do with political arguments about the validity of internally-assessed work in a high-stakes testing regime...but I'll save that discussion for another day and maybe some bright spark out there could do a language investigation into the semantic pejoration of the term 'coursework' in media discourses around education.

But anyway, here's a thing I've put together for our returning AS students, now embarking on the 2nd year of the A level course. It's not a complete explanation of what's involved in the Non-Exam Assessment (NEA) but sets a few starting points and offers some ideas for what you can do before you really get started.

We're not officially starting our NEA work until nearer Christmas (and just to mention Christmas seems obscene at this time of year!) but we'd like students to think ahead a bit and get some ideas ticking over.

You can find plenty of other ideas about language investigations from the blog here.

As part of the second year of your A level course, you will have two exam components and one that is called Non-Exam Assessment (i.e. coursework).

The aim of NEA component is to allow you to explore and analyse language data independently and develop and reflect upon your own writing expertise.

It requires you to carry out two different kinds of individual research:
– a language investigation (2,000 words excluding data)
– a piece of original writing and commentary (750 words each)

Language Investigation 

A project that involves you researching and investigating an area of language, setting your own questions, collecting your own data and then analysing your data and writing it all up. It’s not quite like anything you will have done before for English and requires a good chunk of time, some clear understanding of how language works and - perhaps, most importantly -  your own initiative. You will get more detailed information about the investigation as the term goes on, but will find it helpful to think about potential investigation topics as you look back at work from last year and develop your understanding of new topic areas this year.

A Language Investigation might look something like one of the examples below – which are based on topics you cover on the course – but could equally be about something we do not do on the course. As long as there is a language element to it and you can convince your teacher that it is a viable project, you can do it.

Example investigations

1. A study of the language techniques used by Great British Bake-Off judges when commenting on the cakes produced in the final rounds of the competition, focusing on politeness, directness and possible gender differences.
2. An investigation into the language of female boxers during interviews to see if stereotypes about female communication are true for these women.
3. A comparison of the language used by three children of different ages when responding to the same task, focusing particularly on the stages of development they are at and their ability to use vocabulary and grammar.
4. An investigation into the ways in which different political parties and pressure groups represented the EU during the 2016 referendum across their campaign literature.
5. A study of ways in which local newspapers in 3 different areas represent their local dialect and accent in reports about varieties of English.
6. A comparison of how Maybelline adverts change over a 75-year period in their representation of female beauty.
7. An investigation into the messaging styles of 3 different age groups when using WhatsApp.
8. An investigation into the ways that the language of Twitter arguments differs from those carried out face to face.
9. An exploration of the different language techniques used by three supermarkets to represent their values to the general public on their official websites.
10. A study of the linguistic techniques used by rugby commentators in a radio commentary compared to an online commentary from the BBC website.

This is not an exhaustive list and there are endless possibilities to explore, but you should be able to see that some of these link to areas you might already have studied, while others pick up on A level-only topics.

What you can do now

• Think about potential language investigation topics (and possible methodologies i.e. how you might approach the topic) as this first term goes on
• Start collecting data: saving articles, bookmarking links, making a note of interesting radio, TV or online shows
• Start discussing ideas with your teacher
• Read the material in your A level handbook (and in the OUP or CUP course textbooks) for ideas about how to approach the NEA

Original Writing

You will need to produce one piece of original writing based on one of the following three areas:
• the power of persuasion
• the power of storytelling
• the power of information

The topic choice is down to you (in discussion with your teacher) but you must have looked at a range of style models and chosen one to comment on in more detail as part of your commentary. Again, you will do some of this in class, but it is a good idea to think about the kind of thing you can write and might enjoy doing. Some suggestions for original writing tasks might be:

The power of persuasion
• A piece of investigative journalism.
• A speech delivered on a controversial topic.
• A letter to an MP.

The power of storytelling
• A short story.
• An extract from a biography.
• A dramatic monologue.

The power of information
• A piece of travel journalism.
• A blog focusing on social issues.
• A piece of local history.

Each folder submitted should contain:
• a piece of original writing
• an annotated style model
• a reflective commentary references (paper and web-based)

What you can do now

Read and write. Find stories, articles and speeches to read. Practise writing in different styles. Use the time in class for Directed Writing tasks as part of the exam components to experiment with form, style and voice. This is one of the few areas on any A level that allows you to write what you like.

Welcome back to English Language

Welcome back to English Language A level if you are moving into the second year of your course and hello to new AS/A level students and teachers.

This year, I'm going to try to focus primarily on the material that's new for the AQA A level, so the areas of Language Change, Child Language Acquisition and Language Diversity, including World Englishes. There's already quite a lot of material on here from the old specifications, but I'll set up some new posts linking to the most useful material and then some suggestions for new idea and activities.

As ever, I'm keen to expand the pool of writers for the blog and you will have seen some contributions from a few different writers over the last year (thanks again to them) so if you are interested, contact me via the @EngLangBlog Twitter account.

Why language is such good sport

Previously, I suggested that coffee chains and their pseudo-Italian-American lexicon provided possible evidence of the way that English was changing its attitudes when it came to borrowings. My argument was that asking for 'a triple-shot mocha with soya to go' made consumers feel part of something exclusive; that it somehow helped 20- and 30-somethings to rediscover the joys of using slang with their teenage friends. In short, coffee shops had become closed language communities of their own. This doesn't have quite the same socio-political implications of Milroy's study, but you get the idea. 

However, I'd hate to be thought of as an inverted coffee snob and so I turned my gaze elsewhere. 

Watching Chris Froome claim his third Tour de France title yesterday got me thinking about the language of sport in all its glorious vagary. It is every bit as elitist as coffee and fine dining in its choice of lexis, often seeming like a different language intended for the few, rather than the many. 

In cycling, it literally is a different a language, filled with borrowings of French origin. Why have a referee when you can have a commissaire? As a noun, it sounds so much more important and sophisticated. Then we have the collective noun for the main group of riders: peloton. And let's not forget that the peloton gets strung out into echelons in strong cross winds, aching to pass under the flame rouge as they go over the final classified climb, supported by their domestiques! It's a delightful lexicon, but what on earth does a novice make of it?

And what of tennis?

As Sue Barker rounds up the day's scores, she casually announces that Federer is through in straight sets with a triple bagel, while Djokovic battled through a five-setter, eventually triumphing three, six, six, two and six, breaking twice in the decider. What does this mean to anyone out of the loop?

Golf offers little reprieve. Spieth leads Day by a single shot at seven under after eagling the par five ninth, while a wild tee shot from Day saw him double bogey the par four eighth. From this, we are meant to know what their scores were before these shots! (Incidentally, it would've meant that Day had led on -8 with Spieth three behind on -5.) 

Of course, there are sports like football where everyone knows the terminology, even though they might not quite grasp the rules, but with the Olympics fast-approaching, viewers are sure to be treated to a whole new world of sporting jargon. The question is, why do we tolerate it?

Because we want to learn. We all want to sound like experts in any field, nodding sagely at the right moments. The commentators are our teachers, describing what we are seeing on our screens so that we can match the words (usually nouns) to the actions. If you don't listen hard, you'll loft one into the deep and find yourself caught out!

Once again, specialist, field specific lexis is a tool that helps us become a part of something from which we would otherwise be excluded. Is it so wrong to want to join the club? Language is used in a self-seeking way from the moment we are born, we just become better practitioners in the art of manipulation as we grow. The ability to feel comfortable on a shared topic in any company is incredibly beneficial, so let's not shun the language's ever-changing vocabulary...let's take in as much as we can and go for gold. Well, a podium finish at least. 

Discussing language over a coffee...

Back when I was an A-Level student, I thought I had the concept of borrowings worked out. The textbook definition (as given by my teacher) was that a borrowing must either fill a gap in the borrowing language (usually an abstract concept), or it should name some kind of phenomenon that has gripped the culture of the borrowing language (a more concrete notion).

I suppose words like the German-derived abstract noun 'schadenfreude' (finding pleasure in the misfortune of others - usually a friend) and the Georgian abstract noun 'Shemomedjamo' (eating beyond the point of fullness because the food tastes so good) are fine examples of the first part of the definition because to find an English equivalent to describe such ideas would be too cumbersome. The second part of the definition is more straightforward. The borrowing of the Japanese noun 'karaoke' was beneficial as it gave a name to a new innovation on western shores. 

Where am I going with all this? Well, arguably the traditional circumstances related to borrowings no longer hold true. They appear to have become a cultural issue, designed to fit in with the British class system. Let me give you some examples. 

Two friends are having a tête-à-tête over their suburban garden fence, with one foreshadowing a juicy bit of gossip with the phrase "Strictly entre nous..." The first bit of French means 'head-to-head' (in a friendly sense) and the second means 'between us'. Can English express these ideas without recourse to the Romance languages and without ambiguity? Yes, ultimately making this a middle-class affectation. The late, great comedy writer, John Sullivan bestowed 
such character flaws(?) on Del Trotter as he described attractive women as 'fromage frais' and 



used exclamatives such as 'Chateau Neuf du Pape!' Del always had those middle-class yearnings and Sullivan captured them with warmth and incisive accuracy. 

But let's get to the real point. Return with me to my childhood...

When I was growing up in the 1970s and '80s, my family often popped into a traditional cafe for a drink. Usually, they had tea or coffee but, when feeling extravagant, they would opt for a milky coffee or, in moments of utter recklessness, a frothy coffee! Although you can still ask for such beverages in small tea shops, we know these drinks  better as lattes and cappuccinos today. That's right, I'm about to propose that coffee culture is proof of the changing nature of borrowings. 

Rewind 30 years, enter a cafe and ask for a tall, skinny macchiato with an extra shot to go. What kind of response would you receive? A look of incredulity followed by immediate arrest. Today, however, it's the norm. We speak a different language to many of our grandparents. What's wrong with requesting a small macchiato, made with skimmed milk with an extra drop of coffee thrown in that you wish to take away from the cafe? What's wrong is that, despite its clarity, it sounds like you don't understand; it isn't snappy enough; you're not part of the club - and belonging is everything in today's society. 

And who said size doesn't matter?

If we take the so-called big three coffee chains, we see huge variations in their use of Italio-American jargon to reference the size of drinks available. In Starbucks, you can have (from smallest to largest) short, tall, grande and venti. Meanwhile, Costa limits the choice to primo, medio and massimo while Caffe Nero offers just regular and grande. How do these sizes correlate? I reached the (not unreasonable) conclusion that grande, venti and massimo must all be Italian synonyms for 'large'. I put this to two friends, both fluent in Italian, who laughed at me explaining that the choice of size names were all style over substance. 

Therefore, There exists a reasonable possibility that social class and a desperation to be part of something (moderately) elite has become a factor in why the English language continues to borrow words - even though they don't necessarily mean what we think they do. Isn't it sufficient to ask for small, medium or large? Oh well, c'est la vie!

Brexit: the war of the words

By chance or design, our often fractious relationship with continental Europe has contributed significantly to our proverbial 'mongrel' language which is up there with Finnish and Welsh as one of the continent's most notoriously difficult languages to learn. As if this isn't bad enough, recent events, monolithic institutions and the pseudo-intellectuals in the media have saddled us with a whole new world of linguistic detritus.

Looking back, it was easy: David Cameron promised a straight in/out referendum that we could get our heads around. As time passed, factions emerged in the form of official (and unofficial) Remain or Leave camps. Sadly, as with Brangelina and Jedward, the media outlets needed something...sexier? They found it! After all, who could fail to be seduced after drinking the love potion that is the blended neologism (or blelologism)?

Suddenly, a reporter recalled that the Greek threat to leave the EU had been dubbed Grexit (Greek exit) and so, logically, the concept of Brexit (noun) was born. But Brexit versus Remain lacked balance and harmony. We had the Yin, but why borrow that when we had no Yang to complete the set?  Fortunately, help was forthcoming as a timid hand raised itself from beside the water cooler and suggested that Remain could be renamed Bremain. Everyone present knew it was rubbish, but the noun worked. Shrek had found his Fiona and the blended neologisms were settled upon as the official lexicon of the Breferendum.

From this point on, we saw linguistic change take place at light speed. You were either pro- or anti-Brexit. Already, the new noun had undergone affixation thanks to two tried and tested prefixes. As a consequence it had shifted semantically, evolving from noun to adjective as in the pre-modification present in, '...claimed the pro-Brexit camp.'  The same didn't happen with Bremain because, as a  
noun, it was still rubbish.

Then came the ever-so-slightly-tortured plural noun for the pro-Brexit bunch: Brexiteers. Ostensibly, this is affixation through the use of a a suffix but, however we perceive it, it is difficult to dissociate the connotation of -eers with The Musketeers. Fearless, selfless noblemen risking everything for the side of good? It makes for a compelling image. Meanwhile, The Bremain Camp continued to sound like a dodgy political remake of Carry on Camping.

In truth, it may well have been the war of semantics - not words - that decided the referendum. Brexit always had so much more potential than Bremain and, in the end, three noble horsemen from France contributed to a divorce from that same nation (amongst many others). A result that left many voters feeling a sense of Bregret or Branxiety. Really? The blended neologisms were now forming more abstract nouns. Where will it all Brend?

As for the matter of the the red tops taking the initialism EU and using it as a substitute for the second person pronoun you? We'll leave that abuse of orthography for another time. EU have probably had enough for today.