ENGA1 Language Development essay questions

As this is the start of a new specification, there has only been one "proper" essay question set on this topic so far, but many of the old spec's child language questions might be reworked (or recycled - it is the 21st century) into something suitable for the new spec.

Here's a list of loads of previous questions from the AQA A spec and in days to come we'll have a look at how you might approach these if they were set on the ENGA1 paper.

1. Discuss the ways in which young children up to the age of four learn words and their meanings.
2. Give examples of how children develop their ability to use the sounds of English. What do your examples reveal about the nature of children’s language acquisition?
3. To what extent do children learn language by copying the language that is spoken to them?
4. Give examples of how children learn to use the grammar of English. What do your examples reveal about the nature of children’s language acquisition?
5. To what extent do children acquire language by actively working out its rules?
6. To what extent is it appropriate to describe children’s early uses of language as wrong or incorrect?
7. To what extent do children learn language through imitation? Give examples of sounds, vocabulary, grammar and meaning.
8. How important is the interaction between children and adult speakers in the process of children’s language acquisition?
9. What have you discovered about the nature of language acquisition from the ways children develop their grammatical skills?
10. It has been suggested that children’s language acquisition is a more interesting process than the simple imitation of adult speech.
11. What have you found interesting about the ways children acquire language?

A plan for answering question 4 (grammar acquisition) can be found here on the Teachit website, if you want to have a look at some approaches to it.

To use Teachit links you'll have to register on their site first, but it's still free. Go here, register, log in then follow the link above.

ENGA1 mode exercise 1

Here's a quick revision exercise you can do using the mode continuum (see yesterday's post if you want to open a copy of the graphic).

The following is an online comment to The Daily Mail's website in response to a story about Chelsea's defeat at the hands of Barcelona last week.

1. Where would you place this extract on the mode continuum?
2. Why?
3. What language evidence can you produce for your decision?

Post your response as a comment, or just use it as a way of thinking about how you would approach an extract like this, if you prefer.

Chelsea have only got themselves to blame,they went to barcelona and were a total embarassment and were very lucky to come away nil nil,they made no attempt to play football and went there to get a draw.If you score goals you go through if you don't your out,it's as simple as.

ENGA1 mode continuum

Here's a quickly cobbled together graphic of the mode continuum which might help a bit with revision. In the next few days, and in the run-up to Friday 15th's ENGA1 exam, I'll add some short extracts of texts for you to place onto this continuum.

The millionth word

Today's Daily Mirror has a page dedicated to the English language and the story from the Global Language Monitor about English approaching its millionth word. According to the site today, the English language will reach its millionth word on June 10th. How they work this out, I'm not sure, and it's clear that proper, qualified linguists are sceptical too. Language Log calls it the "million word hoax" and criticises it as a publicity stunt to promote a book by Paul Payack the boss of GLM.

Whatever the pros and cons of the claim about a million words, the article in The Mirror gives a neat, potted account of the development of English and quotes language guru (and future SFX speaker) David Crystal which is always a good thing. It also mentions lots of new words that have entered the language through social networking, online games and gloomy economic conditions, so it's a very handy article to refer to if you want some examples for your language change essays on ENA5.

It's also got lots of fascinating language facts such as the most commonly used words in English, the longest words without vowels and much much more!

Sociable networking

Today's Guardian Technology has a good article about the language of social networking sites, based on research by Professor Mike Thelwall at Wolverhampton University. He's currently researching the language of MySpace and looking specifically at how sentiment is expressed, and how emotions are conveyed through creative grammar, puctuation and spelling. He's previously worked on swearing and gender on MySpace (covered in a good article in emag) and will be speaking at the next SFX teacher conference (he's appearing on the afternoon of Thursday 18th June, along with Bev Plester) about his research.

The article is a good read for anyone looking at technology and Language Change in A2, but it's also interesting from an AS Language & Mode perspective because it covers many of the features of computer-mediated communication and how orthography can be used to convey some of the patterns of spoken English.

The research is presented here in more detail and the previous work on swearing and MySpace is here.

As the article points out, MySpace is no longer the "top dog in social networking", having been superseded by Facebook and maybe to some extent Twitter, but the open nature of MySpace and the accessibility of its data makes it an attractive proposition for researchers. And who's to say that the patterns apparent in MySpace data won't be pretty much identical to those in other social networking applications?

The table here gives a quick rundown of some of the main non-standard features found in MySpace comments and should give you a chance to think about how this kind of thing might link to your ENA5, ENA6 or ENGA1 exams.

A new word every 98 minutes

The English language is heading towards its millionth word, according to an organisation called the Global Language Monitor who say that a new word is created every 98 minutes. It's a hotly contested claim and one that top linguistics blog Language Log takes issue with. But whatever the pros and cons of this claim, there's not much doubt that our language is rapidly expanding. This edition of the BBC News Magazine has a good article about new words, our own personal vocabularies and recent claims that young people are suffering from "word poverty" and need a boot up the lexical arse.

One interesting point for A2 Language Change students is the question of when a word is actually a "proper" word. For example, do these new words count: Obamamania, noob and airline pulp? And what about d'oh and meh, or even teh and pwn? See this post for more on some of these terms and the million words "hoax".

Will they last and should they be entered into dictionaries, or are they just silly expressions that no one will remember in 20 years?

OMG!!!! I hate exclamation marks!!!!!

"An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes," according to the late, great F.Scott Fitzgerald. Well, as someone who is sometimes lucky just to have an audience of one (myself) laughing at my "jokes", I know where he's coming from. He's so right!!!

Apparently, these days we're seeing more exclamation marks than ever before in written and - especially - blended mode communications. In this article from The Guardian, earlier in the week, Stuart Jeffries looks at the exclamation mark and what it means, and how it's changing. Interestingly, he makes the point that 30 years ago, some manual typewriters (those things that existed before word processors and PCs) didn't even have exclamation mark keys:

It is important to realise that advances in technology (if that's what they are) affect how we write. And how we write includes how often we deploy the beloved gasper. Before the 1970s, few manual typewriters were equipped with an exclamation mark key. Instead, if you wanted to express your unbridled joy at - ooh, I don't know - the budding loveliness of an early spring morning and gild the lily of your purple prose with an upbeat startler, you would have to type a full stop, then back space, push the shift key and type an apostrophe.

He goes on to look at how women and men use the exclamation mark in computer-mediated communication and refers to research that suggests women use them more than men:

But technological change is not the only reason for variations in the use of exclamations. Carol Waseleski's unexpectedly diverting paper, Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication, found that women used more exclamation marks than men. But why was this? Are women more excitable? Some theorists (notably D Rubin and K Greene in their paper Gender-Typical Style in Written Language) had argued that the exclamation mark was often a sign of excitability, and that "a high frequency of exclamation points can be regarded as sort of an orthographic intensifier signalling 'I really mean this!'" They also argued that this might convey the writer's lack of stature; that, in fact, a confident person (read: man) could "affirm their views by simply asserting them". Perhaps then the use of multiple exclamation marks is not simply a sign that someone is wearing underpants on their head, but of deeply unmasculine insecurity about expressing one's thoughts. Or maybe that's just my theory!

Waseleski found otherwise. She concluded that exclamation marks were not just marks of excitability but of friendliness, and suggested that one reason women use them more than men is because they were, as a gender, less likely to be socially inept, funless egotists - which isn't quite how she put it. Instead, she wrote: "The results point to the need to reconsider the negative labels that have often been associated with female communication styles, and to investigate [their use] as they relate to email and other forms of computer-mediated communication."

The rest of the article is a good read for anyone interested in language change - especially orthographic change - over the centuries. So read it!!!!

Our magnificent bastard tongue...

...is an ace phrase and also the name of a book by American linguist John McWhorter who is one of several writers contributing to a special edition of Forbes magazine. In it (click here for the link) various experts and lexophiles have a good look at the growth of the English language as it (apparently and rather controversially) heads towards its 1 millionth word.

Among the articles are some really good pieces on how language changes and spreads, new words that have come from internet gaming, how new types of prefixes and suffixes have arisen, and loads, loads more.

I've picked out a few extracts below to give you a taste of what's covered, and I'm sure we'll be using some of this in class in the next two weeks (which is all we have left before study leave...woohoo! Sorry, I mean dammit).

On the millionth word topic:

An outfit called the Global Language Monitor claims that English is about to add its millionth word, boldly (and absurdly) projecting the event to transpire some time around June 8, 2009. But that gives the patina of precision to the ultimately subjective task of determining what counts as "English" nowadays--and what counts as a "word." Even if we content ourselves with the paltry number of neologisms that get included in dictionary updates, it's instructive to see which words make the cut. Recent additions to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, include biosignature, botnet, locavore, mocktail, plus-one and vanity sizing. In some cases we know exactly where these words are coming from. Locavore, meaning "a person whose diet consists only or principally of locally grown or produced food," was coined in 2005 by a group of four San Francisco women who challenged local residents to eat only food grown within a 100-mile radius. It was then picked up by like-minded activists around the country.

On new prefixes and suffixes:

Suffixes and prefixes are the Legos of word-making, handy attachments we slap onto words as needed. Most don't make us blink: like the "pre" and "s" in "prefixes" itself.

Others are a little more creative, gaudy and eye-catching. It's no longer unusual to spot "-y" suffixed words like "women's magazine-y" and "false-prophet-y" or words with " 'tude" such as "braindead-itude," "poor-human-being-itude" and "warlorditude." There's nothing new about "nano" in conjunction with a very small iPod or scientific words like "nanotubes," but slangy, informal words like "nano-brained" are adding fancy new features to the insulter's toolbox. The celebutante-inspired prefix "celebu-" has spawned many recent coinages such as "celebu-tats," "celebu-chefs," "celebu-ooops," and "celebu-scent."

On gaming words:

Sometimes new words are not invented, but are crafted from old words. In gaming, a "griefer" is a player who intentionally disrupts the gameplay of other players--a griefer gives other players grief. Gamers took a word that already existed and added the highly productive suffix "-er" to make a word that fit their language needs.

On the history of new words:

Shakespeare popped off hundreds of neologisms, such as "excellent," "lonely" and "leapfrog," that have long been accepted as words, but which, if dictionaries were being written in Elizabethan times, would have been flagged as suspiciously colloquial. Given that it is nearly impossible to create a word for something out of thin air and see it adopted by the rest of the English-speaking world--i.e., if you randomly decided to call the cover for your memory stick a "verch," no one else would join in--most of the words that have accreted in the vast English vocabulary over the 2000-plus years of the language's existence have been created in various ways.

Twitter gives descriptivists a treat...

...or a tweet. In this article from the Greensboro News Record, Mike Clark takes a look at arguments about outside influences on our own ways of communicating: be they accents in new areas we move to, or technologies like texting and Twitter. He makes a number of interesting points for English Language students about how our individual language (idiolect) changes based on the contexts we're using it in and goes on to suggest that we'll switch between different types of language:

How you talk is often influenced by where you are, by the context of the communication, and that’s just fine. Kids who are born and spend a few years in one part of the country and then move with their families to another will often become bi-dialectal. They’ll play with their new neighbors outdoors, speaking with the patois of those new friends, and revert to the dialect of their own family when they’re in the house. I feel pretty confident that the same transformation can occur, will occur, in fact, does occur with today’s young people as they move from technology-based talking to formal writing, from daily talk to giving a speech, and so on.

Far from being responsible for the demise of formal written English that some prescriptivists have argued, texting and Twitter messages might actually help us develop clearer and more creative language styles:

And think about those parameters. Imagine what a good exercise it is to write something in 140 characters (including punctuation and spaces) max. I think it was Pascal who wrote: “I’m sorry for the long letter. I didn’t have time to write a short one.” If you’re a teacher, you must like that kind of discipline for your students; it forces them to focus, to write with attention and precision. The preceding sentence is 141 characters. Can you effectively remove one character? Twitter people can, even the young ones. Let’s say hello to a new age of talking.

ENA6 - 1a word formation processes

Here's a 1a style question for ENA6 based on the post below about words from politics, technology and economics.

Comment linguistically on three processes used to create the following examples of recent words and phrases:

• credit crunch (a term used to describe the lack of credit or lending available in the current economic crisis)
• zombie (originally a word used to describe a body brought back to life by magic, now used to describe a computer taken over by a hacker and used to perform illegal activity)
• downturn (a word used to describe an economic decline)
• bankster (a word used to equate bankers' behaviour with criminals')
• virus (originally a term used for an infectious disease but now used to describe a code that affects a computer)

Best two answers get the Haribo...

Words of warcraft

Today's New York Times runs an article on the changing language of the Whitehouse under Barack Obama's administration. It's not "a war on terror" anymore; it's overseas contingency operations, and it's no longer "terrorist attacks" but man-caused disasters.

Why should we care? They're just words, aren't they? And words don't kill people: weapons do. Well, kind of, but words are part of war and the groundwork that goes into softening up a population for war, or in Obama's case (we hope) a step away from the deranged war his nutty predecessor decided to wage.

Peter Baker explains in his article:

Every White House picks its words carefully, using poll-tested, focus-grouped language to frame issues and ideas to advance its goals. Mr. Bush's team did that assertively. The initial legislation expanding government power after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was called the USA Patriot Act. The eavesdropping without warrants that became so controversial was rebranded the Terrorist Surveillance Program. The enemy was, for a time, dubbed ''Islamofascism,'' until that was deemed insensitive to Muslims.

And he goes on to argue that while Obama is keen to change perceptions about his policies, in Baker's view, the substance of Bush's policies actually remains in place:

He has made no move to revise the Patriot Act or the eavesdropping program. He has ordered the Guantánamo prison to be closed in a year but has not settled on an alternative way to house inmates deemed to be truly dangerous.

Are the Obama administration's words a whitewash then? Is the emphasis on a change of language just a way of hiding the fact that the policies remain the same, or does the shift in tone signal a profound shift in direction to come? The jury's out...

And how is this useful to you at A level? The contemporary language change question on ENA5 often asks you to consider how new words and phrases come into existence or how existing words change, and politics has been explicitly mentioned on a couple of occasions as an are to look at (along with technology, communication, youth culture, immigration and war), so it's worth trying to have a few examples from contemporary news stories at your fingertips.

You might also want to look at how the recent global economic crisis (a nice new noun phrase) has led to new expressions, or how technology has co-opted older expressions and recycled them. How about these examples:

• credit crunch
• financial liquidity
• quantitative easing
  
• fiscal stimulus package
• avatar
• icon
• virus
• bankster
• menu
• zombie
• downturn

Chatting gas

Here's a very dubious poll that claims men gossip more than women. It's not dubious because men don't gossip (they do, but they probably don't like to call it "gossip"), but it's dubious because it's such a rubbish set of questions and relies on such sketchy data. Have a look here for The Telegraph's take on it.

As Deborah Cameron points out so clearly in her excellent Myth of Mars and Venus (covered here), we shouldn't generalise about what men and women do in conversation, because there are so many different types of men and women and we all "do" masculinity and femininity in different ways depending on where we are and who we're with, but one big stereotype about gossip is that it's just a girl thing.

ENGA1 Language Development data response part 2

OK, thanks for the responses last time. The Haribo will be with the winners on Tuesday (after I've been paid).

Here's a new one for your revising pleasure. The ages of the speakers are in brackets (years, months). The question is the same as last time: comment linguistically on 5 features of child language that you find interesting. Remember that it's not just a question of picking out things that the children say "wrong", but also looking at what they are saying and what they are achieving, and how this might place them at a certain stage of development.

(2,9)
Liam: Did you hid it in my castle?
Stan: Yes, I hid it in the dungeons.

Liam: They shotted their arrows at the baddy

(2,9)
Dad: It’ll be better watching it at the cinema than on DVD
Liam: Yeah, it’s better dan dat

(3,6)
Liam: The goodies are going on their ship cos they’ve caught a baddie

Liam: The cavemans are laughing

Liam: I’m going to build a whole army of goodies//
Stan: // yeah, cos the baddies are coming

(4,6)
Stan: Don’t do that because you’ll hit the men and they’ll fall over.

Blaefummery anywhen

Today's Guardian has a good feature on regional dialects and how they're being recorded. The focus is mostly on lexical variation - dialect words - and gives a good run through of some weird and wonderful local phrases, but Stuart Jeffries also provides a bigger picture with a few interesting snippets from Susie Dent and Jonnie Robinson. The etymology of some of these dialect terms is explained too:

"Some words just seem born for their task," says Dent, "and the echoic blaefummery is one of them. It is an extension of blaflum (or bleflum/blaeflum), meaning a deception, a hoax, nonsense, or illusion; as a verb it means to cajole or impose upon. There seems to be no indisputable origin: blae means blue or livid - in colour, that is - but perhaps one can see some relation to flummery, flattery, empty talk or humbug, and which word has the charm of having started off its life meaning food, whether made of oatmeal or flour, milk and eggs."

ENGA1 Language Development data response

Here's the first Haribo prize competition for AS students. It's based on the 2a question you get for Language Development, so all you need to do is pick out 5 linguistic features from the data below and label them accurately, putting your answer as a comment to this post. For example, if you think "I falled over" is an example of overextension, you would write "1. I falled over = overextension".

Obviously, the more alert among you would realise that's not the right answer. That's because I'm not giving you the answers for nothing and I'm not parting with my Haribo that easily. Oh no. And remember, what you're looking for should be phonological, lexical, semantic, grammatical and pragmatic features, as well as how the interaction does or doesn't illustrate particular theories at work, or a child being at a particular stage or demonstrating a particular function of language. It's also worth thinking not just about what the child says but how the child and parent interact. But that's enough bold font...

So, to win the Haribo pick out your five features and add them as comments. The best 2 responses by next Friday lunchtime will win this coveted prize.

Data:
Girl (age 4,4) in conversation with Dad (age 39..I mean 21)

Girl: Did you eat all your dinner up at work?
Dad: Yes, I did
G: What did you hab?
D: Err, I had a cheese and tomato roll
G: I said to mummy are you gonna hab your dinner at office at work and her said yes
D: What did you do at nursery?
G: I did find the Dora book and I hided it under the table. Daddy, who done dis card? Did you draw it? Look what I drawed. I writed this well didn't I?
D: Yes, you wrote that really well
G: I wrote it well, yes.

OK, ready steady Haribooooooooooooo!!!!!

Apostrophe bullies

This is probably very old, but if you look at this link from You Tube you'll find a heartfelt attack on Lynne Truss and her prescriptivism from comedian Marcus Brigstocke.

Net slang

Confused by the nerdy slang your geeky friends use? Can't understand what your teacher is on about when he mumbles about his Level 58 Captain of Gondor pwning the creeps in the Etten raids? Just want to know more words? Then go to this site which has lots of help about such stuff. BRB LOL.

ENA6 - Investigating Use of Language in Online Communication

Here's this week's Haribo competition, which is based on an ENA6 1b question. The best 2 answers to this by next Thursday get the prizes.

Explain the methodology you would use for investigating how language is used in different forms of computer-mediated communication (email, texting, MSN, social networking sites etc.)

Question 1b requires a 5 point approach. You have to have some sort of aim, a method of collecting data, a framework to analyse that data, an awareness of extra linguistic variables and issues of ethics and validity, and an idea of what you will find and what it means. There is more detail on this available on the AQA site here (aimed at teachers but useful for students if you know what you're doing).

Remember to follow the 5 point plan as laid out below:

• AIM/ANGLE
• METHOD of DATA COLLECTION
• FRAMEWORK for ANALYSING YOUR DATA
• CONSIDERATION of EXTRA LINGUISTIC VARIABLES/ VALIDITY/ ETHICS
• WHAT YOU EXPECT to FIND

On your marks...get set...Haribooooooooooooooooo

KMT @ TXTspk*

A report in today's Sun and a longer one in The Scotsman carry findings from a survey by a company which claims that while 76% of us admit to using "text slang" in our SMS messages, 71% dislike receiving it and would prefer a "properly written" message. Like any survey carried out by a company that's promoting its own services (in this case the "text question and answer service AQA 63336" - no relation to our exam board, I hope) the survey should probably be treated with caution, but in the Scotsman they quote a proper linguist, Dr Christian Kay from Glasgow University who has a look at the limitations of texting:

"I think that when texting first appeared young people took it as a new way of conversing which could exclude people who weren't in on the scene," Prof Kay said.

"At the time this was quite interesting, because we were being told that the written language was going to disappear.

"But after an initial burst of enthusiasm we are at the stage where texting either has to develop or fade away."

She added: "It has reduced everything to a very basic language, which doesn't leave room to convey the nuance of a word.

"In many ways it has run out of interesting things to say, which limits interpretation, which leads to misunderstandings," Prof Kay said.

Hmm, I'm not so sure. I doubt that text abbreviations originally sprung up as a means of keeping others out - after all, what goes on between two phones is relatively private - but rather as a means of saving time and money. Yes, texting can be a crude and unsubtle form of communication open to misinterpretation as most distant modes are, but its got a kind of dialogic structure to it that allows a texter to reply and seek further clarification if the first message doesn't make sense.

And of course, given that the company advertising the survey is in the business of making money from sending answers to a range of questions from the general public, they don't have a personal relationship with the other texter, or any knowledge of what that person's text idiolect is like, so will probably use a more standard form.

So is texting dying out and are we getting sick of its abbreviations? Probably not. The numbers speak for themselves: we sent a total of 78.9 billion texts last year, 216 million a day, according to the Mobile Data Association.

* KMT = Kiss/ing My Teeth (Caribbean expression of distaste/ disapproval)
KMFT = Kiss/ing My F***ing Teeth
KMBCT = Kiss/ing My Bloodclart Teeth (Caribbean expression of extreme distaste/ disapproval)

ENA6 question 1a - technology and language change

Here's the new Haribo prize question, based on a 1a ENA6 question focused on technology and language change.

Comment linguistically on three processes used to create or write the following examples of computer-mediated communication:

FYI (For your information)
Dat (That)
i dont no what yr doin (I don’t know what you’re doing)
cya (See you - signing off at end of online chat)
L8er (Later - signing off at end of email message)

Remember, you just need to accurately identify and label 3 processes going on with these words or how they've been written/typed. The best 2 answers get that lovely Haribo.