When autocorrect attacks

The AS English Language course involves a pretty steep learning curve for many students coming from GCSE, what with its terminology, its theories, its terminology and its... err...terminology. But, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and no, it's not Noam Chomsky dancing with a glo-stick; we'll soon be looking at technology and communication and the ways in which technology offers us scope to communicate in new ways (its affordances) against the limitations that can sometimes be caused by the devices we use and the kittens - sorry, keyboards - we type on (i.e. the constraints of technology).

So, just for a taster of what can happen when technology constrains us more than usual, have a look at this link showing what can happen when autocorrect attacks.

"Prejudice about accents is alive and well."

ITV's Tonight programme last night (available on ITV player) featured some good coverage of attitudes to different accents, including a survey by ComRes into how people rate certain regional varieties. The overall findings suggest that many people still feel that their accent pigeonholes them socially and that prejudice is often rife among some employers towards people with certain accents. As the programme blurb states:

...even in modern Britain, where equality is the new God, prejudice about accents is alive and well. And we often found it thriving most - along the north-south, “us and them” fault-lines of old.
Our research not only shows that more than a quarter of Britons (28%) feel they have been discriminated against because of their regional accent but also, according to another batch of research by the law firm Peninsular, that 80% of employers admit to making discriminating decisions based on regional accents.

As part of ENGA3 we've been looking at language variation and attitudes towards accents and dialects, and many of us will have been running through last summer's assignment on Victoria Coren's take on  George Osborne's downwards convergence towards Morrisons workers,  so this programme is well-timed from that point of view. It also offers plenty of extra ammunition for debate and discussion in the form of the survey results which you can find here on the ITV Tonight website.

Swears wot scare

If you like swearing - and frankly, who doesn't like to have a little swear when George Osborne appears on TV, a puppy does a poo on your favourite shoes, or a cold caller asks you about your pension plans while you're listening to Leeds United concede a 96th minute goal against an inferior team - then have a listen to Stephen Fry's Radio 4 show, Fry's English Delight.

This week he's been exploring the history of the multi-faceted F-word. It's not just a rude word; it's a flexible friend, functioning as a verb, a noun, an adverb and probably every other word class too, in some way or another. But you'll have to get an F-ing move on, because it's only on i-Player for a few more days.

"Try being Jewish at a Chelsea match"

Following last year's heated debate about the use of the terms "yids" and "yid army" to describe Tottenham Hotspur's fans, the flames have been fanned further by interventions from both sides.

As The Guardian reports, both the Football Association and David Cameron have waded in, threatening to fine and ban fans on one hand, or to forgive them on the other. David Baddiel (who is Jewish) has also joined in with a provocative and interesting article in The Guardian and a radio discussion with David Aaronovitch (also Jewish) about whether "yid" is a race-hate term or a proud badge of solidarity among Jewish Tottenham fans and their fellow supporters (on this link from about 33 minutes in).

One of Baddiel's key points is that if you're Jewish and have suffered the abuse directed at Jews by some of the minority of racist scumbags from Chelsea, Arsenal and West Ham, you're unlikely to view "yid" as a friendly term, however it appears to be used by Tottenham fans, who are historically seen as a club with a strong Jewish following.

As we discussed back in November 2012, this is a language topic that crops up as part of ENGA3 and could well form a good topic for the Language Intervention part of the ENGA4 coursework. Have a look back at the longer post here to see where it all fits in.

Taking selfies while twerking off the food baby

It's new words time for Oxford Dictionaries Online and that means lots of media coverage for the new(ish) words that have been added to the dictionary. This is one of those areas of language change that often gets a good press (unlike other changes which tend to cause snorts of derision the press).

Here, Oxford Dictionaries Blog explain some of their new words, while The Guardian picks a few of them up in this piece and The Daily Telegraph has a look too. Elsewhere, twerking - recently popularised by Miley Cyrus, but disputed by several commentators - gets a more in depth look. My personal favourite so far (probably because I have developed a summer one of these) is food baby, which is defined as "a protruding stomach caused by eating a large quantity of food and supposedly resembling that of a woman in the early stages of pregnancy". Excuse me while I go and twerk it off.

Accents and dialects

Welcome back to blog followers from last year and hi to new people starting the course this year. I've tried to keep regular tweets going from the @EngLangBlog account over the summer holiday in place of blog posts and I've rounded up a few of the most interesting ones about accent and dialect here for you.

These should be particularly helpful if you're doing ENGA3 this year, especially those Colchester 6th Form College students doing the summer assignment in the packs from last term.

Lucy Mangan on accent adaptation and prejudice

A guide to Nottingham accent and dialect

A piece on the changing nature of the Leicester varieteh

Public service announcements

Colleagues at two universities have asked this blog to publicise a couple of things that might either be of interest to you, or that they need help with.

The first is a job opportunity at UCL, which involves working on the new Primary English part of the Englicious project. You can find more info on it here.

The second is from Sue Fox and Jenny Cheshire at QMUL. They would like feedback from students and teachers who have used their English Language Teaching Resources and Linguistics Research Digest and just need a few quick responses to this survey.

ENGA3 June 2013 collected revision tips

With the exam coming up on Monday, I've collected together a few of the revision tips from 2012, 2011 and 2010 here. Hopefully, they'll help you target your last day or two of revision:

Tips from 2011
Revision tips from 2012 (BTW World Englishes has cropped up now as a discourses question in Jan 2013)
General ENGA3 exam advice from 2012

I'll add a few more bits and pieces on Sunday, if I get a chance.

Dealing with AO2 on ENGA3

ENGA3 is assessed using three AOs - 1,2 & 3 - but AO2 is the chunkiest of these on this paper, accounting for 40 of the 90 marks available.

While you should still be using the close textual analysis skills you've been learning throughout the course (i.e. the linguistic labelling with clear examples for AO1 and the discussion of meanings, effects and representations created for AO3), it does mean that you need to think carefully about addressing the wider issues of change, variation and discourses that usually appear as part of the 2nd bullet point in each question.

What exactly is AO2, though? The AQA spec says "AO2: demonstrate critical understanding of a range of concepts and issues related to the construction and analysis of meanings in spoken and written language". I've generally taken the first part of this as the most important, namely the concepts and issues part.

In the top band for AO2, you can see what they're after each year from the non-italicised descriptors (i.e. the bits that remain the same each year, whatever the question set):

So, from the top 4 descriptors you can see that it's mostly about theories, research and ideas about language. It should also be clear from this that to hit the very top of the mark scheme, you need to do more than just regurgitate all the ideas you've learnt and revised.

To use a tortuous analogy from the world of rubbish, you need to do more than just wheel out your wheelie-bin of knowledge and dump it across the pavement for the examiner to sift through. You've got to be a bit more like the person who sifts through their recycling and splits it into various types - cardboard, paper, tin cans, bottles -  working out where things go before you put it all out for collection.

(Of course, this analogy breaks down the minute the council rubbish truck (aka the AQA examiner) comes along and just tips it all into one big pile before shipping it off to Albania to be dumped as landfill. But why let truth get in the way of a tedious attempt to make exam revision entertaining?)

So, evaluation of knowledge is critical:

• weigh up ideas and look for competing explanations (e.g. reasons for people using non-standard English)
• discuss contrasting models (Charles Hockett's bull's eye theory or Paul Postal's "non-functional stylistic change" versus Jean Aitchison's functional approach, as outlined in Chapter 8 of her Language Change: Progress or Decay*)
• think about alternative explanations for the same linguistic features (Robin Lakoff argued that women use more tag questions because they're insecure; Janet Holmes found that women use more tags but only of a certain type, and that male tags tend to be the ones seeking reassurance)
• be prepared to challenge ideas within the texts you are given in the exam (especially true in Section B where the texts are non-specialist and often caricature, or present simplistic versions of, linguistic arguments)

We'll come back to ENGA3 again before Monday's exam, but in the meantime it's probably a good idea to chase up a few references to various theories about language change (such as those described and evaluated in Aitchison's book) and variation.

*thanks to Sherif for raising the issue of AO2 evaluation and these ideas

Language Discourses revision June 2013

For those of you revising for the ENGA3 exam next Monday, there have been some really good recent examples of articles that focus on attitudes to language use and abuse. A few of these have featured on the @EngLangBlog twitter feed, so thanks to the various teachers and students who alerted me to them.

Last year's ENGA3 paper featured a Section B question all about the Queen's English Society and their prescriptivist views about language. Some really on-the-ball students - readers of this blog, no doubt ;-) - managed to mention the demise of the QES as reported here in their answers to the June exam: exactly the kind of contemporary reference that always impresses examiners.

The recent articles that you might like to have a look at all take a look at how people feel about the ways in which language changes.

In this one, Steven Poole looks at how the internet has both spawned linguistic development and, for some at least, linguistic abominations such as LOL and bad spelling.

In this one, Simon Horobin, an English Professor at Oxford University, stirs up the readers of The Daily Telegraph into splenetic projectile-vomiting by telling an audience at the Hay-on-Wye Festival to chillax and STFU about apostrophes and spelling errors.

In this one, Michael Rundell of MacMillan Dictionaries has a dig at those who tell us we should strictly adhere to grammar "rules" just because they say so.

All of them provide plenty of food for thought and ammunition for the exam.

Gender revision

If you're revising ENGA3 Gender and Language Variation (like the students at the Convent of Jesus and Mary Language College in Harlesdon - hello!) then this interview with Deborah Cameron from Woman's Hour might come in handy.

Cameron is one of the key thinkers in this field and her Myth of Mars and Venus is an excellent book to study before the exam.

A quick look at other posts about her would also be handy and you can find a load of them here.

Good luck for ENGA1 tomorrow.

Good luck, everyone.

The language of the workhouse

Val Gillies has written a great piece on the revival of a "Victorian lexicon" to describe class in the UK which echoes and magnifies some of the points brought up in this blog post from January about the polarised discourses surrounding people in work and out of work.

If you're looking for ENGA3 topics related to language and representation (for PC discourses) or are thinking ahead to ENGA2 topics for next year's coursework, it makes a good, if deeply depressing, read.

Language Development essay advice

You can find plenty of advice for the data question on ENGA1 in previous posts on this blog (like this and this), but if you want help on the essay, here goes...

With my examiner hat on (it's a bit like a wizard's hat, but less fashionable), I'd say that some of the things that examiners really want to see are as follows:

• People who answer the question . This may seem blindingly obvious, but lots of students seem to write very generic answers which don't really address the question that's been set. So, avoid this by actually addressing and deconstructing the question right from the start. By this, I mean try to define what you think the question is really asking about and how you are going to deal with it. So, if the question says "Discuss the ways in which children develop their grammatical skills" you need to define what's meant by "grammatical skills" (i.e. syntax and morphology). 
• Examples.  Give examples. It's all very well knowing plenty of the bigger picture, but you also need to bring in examples of what children (and sometimes adults) actually say. Have examples of your own ready. Failing that, use some from the data question.
• Evaluation. Many questions are phrased with "How far..." or "To what extent...", so you should be able to see that it's not just a question of raising a flag for Chomsky, Piaget or Skinner, but to really evaluate how different theories might explain how children acquire language. And remember, just because conditioning seems to work in a way with politeness features, doesn't mean it works for everything else. Think about different elements of language and how - for example - social interaction theories are very good at explaining children's pragmatic development, but pretty poor at explaining the overgeneralisation of grammar rules.
• A clear structure. You've got to write clearly and offer a logical and developed argument. Think through your answer, use a plan and paragraph it!

Do I not like 'like'

There's a pretty sketchy and rather vague piece from yesterday's Mail on Sunday here which uses work on a corpus of contemporary English to make some rather sweeping claims about declining standards of "correct grammar". Needless to say, it's full of prescriptivist claptrap.

One of their particular bugbears is the apparently increased appearance of "like" in colloquial talk. Fair enough, they might not (like) like, it, but to claim that "The average English child is likely to say the word 'like' five times as often as his or her grandparents..." is a bit silly. The word's use may well have increased over time - no one would deny the growth of like as a filler - but that's not the only use we put it to. As, the excellent Linguistics Research Digest at QMUL points out, many linguists have started looking at how like has developed as a quotative (as can be seen in the excellent Zack bike transcript on their site) and even as what are called "it's like enactments". So, not just a word we use to fill a gap, but a word that's like lots of others, doing, like, lots of different jobs and not getting much, like, love.

Sadly, for the Mail, they also seem a bit confused about what grammar actually is. Is the pronunciation of 'going to' as 'gonna' really grammar? And, if they are so upset about declining standards, why write a sentence using just an adverbial clause of time ("While Janet Street-Porter and footballer David Beckham are viewed as more 'demotic'."). Tut tut.

But even worse than this is the response from the readers of this paper. In a bid to obtain Mick from Scunthorpe's crown as King of Unintentional Irony for his mighty "keep talking like that and see were it get`s you, muppets no wonder some kids are as thick as to short planks" comment about an article on youth slang in The Sun, a guy called "Big Kev" gets very angry about Jamaican accents. While showing a disdain for the accurate use of his own language (sic):

The fake 'Jamaican' accent seems to be norm amongst comprehensive educated children in London. The cockney accent may of had it's day.
- Big Kev , New Addington, 18/5/2013 13:59

Arsetrumpets

It's unlikely that swearing will turn up as a topic on ENGA3, but it's an interesting area of language change to have a look at, all the same. The Boston Globe features a piece on the history of swearing here, while Four Thought also covered the same topic on Radio 4 this week.

Language Development data revision 1

Question 2 on the ENGA1 paper is your 10 mark data question, so here's an example with some extracts taken from Jean Aitchison's The Articulate Mammal.

Your job is to comment linguistically on 5 features of the child language below. All we need is an example and an accurate description (with a linguistic label) of what you've identified. If you add answers as comments, I'll give you a mark out of 10. If you're one of my students, the best answer will win an exciting prize from the Happy World of Haribo.

Child Aged 2
I singing
Blue shoes
He is asleep
He is a doctor

Child Aged 3
He wants an apple
I helped mummy
I am singing
He's a doctor
I'm singing

Poetic hustla upsets bearded prescriptivist

...because American signs are better than foreign ones

This link came from @aboutworldlangs and is good for some ENGA3 analysis. It's full of the usual moans and groans about language changing for the worse and uncultured morons ruining English, so should provide fertile ground for a bit of discourse analysis.

Which themes can you pick up from this? I can see a bit of damp spoon, a touch of crumbling castle, a whole heap of declinism and even a subtle waft of infectious disease.

ENGA3 topics so far

Thanks to Ellie, we now have a complete list of all the topics set for Sections A and B on ENGA3.

Watching badgers

The BBC site has a nice list of 'naughty' euphemisms today. Among them are several wittily ambiguous ways of describing drunkenness or extramarital trouser-dropping, including "Watching badgers" and "Hiking the Appalachian Trail".

They make a lot more sense if you have a look here. But no entry for "taking the dog for a walk" (and subsequent euphemism of "dogging") which Essex is so famous for?