Start thinking (and reading) like a language student
To do well on the course you will need to start thinking about language in a different way to how you've done in your studies so far.
Marcello Giovanelli's article "Becoming an A Level Language Student - a Quick Guide" in emagazine 65, September 2014 gives you some really helpful pointers about this, as does the article by Billy Clark and Graeme Trousdale in emagazine 51, February 2011, "Looking for Clues - How to be a Language Detective".
Your English department *should* have a subscription to the English and Media Centre's emagazine as it's full of really excellent articles (OK, I'm biased as I now work at the EMC, but I recommended it well before I got the new job!). Just ask your English teacher for the log-in details.
Along with emagazine, Babel from the University of Huddersfield is a very useful publication about English Language and Linguistics an aimed at keen students. While Huddersfield Town's stay in the premiership might be mercifully short-lived, this magazine deserves a longer stay at the top.
Choose a few key books to read as the course goes on
There are two text books to accompany the course - this one and this one - and they are good for mapping out lots of the key areas and providing you with a range of texts, examples of analysis, theories and research studies - but there are also some really good books that will offer you more detail on key areas.
My top tips are:
- Deborah Cameron, The Myth of Mars and Venus - a brilliant, dry take on how women and men use language and the myths around it.
- Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars - a readable and comprehensive overview of some of the ways in which English has been debated about and argued over ever since it came to be.
- Jean Aitchison, Language Change: Progress or Decay? - excellent for how language changes and what people think about it. Essential reading for Paper 2.
- Annabelle Mooney and Betsy Evans, Language, Society and Power (4th edition) - almost as useful as a 3rd textbook for this course.
- English & Media Centre, Language: a Student Handbook of Key Topics and Theories (aka the little red book) - put together for you to offer new angles and key ideas for most of the main areas you cover. Buy it or my puppies starve.
- Susie Dent, Modern Tribes - a very accessible and readable book with lots of great examples for work you will do on social groups.Worth dipping in and out of.
- Julie Coleman, The Life of Slang - while the slang material is really good in its own right, the discussion of how new language gets generated, how it spreads and why it gets picked up (or not) is very insightful.
Listen to language
Obviously, it's important to listen to your teachers, your fellow students and any ace linguists who you go to see at excellent conferences, but you can listen and learn in other ways too. There are some really good radio programmes and podcasts about language, including these:
Michael Rosen's Word of Mouth
Talk the Talk
The Vocal Fries
Lexicon Valley
Stay tuned in to media stories about language
Language is being discussed all around us every day. Language is central to so many things that we do and central to how we view others and perform our own identities that it's hardly surprising we talk about it all the time. Most stories about language in the news - whether it's accent discrimination, new words entering the dictionary, concerns about disappearing local words or claims about how women and men use language - are fair game for discussion on this course and could end up as future topics for exam papers or your own NEA projects.
You can keep up to date with news stories by following @EngLangBlog but there are loads of others too and I'll tweet a few suggestions next week.
Next time, I'll post a few more suggestions about work you can do as an English Language student to help you do well and enjoy the course.
