Paper 2 Question 3 – Slaying the Beast

This guest blog is by Anna Browning (on Twitter as @wordphile) who is a teacher in the East Midlands. She says, 'I've been teaching for over 25 years and have learned so much from colleagues over the years; now it's a genuine pleasure to help others where I can'. Thanks for a great post.

Of all the questions on the AQA A Level Language Papers, this is the one that my students need the most help with. It is not that that skills are different, or that the texts are difficult – it is that there are so many balls to keep in the air at once. The examiner’s report (which I advise you to read) makes it clear that this is the question that candidates find most challenging.

What I have outlined here is a way to teach students. It is like a slow “guided reading” process that teaches students to see what is significant and interesting in the data.

1. Slow them down – make your students take the time to read.

Observing my students when faced with an article has taught me that they want to start annotating straight away. Out come the highlighters and the coloured pens and away they go. I understand – they see “just reading” as wasting time and making a mark on a piece of paper is tangible evidence that they are making progress with the task. The trouble is, they are frequently highlighting features without having understood the articles properly. Tell them to put down the pens and just read. Then write down three things about each source:  

What is it? Who wrote it? Why was it written? 

Get them to write these questions in large letters somewhere prominent and to keep them front and centre as they look at the texts.

Top tip – if there is a shorter article, look at it first and compare the longer one to it rather than the other way around. Simply, the shorter article will have fewer things to spot that the longer one.

2. Place the texts in a wider discourse.

Encourage your students to be precise about this. The articles will be about language change or language varieties and they will have encountered the debates and discourses in lessons and in their wider reading. You might have two articles about the way language change is perceived as decay, the apparent loss of accents and dialects over time, or the way women’s use of vocal fry and uptalk is seen as disempowering. Make this the first sentence of the answer and you are on to a winner from the start. 

Be careful though, of having a reductive list of discourses. It is important to write about what IS there, not what we might LIKE to be there. 

3. Find links and patterns.

On the paper, the two text are printed so that they can be placed side by side. This is so that from the very start, students can do just that and see them as a data set. Now to ask the next question – what else links these two sources that might be relevant?  Do they use the same language? Are the writers, the contexts, or the attitudes similar? Are there any patterns across the two texts in the language or structures that are immediately obvious? 

In my classroom we like to look for figurative language, rhetorical devices and code-switching on a first pass. 

4. Compare the way the writers represent themselves.

Start with the by-line. In an opinionated editorial (op. ed.) the writer is usually an “expert voice” and the views are the writer’s own. A journalist will often distance themselves somewhat from the opinions by using quotation or paraphrasing an authority on the subject. However, there is no such thing as an unbiased writer. It is often interesting to compare the ways that writers shape and frame arguments by selection.

5. Analyse the representation of ideas and opinions. 

Analyse the different ways that writers represent the opinions of others. It can be helpful to look at how experts are described – are they “linguists” or “language boffins” and what difference does it make? What assumptions are made about the knowledge and interests of the reader? What is simplified, glossed or exemplified? What use is made of metaphor or cultural references? Are the ideas being presented new or established? What sorts of sentences are being used – simple or complex? Declarative? Is the tone personal or impersonal? Is the register formal or informal…

Top tip – teach them to look at co-text as well as context. If you pick out a word or short phrase, then look at what comes right before and right after it and how that changes things. 

6. Evaluate how the reader is positioned.

How have the two writers shaped their presentations of the issue for the audience?  Remind your students that most people do not choose their reading material because it challenges their ideas and opinions – quite the opposite. I read the newspaper that most accords with my world view. Persuasive speeches do not change people’s minds – whatever we tell students at GCSE - they reinforce beliefs. And advertisements do not make you want to buy aftershave – they suggest that THIS aftershave might the one for people like you… 

In my classroom, our current favourite device is the conditional sentence. 

“If you don’t like uptalk, then you are going to hate vocal fry.”  

See? There is not much room for the reader to LIKE uptalk in that sentence – it assumes that the readers do not like uptalk and are quite ready to dislike whatever new vocal tic they are exposed to. 

7. Finally, make a choice about what to write about.

If your students have spent the best part of a double lesson looking at the texts in depth, then they have far too much to say. 

Now comes the distillation process – what is most significant and interesting about the way these two writers have engaged with this linguistic topic and shaped their texts for their audiences?

 

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

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

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

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

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

Evaluate the idea that language is decaying slowly.

Keeping evaluation at the forefront of all ideas

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

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

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

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

Students are likely to:

• conceptualise nature and causes of language change as a process

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

• evaluate and challenge descriptivist stances

• evaluate and challenge prescriptivist and decay views 

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

The missing bits: linguistic register

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

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

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

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

Errrrr…

A happy marriage

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

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

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

AO1

AO2

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

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

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

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

Guiding the reader: essays for Paper 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example 1 

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

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

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

Example 2 

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

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

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

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

On the other hand, it is important to consider… 

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

Example 3 

These are simple but effective examples from two different essays. 

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

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

One variety of language that can be explored is… 

However, a factor that needs to be considered is… 

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

Example 4 

These are taken from two separate answers. 

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

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

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

Example 5 

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

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

Example 6 

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

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

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

Intersections and explorations

One of the key messages from the feedback on Language Change and Diversity on Paper 2 over the last few years has been that students who understand the interconnected nature of the language topics* often have a better chance of hitting the higher levels of the AO2 mark scheme than those who see them in separate boxes. And this makes a lot of sense when you look at the kinds of questions being set and - more broadly - the nature of language and its users.

To paraphrase and oversimplify decades of sociolinguistic thinking, the first wave of work in the 60s and 70s tended to look at the language associated with and used by different groups in society, the second wave looked at social networks and how connections and associations between people and groups impacted upon language use, before the third wave came along and looked at how language is used by people to perform different aspects of their identities by drawing on linguistic repertoires and pools of language features. You'll find many better worded and more developed explanations of these trends in sociolinguistics text books, but as a general picture of where thinking has been going, it's a start. 

What this feeds into for Paper 2 is that if you view language use in a kind of essentialist way (ie that working class people use x kind of language and middle class people use y kind of language because of the social classes they belong to) you're probably not going to appreciate the more complex nature of our identities as language users. After all, we are all more than just products of our environment and the categories we can be placed into. Aspects of our identities - gender, ethnicity, occupational and social groups, for example - all have an impact on how we use language and we perform these aspects of our identity in different ways depending on who's around us and what we want to achieve. I probably didn't think a great deal about 'performing my whiteness' when I was teaching in a largely white college, but I thought about it more - and about my students' performances of their own ethnicities in that college and later on, elsewhere - when I worked in a largely African-Caribbean college. Sometimes, we start to think about these things and realise that aspects of language we had perhaps taken for granted are part of a much bigger and more complex picture.

It's also why a lot of us teaching the course keep reminding students that while the topics* for Paper 2 - occupation, gender, world Englishes, region etc - have their own knowledge base and bodies of research, there are some key strands that link them all together. It's this overlap or intersection of different aspects of language that can be really interesting and the exploration of these overlaps can lead us into some of the higher reaches of the mark scheme when it comes to assessing work.

Let's take a couple of recent programmes about language as cases in point. Radio 4's Woman's Hour recently aired a segment about accents. You can find it here: From about 33 minutes in

In this programme, the contributors talked about how their accents had been commented upon, criticised, belittled and mocked by others. While it was sad to hear this and the emotional and professional impact it had had on these women, it wasn't new: we hear about this all the time and accent bias is something you're bound to look at on the course at some point. Where it became more interesting is where the prejudice about accent (usually - but not exclusively - seen as a feature of regional variation) started to intersect with issues such as class and gender. Were women particularly discriminated against because of their accents? There certainly seemed to be an aspect of all of this behaviour that suggested that women's voices were fair game for criticism in a way that men's voices often aren't. 

And what about social class? Is it worse for a woman to sound working class than a man? And what about working class women in certain occupations such as teaching and lecturing? This is where an understanding of wider ideas such as attitudes to standard and non-standard English, different attitudes to linguistic variants (how someone might say bottle, grass, or use different words for greetings - hi, hey, whassup, alright) across the world and a grasp of the shared patterns across different topics really comes into play.

A second programme on Radio 4, called Code-switching, also illustrates some of this. While code-switching and style-shifting are fairly common areas to study on the course, the different angles in this programme are particularly fascinating. The host, Lucrece Grehoua takes us through some of the ways in which the Black people she interviews view their use of language in relation to predominantly white and middle class workplaces, how they feel about adapting their language and the different tensions between between ethnicity, class, occupation and gender. For a lot of people of all ethnic and social backgrounds, converging and diverging are just things we do all the time, so it's really interesting to hear people dissecting their own language use in such fine detail and at such a meta-level.

Again, this is the kind of discussion that helps to illuminate a number of different areas of language study and allows you to see how so many of them link up. Have a listen and see what you make of it.

Get back to work, you lazy slackers.

With the new academic year starting, I thought it might be a good idea to post a few short blogs. Today, I've been thinking about work and the Paper 2 Language and Occupation topic*. 

The lockdown has led to a lot of talk about how we work, what work means to us, how it oils the wheels of the economy and how it generates new language. So, while we've had lots of new expressions emerge from how many of us have had to change our working practices - WFH (Working From Home), Zooming (using the Zoom app to hold meetings), Zoombombing (like photobombing but with other people's Zoom meetings) and Toxic Productivity (the pressure to work at full tilt throughout the lockdown) - we've also seen a lot of language used to discuss and represent work. 

As you probably already know, all the topics* for Paper 2 (gender, social groups, ethnicity, region etc) can be as much about how language is used to represent different groups as it can be about how people use language. So, for example, when looking at language and gender, you might look at supposed communication differences between the sexes but also look at how language constructs ideas of masculinity and femininity; for language and social class, you might focus on sociolect and education, but also how language represents different social groups through terms like chav, posh, townie or pleb.  

Up until now, I'd found language and occupation a slightly trickier proposition for a representation focus than many of the others. There's always been discussion of business jargon and arguments about plain English in the workplace, and they've been set before as part of the AS exams already, but that's about all I could come up with. 

What's been interesting in recent months is how work, as an idea, has been discussed and represented. One good source for material is in the media coverage of the government's messaging about safety in the workplace (and of course, for teachers, catering staff, classroom assistants, students and admin staff, schools and colleges are among these places of work) and how that messaging has been pitched to represent work in different ways. Of course, a major part of this messaging has been about how safe it is (supposedly) to return to work, so there has been a lot of reassuring language used, but coupled with that has been a creeping implication that if we don't get back to the office soon, sandwich retailers and coffee shops will go bust, the economy will collapse and will it all be our fault. As the reassuring messaging about schools, offices, public transport and bowling alleys (?) is rolled out, other messages are fed to us too.

In many ways this is indicative of how I think a lot of government policy during the pandemic seems to have operated: first an idea is pitched to a sympathetic media outlet who run it and see what the reaction is; then the proposed policy is re-calibrated or pulled, depending on how it has been received. 

Try this tweet from The Sun, for example: 

Elsewhere, the return to work was described in various terms in other media outlets. Try a few of these for size...

• ...the Government tries to entice people out of their lockdown habits and reboot the economy (the Daily Express)
• "I think there's a limit, just in human terms, to remote working. And there are things where you just need to spark off each other and get together in order to make progress." (Government Minister Grant Shapps, quoted in the Daily Express)
• ‘The UK’s offices are vital drivers of our economy,’ says Dame Carolyn, who speaks for almost 200,000 firms. ‘They support thousands of local firms, from dry cleaners to sandwich bars. They help train and develop young people. And they foster better work and productivity for many kinds of business. (Daily Mail)
• The UK economy could lose almost half a trillion pounds of output if workers fail to return to their offices, a study estimates. (Douglas McWilliams, a former chief economic adviser to the Confederation of British Industry as reported in The Guardian) 
• 'Go back to work or risk losing your job': Major drive launched to get people returning to the office. Ministers warn that continuing to work from home could make staff ‘vulnerable’ to being sacked (Daily Telegraph)
• Brits must return to offices to stop city centres becoming 'ghost towns', CBI boss warns (Evening Standard)

What's interesting about these from a language analysis point of view is that we can see a mixture of positive representation of the office environment and thinly-veiled threats that not returning to work might result in being sacked. If you were pulling a few of these extracts apart, you might think about some of the following:

• verb choices - entice, spark, foster - offering the language of encouragement and positivity linked to the office
• semantic fields of financial cost
• home working being represented as having 'limits' and 'risks'
• modality doing a quite a lot of work about what might happen: could lose, could make staff vulnerable, must return

There are all sorts of good reasons why people might want or need to return to the workplace - doing things you can't do from home, mental health, the social side of the workplace, pinching other people's mugs and biscuits, the injection of money into the office economy etc - but I think we need to look carefully at the ways in which all this is framed and represented to us, and some focused language analysis gives us the chance to unpack some of the different agendas at work. Along with this, it's also very helpful for paper 2 if you want to think a bit more about how language represents occupation and its changing nature as a result of the pandemic. Maybe you could start to find your own examples to look at as part of a mini-study of the area, or even pick it up as part of a language investigation. It's unlikely that the data will dry up any time soon - furloughing looks like it will come to an end in October and different workplaces will be featured in various government campaigns and media onslaughts - so there will be a lot to look at and a number of different viewpoints to consider.

(*Topics are not really the preferred term here as they are all linked and related, but we often teach them as topics before making the bigger connections.)

Paper 2 Section B resources

Other A Level English Language teachers have been really generous with their help at this weird and unsettling time, so thanks to Jacky Glancey at Macmillan Academy for sharing her revision material for Paper 2 Section B.

The activities here are designed for Question 3 and help get you thinking about the kind of analysis that's needed when you're addressing texts about language issues. It then broadens out to focus on the wider discourses and issues connected to the analysis. There are loads of helpful ideas in here, so it should be helpful not just for Paper 2 but also for helping develop analytical approaches on NEA if that's what you're working on.

The activities here are designed for Question 4 and are designed to address the AO2 side of the task, by offering ideas about identity and language that can be discussed and debated.

Could you recognise an East Midlands accent?

In this guest post, Natalie Braber (@NatalieBraber) takes a look at a variety of English that sits somewhere in the middle of the North/South divide and a little to the east of its better known Brummie cousin. Natalie is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University and an expert on the accents and dialects of the East Midlands.

When we think about accents in the UK, there are some which we all think of straight away, for example, Scottish and Irish but also more local places such as Newcastle, London or Liverpool. But not all varieties have the same media exposure and this can make them harder to recognise, even for people who live there.

Perceptual dialectology - perceptions of local accents and dialects

My research examines language variation in the East Midlands which I think is a really interesting area of study. When linguists (and other people too!) think about the way people speak in the UK, they often think about the North/South divide and how that is reflected in language. For example, do you pronounce ‘bath’ with a long or short /a/? And do you pronounce ‘up’ as /ʌp/ or /ʊp/? But this divide is not straightforward – how do areas like the East Midlands fit into this picture? Although the East Midlands is the geographical centre of England, it certainly isn’t perceived as being a central part of England. It has been referred to as ‘neither here nor there’ and as a ‘no-man’s land’. Even the use of the term ‘East Midlands’ can be problematic – different researchers use terms such as ‘south Midlands’, 'North-west Midlands’, ‘Central Midlands’, ‘East-Central Midlands’ or just ‘Midlands’ but without explaining exactly what areas they are discussing.

Until I started work on them over the last few years, there hadn’t been a regional survey of the region since the Survey of English Dialects in the 1950s. However, I think these linguistic varieties are interesting. From its geographical position in England, we can see that these varieties share features with ‘northern’ speakers but there are also some features which are more typically found in ‘southern’ varieties. I wanted to find out more about what young people thought about language variation in the UK and whether they could recognise local accents. So I invited secondary schools from across the East Midlands to take part in my study. I asked permission to attend an hour-long class with students in year 13 in order to engage with their opinions on language variation in the UK and listen to some recorded voices to try to place particular accents.

In all, 327 students were involved in this study (of which 191 in Nottinghamshire, 85 in Derbyshire and 51 in Leicestershire). The first task was to ask these students about the North/South divide in the UK – where they thought it was and whether they felt they belonged to either region. Students used a map of the UK to draw a line where they felt this divide was and wrote next to this whether they thought they were northern, southern or neither. This task showed me that most students (99%) agree that there is such a divide but many did not have an expressed affiliation to either region. Almost a third of all participants left this blank and ‘neither’ was the second choice. Geographical location could play a role, because students from the most southern county in these samples, Leicestershire, were more likely to label themselves as ‘southern’, while those from Nottinghamshire were most likely to label themselves as ‘northern’ and for those who used the term ‘Midlander’ most were from Derbyshire.

In the second task, students were asked to circle areas on the map where they thought distinct linguistic varieties were to be found, to label them with names if possible and to give any opinions they had about these varieties (what it sounded like, typical words or pronunciations, famous people who spoke with such an accent). The responses given by these students were very variable. Some included just one or two circles (e.g. Scottish, Geordie) whereas others drew very detailed analysis of different words used in areas and included many circles covering larger areas of the UK. The top five regions/cities labelled by the participants were Liverpool (by 90% of students); Birmingham (83%); Newcastle (81%), London (77%) and Scotland (62%).

Ringing & labelling UK dialects

Opinions & views about UK dialects

I was also interested in the way students labelled their own areas, and which areas they left blank. Nottingham was recognised in 10th position as a distinctive accent by students in all three counties (although it is important to remember that Nottinghamshire students made up a larger group in this sample). But even the students from Derbyshire and Leicestershire very rarely included their own areas as having an accent. Only eight participants labelled Leicester/Leicestershire as having a distinctive accent (and all of these students were from the schools in Leicestershire) and a further three had labelled Derby/Derbyshire (again all from schools in that county).

So it seems from this task that the East Midlands accent is not seen as being an obvious candidate for showing regional variation. This may be due to the age of the students as they may not be aware of having an accent themselves or it could be to do with the fact that East Midlands voices are not often heard in the media.

In the third task students were asked to listen to 14 different voices and to put a cross on the map where they thought the speaker was from – this included locations from around the UK (including Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh accents, as well Plymouth, Ashford (Kent), London, Newcastle, Birmingham, Burnley, Withernsea (East Yorkshire) and Liverpool and three ‘local’ dialects (Nottingham, Leicester and Derby). I was particularly interested in how well the students were able to recognise the ‘local’ voices. The results show that it seems that the dialects commonly named in the previous task were also accurately labelled in this task (particularly Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham and Wales). London, Glasgow and Northern Ireland as well as the local dialects were generally labelled less accurately. Previous research suggests that people tend to be better at recognising local accents. However, our participants were not very accurate at recognising the voices which were from the East Midlands and placed them all around the country, with locations being placed as far north as Manchester and Leeds, and as far south as Plymouth and London.

From this task we can see that some accents may be harder to recognise for these participants and local varieties are included in this. I did include discussion about local language with the participants and they were able to think of lots of different features to do with pronunciation, grammar and local words which they thought were ‘typical’ of the East Midlands. When we talked about local language, much of the discussion focused on its perceived ugliness. Students mentioned that it was lazy, slurred, chavvy, boring, rough, not proper, nothing unique, and some said that they did not like it or were trying to get rid of it. Only one or two students said that it was relatively easy to understand and one student that it was friendly. This raises questions about why there should be so much negativity surrounding local language. Even so, these participants were still not accurate in recognising these accents. It could be that the East Midlands is not immediately thought of as having a distinctive accent because there are no strong links with local famous people. For many of the other accents we could see that celebrities from a region may help with recognition.

I think more work is still needed – would older participants hold the same views? How good would people outside the East Midlands be at recognising or describing East Midlands voices? There are plenty of other varieties in the UK where this still needs to be done – why don’t you collect some data where you live and examine how it differs from other varieties? You could include pronunciation, morpho-syntactic structures or lexical variation. I think it is important to celebrate our own local accents and dialects – they are an important part of our identity and we should be proud to use them!

You can read more about Natalie Braber's work on East Midlands English, including 'pit talk', the language of East Midlands miners, here and East Midlands Voices here. 

Revision: for now and later

With the clocks going forward, beautiful blossom blooming on the trees and summer rapidly approaching, it's time to cast happy thoughts from your mind and think about the looming exams in June. Sorry.

There's still plenty of time to get revising (or just 'vising' if you haven't done some of the course content yet) but there are a few key things you can do now to make sure that what you are on the right lines for later on. We've already had a revision post from Olivia which focused on advice from her as a former student for students in the run-up to the exams, so this one takes a slightly different tack and thinks about the bigger picture and some suggested reading.

Big ideas
Think big, to begin with. Before you dive into the details of different topic areas and sections of exam papers, think about the big questions around English. How confident are you about them? Back in this blog post, I suggested that one of the ways to help understand the scope of areas such as language change and language diversity was to think about the big questions around how and why language changes and varies. To this, you can also add questions around children's language development. What are the main influences on children's spoken language development? How does children's writing development differ from their spoken development? Have some idea about the broad answers to these questions and then you can work out the ways in which the detail can be added as you work through the rest of your revision.

Op-eds
Read plenty of opinion pieces about language and get a good grasp of a) the language discourses used and replicated in them, and b) the style and structure of these pieces. Paper 2 Question 4 is where you need to write one of these yourself, so the more you have read and thought about, the better your chances of producing a good one of your own will be. You'll also be answering Question 3 on two texts that put forward views and opinions about language, so it'll help you with that.

Here are some suggestions for recent pieces that might help:
Regional Diversity
Meghan Markle's accent
The ugly rise of accent softening
Identity and International English


Get to grips with meanings
There's a worrying tendency in lots of English lessons these days, from Key Stage 2 to A level, to get completely obsessed with masses of literary and linguistic terms. You're doing an A level in which you need to show linguistic knowledge and expertise - and terminology has a role to play in that - but it's much more important to engage with what texts mean and then trace back how the language creates these meanings and representations.

In examiner-speak, this is an AO3-led approach. What is the text about? What is being said about this? How is the text producer using language to represent the issue, the events being described, the people or sources in the text, themselves, language? Once you can talk confidently about this, you can look at how the language - across all the levels of grammar, graphology, semantics and discourse - works and get more technical about it.

Using a deluge of technical terms is not a substitute for thinking deeply about a text's meanings, so revise by reading texts and immediately asking yourself quick-fire questions like "What is it about?", "What's being said about that?", "Who is saying these things?", "Why should I believe them?", "How are they trying to come across?". If you can't answer these confidently, read the text again. Practise with short texts and then build up to longer and more demanding ones as you get closer to the exams.


Work through your own ideas
As I said before (here), there's not an official list of theories and case studies that you can use as a tick-list, but there will be studies and theories you will have covered in class and through your own reading. Organise your notes on these and think through them. Be clear you know how you can use these ideas for different kinds of questions and pay particular attention to those studies that have multiple applications. Emma Moore's Eden Village Girls study in Bolton is a good one for this, because it opens up discussion about gender, region, class and friendship groups, and introduces ideas around 'communities of practice'. Likewise, Peter Trudgill's classic Norwich study takes the variable '-ing' and traces its pronunciation according to region (Norwich), class, gender and context (different kinds of speech formalities) while also considering how people tend to report on their own usage.

Understanding and exploring the intersection of different factors in people's language identities is a crucial part of doing well in the higher levels of AO2, so it makes sense to use studies that help address this, but equally, you can draw on any relevant research, so long as you use it intelligently (see the original blog).

Do some reading
There's still time to get some reading done. I know it's English Language and you don't have set texts, but there are some really good, accessible and fascinating language books out there. Even just dipping in and out of a few chapters from some of these will give you some added insight into the debates and the history but also lots of original examples and perhaps a few nice quotations. Here are my current favourites:

• Deborah Cameron: The Myth of Mars and Venus (how we talk and think about gender and speech)
• Lynne Murphy: The Prodigal Tongue (history and debates about American English)
• John McWhorter: Words on the Move (all about language change and how it happens)
• Lane Greene: Talk on the Wild Side (how we think about language change and try to 'tame' the language)
• Henry Hitchings: The Language Wars (the best book for understanding language discourses)
• The EMC Language Handbook: 14 chapters on different language topics and areas of research, all designed for A level students.

There are plenty of blogs and sites produced by linguists and experts which can keep you up to date with language in the news and the latest research. Some of my suggestions are:

• The Linguistics Research Digest
• Teach Real English: great material and resources for most aspects of A level English Language
• Tony Thorne's Language & Innovation site: articles, links and collections of slang
• Deborah Cameron's blog

And then there's always emagazine from the English and Media Centre. Every issue has great articles for students on the course and you can access the digital archive with your school/college's user name and password.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How and why does language change? 

and

How and why does language vary? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revision round-up 4: reading that works

You've still got over 2 weeks before you sit Paper 2 so there's still time to do some reading. In the last post I mentioned how it's important to read plenty of articles about language, but there's even time to read around the subject (or listen if that's what you prefer).

I posted these suggestions earlier in the year, but there's still time to dip in and out and these are all accessible for students if you've got a bit of time and patience.

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 husky starves.
• 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.

For listening revision (always good for those tedious bus or train journeys, or Maths lessons):

Michael Rosen's Word of Mouth
Talk the Talk
The Vocal Fries
Lexicon Valley

And finally, the Cambridge Topics in English Language series that Marcello Giovanelli and I edited are all out now. We're chuffed with how they've come out and they seem to have been going down well. You can see more about them here.

If you have any suggestions for things you've read or listened to recently that have been helpful, please add them to the discussion on Twitter here.

Showing what you know

One of the challenges of exams is that they not only test you on what you know but they also test you on how you interpret the question to show what you know. A case in point is last summer's AS Paper 2 in which lots of students (including many of my own, I'm sure) saw a question about gender and thought "Woo hoo! We've done this one already - it was on last year's Paper 2". Or words to that effect...

Of course, a gender question was set on the 2016 paper, but with a very different focus. The problem with this is that - like all the other areas you do for Paper 2 in the AS and the A level - you have to select the most relevant knowledge to address the question that's been asked... not the question you'd have liked to be asked. And with Question 3 on Paper 2, the focus was very much supposed to be on representation of gender. That means that it's not really relevant* to talk about studies into language use and interaction. What's more, the question actually gave stimulus material based on discussion around sexist language as a way into the task.

This article, which appeared on The Guardian website a few weeks before the exam, is much more like the kind of thing that I think examiners were after: a text that looks at how language represents gender and how ideas about gender are constructed and challenged.

This is also a good one to think about; it's a blog by Deborah Cameron about the politics of pronouns and the reasons why various writers and linguists have argued about them and their significance.

The key thing to think about here is that when you look at the main areas for Paper 2 - broadly speaking, at AS it's accent & dialect and sociolect (including social groups, social class, occupation and gender) and at A level it's those plus ethnicity and world Englishes - you need to be aware that it's not just how people use language that is being assessed but how the users of language can be represented in language.

So, three things that you can do to help you avoid producing the wrong knowledge are:

1. Think carefully about how questions might be phrased that ask you to focus on representation of some of the other areas - social groups, ethnicity, occupational language.
2. If you are doing the AS, think carefully about the stimulus material and the steer it's giving you. 
3. Read the question very carefully and select from the most relevant parts of your knowledge. Don't assume that the keyword 'gender' should be the cue to offload all your knowledge about everything you've ever learnt about gender.

(*There are a few cases where it might be a little bit more relevant - like how certain pop linguistics books represent men as from Mars and women from Venus, or how deficit theorists represent women as weak - but these aren't enough to sustain a good answer.)

A level Paper 2: revision tips part 3

Here's the third in a short (and predictably-titled) series of ... yadda yadda yadda...you get the drift.

Still on the subject of Language Discourses, what have different people - linguists, writers and media commentators - had to say about the big debates around change and diversity? Who could you go to for some ideas about different approaches to these arguments?

A really good starting point is the linguist Jean Aitchison, whose BBC Reith Lectures in 1996 were all about language: what it is, how we acquire it, how it changes and how people feel about it. Her book, Language Change: Progress or Decay? (now in its fourth edition and a great text for the whole second year of this course) looks at some of the patterns of change we see in English over time and some of the perennial complaints about such change.

One of her best known metaphors is the the idea that prescriptivists (those who resist change and want to tell everyone else what constitutes 'proper English') fall into what she terms a 'crumbling castle' view of language. As a linguist and descriptivist, Aitchison herself is not a fan of the crumbling castle view and explains in her lectures (and her books) that the whole presumption that English was ever a perfectly-formed and gloriously complete language is completely false and that change is natural.

This treats the English language as a beautiful old building with gargoyles and pinnacles which need to be preserved intact, as implied in statements by the writer John Simon: Language, he argues, should be treated like "parks, national forests, monuments, and public utilities ... available for properly respectful use but not for defacement or destruction".

This view itself crumbles when examined carefully. It implies that the castle of English was gradually and lovingly assembled until it reached a point of maximum splendour at some unspecified time in the past. Yet no year can be found when language achieved some peak of perfection, like a vintage wine. The "beautiful building" notion presupposes that rigid systems, once assembled, are better than changing ones. This is untrue. In the animal world, flexibility is a great advantage, and animals that adhere to fixed systems often lose out.                         (from this Independent article)

Her other metaphors - the damp spoon and infectious disease - are explained in more detail in her own words here. And it's worth a listen.

Back in 2014 I did this post about attitudes to language change and you can find some useful points and links here about the ways in which more recent (prescriptive) media commentators such as Lynne Truss and Simon Heffer have argued a similar case to those that Aitchison outlines and how more progressive and descriptive writers and thinkers - Steven Pinker,  David Marsh, Michael Rosen and Erin Brenner - have argued their case.

Another interesting person to look at is Lane Greene. His book You Are What You Speak is another really good read and offers some really astute points about the reasons for people's concerns about change. In the two chapters you can find here and here, he looks at complaints about language and places them in what he terms declinist and sticklerist traditions.

Again, there's plenty on this blog about discourses and if you look here, here and here you'll find some useful material.

A level Paper 2: revision tips part 2

Here's the second in a short (and predictably-titled) series of posts preparing you for next week's first sitting of the new AQA A level Paper 2. The last post was on Language Discourses and what they are. This one is on some of the discourses and debates you could explore. These are just a few suggestions; there are lots of other areas you could look at and I know nothing about what might appear so don't take any of these as predictions. My advice is always to revise all the possible areas and be ready for anything.

Gender debates - remember, as with the AS paper this summer, debates about gender can be about how language is used but also how gender is represented in language.

American English and World Englishes - have a look at some of the arguments here and here about the supposed Americanisation of English.

Attitudes to accents and dialects - this cropped up on the AS paper this summer and is worth thinking about from an A level perspective.

New words and arguments about lexical change - have a look here and here for some debates about how people feel about new words and their place in the dictionary.

Political Correctness and language reform - always a heated debate on this one and this link might help.

A level Paper 2: revision tips part 1

This is the first of a short (and tediously-titled) series of posts on revision for AQA A level English Language Paper 2. With Paper 1 out of the way and Twitter awash with exam-based memes and 'bananagate' stories, you can now turn your attention to Language Change, Diversity and Discourses.

You've still got just under a week to go, so there's time for some reading and thinking as well as practising the skills you need to use across the three very different questions you'll need to answer. Today, let's have a look at Language Discourses and what you can do to work on these before the exam. One thing to say is that while Section B is the main Language Discourses bit of the paper (it's even called that), arguments and debates about language can crop up in Section A as well, so don't narrow your thinking down too much.

The first thing to ask is "What the hell is a language discourse?".

The answer - for this paper, at least - is that it's a way of discussing and arguing about language. Language discourses are the ways in which people describe language change and diversity and argue about the language around us. Given that what's being discussed is language itself, it's probably no surprise to see writers using metaphors and analogies to describe change and diversity.

If every writer simply said "Language is a system of communication" it would generally be accurate and not very contentious, and not very interesting either. But when writers describe change as a process of decay, collapse or evolution, diversity as a disease, a kind of pollution, a beautiful cross-pollination of varieties of English, language use of young people as a war between old and young, between women and men as a battle of the sexes, or American English as a threat, an invading army or an unwelcome intruder, that's when we're looking at discourses.

Language is being described in other terms and a viewpoint or perspective established. More often than not, these discourses and ways of thinking are already there because they're ones that others have raised over the history of the language. So, when writers use a discourse, they're often contributing to an existing way of thinking - tapping into a discourse that others can relate to - because it's already out there. That's what makes them so pervasive and persuasive, because they're common sense, aren't they?

We all know that language is getting worse because of young people and foreigners... or that male and female language use is fundamentally different... or that technology (mis)spells doom for standard English... or that some accents are just worse, don't we?

Well, no. Just because claims about language are repeated and seep into the mainstream way of thinking doesn't make them right. In fact, the more 'common sense' they appear, the more we should be wary of them. Look at those claims above. There are many good linguistic (and social, moral and political) reasons for challenging each and every one of them. in fact, they're all a bunch of cobblers really*.

Many of these discourses have been around for centuries; just have a look at Henry Hitchings' The Language Wars and you'll see a great overview of what people have complained about in English and the terms they've put it in. The targets change but the song remains the same.

So, one useful thing you can do is to get together a list of the different discourses that crop up when English is discussed. Look at the stories on this blog and linked via the @EngLangBlog Twitter account for a cross-section of these. And think about all the potential areas for argument and debate in the areas of change and diversity, because these could all crop up in Section B of the paper. The sample paper has change (semantic change) as its focus but diversity and variation topics could be here as well. In fact, all the Paper 2 variation and diversity topic areas - occupation, accent & dialect, sociolect, gender, ethnicity, world Englishes and any combination of these with change - could appear. It's a lot to think about and revise but the arguments are often very similar.

And the other thing you can do is realise that after two years of English Language study, you'll probably know a lot more about how language works (and how it doesn't work) than some of the writers and journalists who feel qualified to spout off about English in the pages of the kinds of publications that you might get set for Section B.

Don't be afraid to analyse, deconstruct and challenge the views put forward in the texts that you get for Section B. If you can identify the discourses they are using and analyse the techniques they're using to construct these ideas about language, then you can pull them apart and evaluate whether they are fair ways of describing what's happening. Use your knowledge from the study of language to think about alternatives and you'll be able to do really well.

Next time round, I'll post a few more practical ideas for studying discourses, including a few links to old blog posts about particular debates.

(*Not a very academic way of putting it, so don't quote me on this.)

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.