Media Texts and Language Interventions updated

A year or two ago, I put up a list of links to articles that might be used as style models or sources of inspiration for the A2 writing coursework part of the AQA A (Language Intervention) and AQA B (Media Text) specifications. This has been updated a few times, thanks to links that colleagues and blog/Twitter people have sent me, but I thought it was probably time to add a few more, so here goes.

If you are a teacher reading this, you might also find this useful for the new AQA English Language A level that starts being taught in September 2015, where Paper 2 has a writing task similar to the media text and intervention.

Again, I'd be delighted to add any others if you want to suggest them, either as comments on this blog post or as tweets via @EngLangBlog.

Opinion pieces

English can absorb this assault from texting (Canadian article)

Isabelle Kerr on silly new words and why they shouldn't be in the dictionary

Fay Schopen complains about young people and language

John McWhorter on “Is Texting Killing English ?”(short answer: no)

Lynne Truss gets angry about grammar

Erin Brenner responds to Lynne Truss

Michael Rosen argues that there’s “no such thing as ‘correct’grammar”

Terence Blacker on why schools should clamp down on slang and ensure Standard English

Michael Rundell asks “What are the correct rules of English?”

David Marsh on arguments about language and The Pedants' Revolt

Harry Ritchie challenges "only one way to speak"

Kyle Chayka asks "Is the Innanet RUINING teh English Language??? ¯\(°_o)/¯"

Geoff Pullum asks "Are grammar nazis ruining the English language?"

Hannah Jane Parkinson on How We Are Judged On Our Accents

Cumberbatch Needs to be More Careful with Words ('coloured' actors and racist language)

Don't Crucify Cumberbatch (the 'coloured' controversy)

Robert Lane Greene on prejudice against accents

Feature articles

Rebecca Holman on ‘Menglish’ (gender and language)

‘Menglish’ in The Daily Mail

Girls are way ahead of the linguistic curve (gender and language innovation)

How 'like' has taken off as a quotative

Britt Peterson on Why We Love the Language Police (grammar and non-standard English)

Ben Zimmer on 'Salty', a "Word with a Promising Future".

Manterruption: the "Secret Plague" for women at work

Hadaway wi ye

The responses to the story last week about Sacred Heart Primary in Middlesbrough correcting their pupils' use of non-standard English are still coming thick and fast.

The most original is from the author, David Almond, who was born in the North East. In his phonetically written article for The Guardian, he argues that "the commin langwij cums from the hart an sole, and must neva be forgot". It takes a minute to tune in, but it's a good read once you're on his wavelength.

This article in yesterday's Independent on Sunday is great stuff too, because it's written by a genuine expert, a sociolinguist from King's College, London. Here, Julia Snell  shows that it's more than just a question of promoting "good English" - which is what all English teachers are trying to do in pretty much everything they teach - but also to recognise the close link between language and identity.

As Snell says, "Ultimately, it is not the presence or absence of non-standard forms in children's speech that raise educational issues; rather, picking on non-standard voices risks marginalising some children, and may make them less confident at school. Silencing pupils' voices, even with the best intentions, is just not acceptable".

Sadly, this article by a teacher called Pete Turner is less exciting, partly because it has no real style and partly because it's just a rather predictable moan about young people's language. Sorry Pete, but if you'd opened your ears a bit more to some of your students' language styles, it might have made a more engaging read. And as for northerners having large, extended families and southerners getting their slang from grime? Right...

The fact that two of the articles have over 600 responses shows what a live issue this is out there in the real world, not just in our English Language lessons. If you're looking at doing your Language Intervention for ENGA4 coursework in the next few weeks (and you probably should be) then this is exactly the kind of language debate that you should be getting stuck into.

(HT to Ellie Aslin, Jon Dolton and @backwellengdept and @UKLiteracy for first link, Paul Kerwsill via the EMC Facebook page for the second, and Alasdair Mackenzie for the last.)

Edited on Monday 11.02.13 to add 2nd article and restructure references.

Media Texts and Language Interventions: helpful article

It's probably too late for this year's A2 students to get much out of this link, because you really should have handed in your coursework by now, but this article (which I've nabbed from a suggestion by Julie Blake on the Teachit Language Sputnik) offers a very readable explanation of what's needed in good science journalism.

As Julie points out over on her site, a Media Text (B spec) or Language Intervention (A spec) is often concerned with making a difficult, quite specialist idea accessible for a mainstream, non-specialist audience, very much like science journalism has to do. The article gives some helpful pointers as to what you can do.

LOL For The Win

The OED's decision to add LOL, OMG and the verb to heart to its latest update has already been covered here on this blog, but this BBC News Magazine piece about LOL is a really good read, not just for its content but also its form and style, which make it a neat example of how a Language Intervention (ENGA4) or Media Text (ENGB4) might work. It's also a good example of the sort of short article that can appear on the ENGA3 paper for Language Change, offering plenty of scope for discussion about attitudes to change, reasons for change and processes that help changes spread.

Texting: too many LOLZ, not enough R&J

As mentioned on here many times before, the USA has caught onto texting a bit later than us in the UK, so the moral panics about texting and literacy, texting and repetitive thumb injuries and texting and attention spans have hit their media fairly recently. I'm only saying this again to cling on to a deeply pathetic sense of superiority over this one tiny achievement when, in all other fields, the USA beats our increasingly rubbish country.

This article in the Seattle Times takes a look at the ways in which the language of texting is leaking into some students' written work and the concerns that have been raised about this. It's a good article because there's some attention given to less hysterical viewpoints, and even the students quoted are honest when they admit that sometimes they're just lazy and CBA 2 switch styles.

It's also quite a good style model for an ENGA4 Language Intervention or an ENGB4 Media Text, I think.

If you are looking for more articles about texting, click on the texting label at the end of this post and you'll find loads more.

Media texts and Language interventions

As loads of A level Language students (and teachers) are currently looking for style models to use for the A and B spec A2 coursework, I thought I'd try to make the search a bit easier by pulling together links to articles and stories that might be good to use.

I'll try to group these into broad areas that have been helpful for me in the past, but if you'd like to suggest other categories or argue about how I've grouped or defined these, just say.

(Updated with new links on Monday 17th October 2011)

Op-eds (opinion/comment pieces by named writers)

• Zoe Williams on slang that demeans women
• Zoe Williams attacks the word "chav" and all it stands for
• Paul Flynn on the word "chav"
• Beatrice Bray on words to define mental illnesses
• David Mitchell on language change
• Richard Littlejohn on "gollywog"
• Mad Melanie Phillips on "gollywog"
• Hannah Pool on "gollywog"
• Ziauddin Sardar on the place of political correctness in language
• David Gelernter on the perils of PC
• Anti-ebonics op-ed
• Max Davidson on slang 
• Christopher Howse on new words and dictionaries
• SFX blog post which links to several pieces by Simon Heffer about language
• Dr Bernard Lamb of the Queen's English Society bemoans low standards in English
• Henry Hitchings (author of Language Wars) on changing London dialect
• Charles Moore of The Daily Telegraph on why change is bad
• I h8 text messages: John Humphrys gets mad in the Daily Fail
• Cn u txt?: John Sutherland savages texting in The Guardian (2002)
• 2b or not 2b: David Crystal argues that texting isn't all bad
• The end of handwriting: Boris Johnson on the rise of technology and the end of writing

News stories

• "Man on the Street" offensive to women
•  The Sun on "youth"
• Texting is good for you
• Texting is bad for you
• Texting is edumacational
• Studying texting is dumbing down 
• More on texting and literacy (readers' comments range from hysterical to offensive)
• The Sun on slang (image file) 
• A strangely popular article about the rise of "regional super-accents". With pictures of Cheryl Cole.
• Twitter and regional dialect in the USA (thanks to Ant's blog)

Feature articles

• "Gang slang" in The Evening Standard (nothing to do with gangs really, but there you go...) and an op-ed response in The Voice
• Lucy Tobin on "student slang" (again, not really about "student" slang per se, but worth a look...)
• Anna Leach on geekspeak and the language l33t (really good article!)
• Seattle Times piece on worries over text language

• General advice from Tim Radford on writing about science for a non-specialist audience: useful tips

OK, that's a start for now, and I'll add more over the coming days. You can also look for the blog posts where these articles were first mentioned by putting various keywords and phrases such as language intervention, media text, style models, texting, slang, new words, political correctness in the search bar on the top left of the screen, or by clicking on the labels below.

You might also find this link helpful as it gives more info about what an op-ed is. I've always told my students it's an opinion editorial, but this link says that's not the case. Ho hum.

This is quite interesting on different types of feature article too.

Gang slang: a response

The article by Lindsay Johns in the Evening Standard the other week has already kicked up a fair bit of discussion here and elsewhere, but The Voice has a brief response to it here. As well as being an interesting debate about language, there's plenty of material in the original article, the comments after it and this piece to help any English Language A level student who's putting together a Language Intervention for ENGA4 or a Media Text for ENGB4.

Let's get retarded...

...or rather, if you're the Black Eyed Peas and worried about not getting your single played "Let's get it started". The word "retard" has come under scrutiny in the USA with the debate about its offensiveness or otherwise gaining a political dimension recently. In this Washington Post article (a great style model for an AQA A Language Intervention or an AQA B Media Text) Christopher Fairman traces the word's history and the arguments about its use.

I don't know if this is something that the USA has been late to pick up on (a bit retarded, you could say) but retard has been pretty offensive in the UK for some time now. In much the same way that spastic was a term of playground abuse until we were all told off for using it, retard has always been a bit contentious. For example, I'd find it pretty hard to imagine a disability rights group in the UK calling itself the Association for Retarded Citizens. But then again, the expression spaz also hit the headlines a while ago in the USA, a good two decades after a school assembly from my old headteacher reminded us all that it was a bad word. 

In his article, Fairman makes some very good points about the cycles words go through and the euphemism treadmill that turns to generate new terms which - for a short time at least - avoid offence to different groups of people:

The irony is that the use of "mental retardation" and its variants was originally an attempt to convey greater dignity and respect than previous labels had. While the verb "retard" -- meaning to delay or hinder -- has roots in the 15th century, its use in reference to mental development didn't occur until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when medical texts began to describe children with "retarded mental development," "retarded children" and "mentally retarded patients." By the 1960s, "mental retardation" became the preferred medical term, gradually replacing previous diagnostic standards such as "idiot," "imbecile" and "moron" -- terms that had come to carry pejorative connotations. 

What's also interesting is the parallel Fairman draws with other potentially offensive words such as the n-word, queer and gay. And while Fairman is sensitive to retard's offensiveness, his point is that we are grown up enough to show discretion and judgement in how we choose to use terms:

The current public awareness campaign surrounding the use of the word "gay" offers better lessons and parallels for the R-word debate. Advocacy groups contend that the phrase "that's so gay" fosters homophobia and that anti-gay language is directly related to violence and harassment against homosexuals. At the same time, there is recognition that much anti-gay language is uttered carelessly and isn't necessarily intended as hurtful -- as is probably the case with uses of "retard." The Ad Council and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network have developed a Web site, ThinkB4YouSpeak.com, that, much like R-Word.org, encourages the public to sign a pledge to cease using the phrase. (The slogan: "Saying that's so gay is so yesterday.")

By increasing sensitivity and awareness, the campaign hopes to encourage people to think about the possible consequences of their word choices. Such reflection would presumably lead individuals to censor themselves once they understand that others can be hurt by their language.

Inherent in this idea is the realization that words have multiple meanings and that those meanings depend on the context and circumstances surrounding any particular statement. For example, "gay" is a term of identification for homosexuals, but it also can be used as an all-purpose put-down: "That's so gay." Those using it as an insult don't intend to say "that's so homosexual," nor do they necessarily make the conscious leap that homosexuality is bad. (Indeed, the success of the ThinkB4YouSpeak.com campaign depends on this distinction.)

Happy new words

For this first post of 2010 there's an op-ed from Liz Hoggard from The Independent all about popular culture and new words. It's a good, pro-language change piece that celebrates the "energy and rhythm" of new language, and it doubles as a neat style model for anyone doing an ENGA4 Language Intervention in this form.

And here's an article from The Guardian a few days ago about the best new words of 2009 and the Oxford English Dictionary's latest additions. Plus, here's a Guardian blog post of readers' favourite words and phrases of the noughties.

Teenglish? Allow that...

This article from Tuesday's Education Guardian is a good example of how some newspapers treat slang. While some of the definitions aren't exactly wrong (and it's tricky to say if a word meaning is ever really wrong if someone uses it in their own way with their peers) they're certainly only half the picture. To call these examples of "student slang", as Lucy Tobin does, seems to be forgetting that many of the terms (waste, wagwan, allow that/it, among others) originate specifically from young inner city (often black) roots. They might have spread to university campuses with the increasing numbers of working class and inner city students entering university over the last 10 years, but I suspect that only a handful originated on the campuses themselves.

However, grumbles aside, it's quite a good read as a source of inspiration for an ENGA3 Language Intervention (or even a B spec media text?) and there's even a quiz you can take here to test your skills.