Following on from the last blog about AO2 on Paper 2,
another aspect that I think it is important to address, for hitting Levels 4
and 5 in particular, but more generally in terms of an understanding of language
across the board is that of the overlapping nature of the ‘topics’ on Paper 2.
I use ‘topics’ in slightly wanky quote-marks because I think there’s often an
issue around the word that I hadn’t really twigged until the new spec appeared.
For some, ‘topics’ are just blocks of content, often optional ones from a wider
list, so if you used to teach the old AQA B spec, you could choose from 3
topics on ENGB1: language and technology, language and power and/or language
and gender. A few centres taught all three, most seemed to do two of the three
and I think some might have just done one and crossed their fingers and hoped
that it was a nice question.
This is clearly very different with the new spec; the topic
areas (if I can call them that without falling into the ‘topic’ trap) are all
related in various ways. We have areas such as occupation, class, gender,
ethnicity and world Englishes all floating around in various forms and there’s a
lot of overlap between them. For example, where does social class and language
fit in? Is that part of social groups or is it more related to region? And what
about language & occupation? Is that part of social groups or a different
area entirely? I think the simplest thing is to actually go back to the spec
and see how it’s laid out there.
The specification outlines the following: sociolect (specifically
mentioning social and occupational groups, gender and ethnicity), dialect
(including regional, national and international variation) and change.
To me, it makes sense to use this as the starting point and
to think about the overlapping nature of all these areas before really going
into detail into all of them and considering the most relevant examples, studies
and theories to explore. By that I mean – a bit like I mentioned in the last
post – to think about the core concepts to begin with and then map the detailed
knowledge back from there.
Before we even look at the areas that we might cover for language
diversity, let’s step back and look at the bigger picture for Section A of
Paper 2. If we look at the nature of language variation and change to begin
with, we can see that the two big areas (which get divided into a choice of two
questions in Section A of Paper 2) themselves overlap.
An example of this is UK dialects and the ways in which they
have changed over time. If you look at work carried out by the Universities of Cambridge, Zurich and Bern in 2016,
they have traced dialect change using an app and compared the findings of their
survey to the Survey of English Dialects gathered between 1950 and 1961. While
there are differences in their methodologies and some variables that might have
altered, what’s really clear to see is that in some areas, dialect terms have
almost completely disappeared. What’s also interesting is that accents have
changed too but not always as obviously. So, with this dialect levelling we are
actually seeing a change taking place over time in the way that English varies.
There appears to be less variation now than there was in the mid-20th
Century.
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| 'Backend' and 'Autumn' |
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| Pronunciation of 'arm' with rolled /r/ |
Another example is that of word meanings. Again, this is ostensibly
a change issue – word meanings changing over time – and therefore a change ‘topic’.
But how do word meanings change? They don’t just change overnight and in fact
at any given point, lots of people will have a very different understanding in
their own minds about what words might mean.
Take recent examples like ‘gay’ and ‘awesome’ (both looked
at by Justyna Robinson in 2010). At any time, there will be multiple – often age-differentiated
- meanings for the same word.
There are other contentious terms that have
different meanings for different age groups. I remember having a heated debate
with a bloke at football last year because he’d used the word ‘mong’ to
describe a player on the home team. I objected and told him that it was a disgusting
word to use, because it was an offensive term for people with Down's Syndrome.
He couldn’t see the issue and claimed it meant nothing like that and I heard him
grumbling later to someone he was with that “You can’t say anything now”. Who
was right? Maybe we both were. I was brought up in a time when the word ‘mong’
was tossed around as a casual slur and it was linked to the word ‘mongoloid’
which had been used to describe the facial appearance of those with Down's. He
was younger than me (and bigger, so I’m glad it didn’t come to blows) and
denied point blank that it meant anything like that to him. I’ve had similar
discussions (although usually less sweary and heated) with students who have
used the term and been oblivious to its older meanings.
It doesn’t just have to be slurs and slang under discussion
though. Even this week, there has been debate about the meaning of the word ‘sausage’
in relation to Greggs’ new vegan sausage roll. “How can a sausage roll be vegan
when a sausage has to contain meat?!” shouted some angry gammons. “Sausage is
all about the shape, fam. Allow it!” responded some millennial snowflakes. This
is how change often takes place: meanings gradually shift, are contested,
complained about and often take a while to bed in. (If you’re interested in
this, John McWhorter’s ‘Words of the Move’ is a brilliant book about how and
why change happens and a recommended read for everyone studying this course.)
So, there’s overlap between change and diversity, but what
about within diversity? The key point for me here is to make sure that before
diving into the study of areas like gender and occupation, all students are
completely clear about the bigger picture. Most sociolinguists these days don’t
subscribe to a ‘pigeonhole’ view of language – that the ‘categories’ you are
born into, be they your class, region, sex, race, or whatever, dictates your language
use. That’s far too deterministic and doesn’t really reflect the nature of
language as we use it in the real world and the variation within groups.
The thinking now tends to be that while these factors might
all contribute to your language identity in some way (and perhaps some more significantly
or obviously than others), we can draw on different linguistic strands from
this pool or repertoire to perform different identities with different people in
different situations.
We can perform a friendly and competent co-worker identity with
Person X at work, perform a more casual and relaxed identity with Person X and Person
Y after work and then perform a parental role with young children at home. All
of these will draw on different linguistic resources available to us through
our individual backgrounds and the contexts we are using language in.
Rob Drummond and I have talked about this idea about
performing identity quite a lot in the CUP Topics in English Language book, ‘Language
Diversity’, that we collaborated on but you can also find more about it in sources
such as Penny Eckert’s ‘Jocks and Burnouts’ Detroit study, Jenny Cheshire’s
Reading study, Kevin Watson’s work on the Liverpool accent and performing a
Scouse identity, Carmen Llamas’ work in Middlesbrough and Emma Moore’s Bolton
study. There’s a lot of new work going on around it too and it’s a very productive
and interesting area for students to explore.
That understanding of language as something that we can
choose to use to construct a version of ourselves in different contexts is one
that underlies a lot of the ‘interplay’ alluded to in the indicative content on
the mark scheme for Level 4 of AO2 in the June 2017 paper and the “different
views, approaches and interpretations” in the Level 4 performance
characteristics each year.
So, how could you approach this in practical terms?
Case studies are a way to introduce this. By looking at some
real (or made up) examples of people’s language backgrounds, you can explore
the language they use in different contexts and where that comes from. We included
one such case study of a former A level English Language student from south London, Shahnaz, in the OUP textbook
and this might give you a flavour of the kind of approach you could take. You
could also ask students to start building up a picture of their own influences,
but a problem with doing this with A level students is that while there may be
a degree of social, ethnic and perhaps even regional and international variation
among them, they are all of a similar age and you might be teaching in a single
sex school. While you can get somewhere with this and start to help students
unpick the different influences on their own linguistic behaviour, it might be
more useful to start with a few case studies that allow you to show different
features and factors at work. Just off the top of my head, I might look at David
Lammy, Maxine Peake, Stormzy, Danny Dyer and Scarlet Moffatt, but there are
plenty of others who could be interesting case studies to examine.
The next step might be to gather language from these people used
in different settings and to think about what it is specifically and
linguistically that’s interesting to talk about. Does David Lammy use the same
kind of language in parliament as he does on Twitter? Has Scarlet Moffatt’s language
changed in different settings since she first appeared on Gogglebox and I’m A
Celebrity? You’d need to be careful to avoid scripted performances, but there’s
plenty to look at.
What’s also important with each case study is to really show
what you mean by language variation – in other words, the characteristics of
language that can vary on a lexical, semantic, grammatical, phonological and pragmatic
level and how these can be illustrated.
Once you have looked at these case studies, you’ll be able
to think a bit more about the different topic areas and how to approach them,
because you’ll no longer be looking at them in isolation, but as part of a much
bigger picture of language variation and diversity.
I hope that gives a few ideas about how to deal with the overlapping
nature of parts of Paper 2. In the next blog, I’ll have a look at how to
encourage students to use case studies, research and examples and to write linguistically about the issues at the heart of Paper 2. It might take a little
while, but there will be other blogs along soon from other writers. Huzzah.
