Meanings and representations

Paper 1 of the new AQA AS and A level focuses on ideas about how language creates meanings and representations, so I thought it might be useful to look at what could be meant by these terms and what the difference might be.

I suppose the first point to make is that the focus of the first two questions is now very much on how language is used (AO1) to create meanings and represent the topic (AO3), rather than on the types of texts they are (which now comes under the remit of Question 3 and the new AO4).

AO1 and AO3 are quite distinct on the new specification, so you can pick up AO1 marks for labelling  and exemplifying word classes, sentence functions and higher level grammar features such as the passive voice, progressive aspect verbs and clause types, but to get AO3 marks you need to explain what these language features do.

For example, you could get yourself a Level 5 mark (9 or 10 AO1 marks) by identifying (correctly!) something like the following range of language features: noun, verb, adjective, 2nd person pronoun, present tense verb, simple sentence, a minor sentence and a relative clause. But if you left it at that, you'd probably get something like 2-3 marks out of 15 for AO3 at best. What we need to see is some useful discussion of what each of these actually means in its context - not just catch-all generalisations such as "The 2nd person pronoun makes the text more personal." - and (crucially) how they help create a representation of whatever it is that's being discussed. Take the example from a Cancer Research UK below:

If you describe the first sentence as a simple sentence that uses the present progressive, you'll get some good AO1 marks. But to get some AO3 marks, think about what this helps represent: the charity is shown as engaged in an ongoing battle, a fight that they are now taking to the disease and its effects on people. The whole idea of finding cures and treatments for cancer is represented (unhelpfully perhaps?) as a war and the charity and disease as two opposing forces.

If you start with AO3 this time, you might then move on to talk about how time is represented in the rest of the extract above. Several adverbials of time are used: "for a long time", "someday soon" and "anymore". Why are these important? They seem to suggest that time is important and that a turning point is about to be reached.

There's plenty more you could look at in this short extract or in other parts of the ad (like below) but this is a start and (I hope) illustrates what's needed at this level.

So, what's the difference between meanings and representation? To my mind, it's the difference between looking at the possible effect of a single language choice (e.g. the use of different pronouns to show separate sides) and the overall effect of a number of these choices on how the topics are shown to us (cancer as an opponent in a battle; Cancer Research as an organisation fighting on our behalf).

There will be another post soon, looking at other approaches to meanings and representations.

Fry up

Over the summer, you might have read about vocal fry; that’s the kind of deliberately croaky voice demonstrated here by my favourite sit-com teenager, Dalia in Suburgatory.  Recent coverage of vocal fry has all the features of typical media stories on language and gender, and is a great example of why we should be sceptical when reading mainstream media coverage of linguistic issues.   Reading and analysing mainstream media coverage of linguistic issues is, of course, something  A2 students will need to do in your exam; you’ll also need to create your own piece for your intervention coursework.

 

First, newspapers will pick up on a recent bit of linguistic research, or maybe something they've seen mentioned on Twitter or YouTube.  Journalists are particularly keen on using headlines which express a clear and simple difference between men and women, so they will either reduce complex, nuanced findings to simplistic ‘men do this/women do that’ headlines like this, or base an article around a flawed bit of research like this.   The wonderful Deborah Cameron outlines this process at length in her snappily titled blog post (which btw would make a great style model for your intervention) ‘How to Write a Bullshit Article About Women’s Language’.

In the case of vocal fry, it seems that reporters noticed a story in the academic publication ‘Journal of Voice’.    Enterprising journalists realised they could write a story that combined celebrity click-bait with a ‘men-and-women-are-different’ story and so produced headlines like this featuring tabloid darlings like Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears.   There was even more mileage in the story when media outlets realised they could use the story to lecture women about how they need to speak more like men, and to blame their failure to do this for inequalities in education and the workplace.  Even feminist writers in respected, ‘serious’ newspapers got in on the act, presenting the story as a rallying call to young women; stop talking like a weak and feeble girl!

Never mind the fact that the original research only looked at young women, and so provided no evidence that only young women use vocal fry.   Never mind the easily demonstrable fact that men use vocal fry too, as shown in this brilliant post.   Never mind the fact that the original research only looked at young women, and so provided no evidence that only young women use vocal fry.  Never mind the fact that vocal fry is only seen as a sign of weakness when women use it.

The lesson here is not to take media coverage of women’s language (or, indeed, any linguistic issue) at face value.    Instead, do a bit of digging and reading around.  And if you want a different perspective on women’s language, you can always rely on Professor Cameron.

For Starters (part 1)

With the new term starting and new A and AS levels being taught for the first time, I thought it might be handy to think of ways to get classes starting to think about the kinds of things they'll be doing as the course goes on.

I'm sure lots of teachers already have plenty of starters and ice-breakers up their sleeves, but it might be worth thinking about tasks that link to some of the newer areas of the specification. For example, for the first time in ages, we'll be teaching accent, dialect and sociolect to AS/1st year A level students, so why not look at a couple of things connected to that? Here are two ideas based on Language Diversity and another on Textual Variation.

Language fingerprints: ask each student to think about what characteristics make up their own unique language identity. 

• Where were they born? 
• Where else have they lived? 
• Which other languages or dialects have they spoken?
• Where were their parents from?
• Do they work part-time or do volunteering? 
• Do they spend a lot of time doing certain activities: football, online gaming, going to gigs/festivals, writing, looking after younger children?

If each student maps out these ideas, they'll build up a bigger picture of the influences that affect their language. You can introduce social, ethnic and gender/sexuality influences too, if that seems appropriate, or at least flag those up as aspects for students to think about themselves. Each area can then be mapped to the course they are about to start.

Proper English: use some of the links on these posts to find relevant articles about slang bans and school policy on "proper English". 

• Ask students to have a look at the lists of banned words/expressions that feature in many of these stories. 
• What's "wrong" with these terms?
• Why might they be used?
• What alternatives are there and why might the schools see these as better?
• Is it right to ban these terms and how can that be achieved?
• What are the problems with trying to change people's language behaviour?
• Is there such a thing as "proper" English and how might that be defined?

This can lead into discussion of attitudes to Language Diversity (on Paper 2 of the new AS and A levels) and Language Discourses (same).

Found texts: following on from ideas like this one, you might want to ask small groups of students to spend 10 minutes gathering "texts" from around the classroom or form their own pockets and bags before selecting 6 per group to start analysing in a fairly simple way:

• Who is it by?
• Who's it aimed at?
• Why is it written in that way? 
• How can you characterise the style?
• What do you notice about language patterns?
• What do you notice about visual design? 

Examples of texts might be:

• a film poster on the wall of the classroom
• a college diary with the code of conduct
• a letter hone about book deposits
• a book blurb
• the writing on a packet of Wotsits
• the writing on a tube of hand gel/chapstick/tin of vaseline

You can decide if you want to include electronic and spoken texts. At this stage, getting phones out and starting to read texts, Tweets, Snapchat messages and the like might not be the best starter in an early lesson, but you can play it by ear.

Graphic Language

As part of an effort to broaden the pool of writers for this blog and to cover some different areas of English Language study, there will be some new blog contributors posting soon and a few guest posts. In one such guest post by Nigel Ball, course leader for the BA (Hons) Graphic Design programmes at UCS, Ipswich, the focus is on the role of language in graphic design.

If you asked someone “what is graphic design?”, I’d put money on most people mentioning something about images. And if someone from within the discipline itself were asked, the term ‘visual communication’ would likely crop up. Both are obvious, and in and of themselves, there is nothing wrong with them. While it is undoubtedly hard to think of a piece of graphic design that isn’t visual, what such beliefs overlook in my opinion is the importance of English language to the subject. What follows are some reasons I believe English language is (nearly) as important as good image-making abilities for graphic designers.

The Brief

There are some obvious reasons, even before you start designing, why English is a vital tool. First and foremost, the majority of design jobs will start with a ‘brief’. This will either be supplied by the client, or written by the designer themselves after meeting with a client. It will invariably need to be agreed by all parties before proceeding with the job inhand in order that there is no confusion about what is required by both parties. If there is confusion at the initial stage, then in all likelihood, the outcome will be confused and won’t communicate effectively. Within the brief, (and notes from client meetings), designers will often search for important key words that indicate a client’s values. These give measurable criteria that can be returned to as the design progresses.

Such importance is placed on the brief within design circles that even if a designer is working on a personal project they will invariably write their own brief in order to clarify their initial thoughts and set the parameters within which they intend to work.

Research

After laying out the boundaries of a job, the designer will then typically move on to a research phase. While this will be dependent on what the brief is, common research themes for most jobs will include looking closely at who the client is and what they do, the client’s competition, as well as all the contexts that surround the brief. It is important to note at this point that designers rarely only work for clients who have the same interests as them, meaning research is a vital part of the design process. For example, I know next-to-nothing about opera. Were I contacted by the English National Opera tomorrow to do a job for them, I’d have to find out as much as I could about the subject in order to be able to do it justice.

Some of this research will be primary, some will be visual, but much will involve a lot of reading. This is one of the exciting things about being a designer: you get the opportunity to widen your personal knowledge on a huge range of interesting, (and sometimes boring), topics. But with any research comes a lot of searching for material, analysis and notation.

Designing

Once a designer starts the actual ‘design’, language may become less important as concepts are considered and visual ideas start to fly. However, there are many decisions to be made at this stage. Regardless of the idea, the sort of imagery to use needs consideration. Questions such as whether to follow a photographic or illustrative route arise. Even within these two choices there are a myriad of associated stylistic choices which can affect the way an image is interpreted. For example, a few years ago I ran a live project with students in collaboration with Suffolk County Council who were asked to create a recipe pack for food bank users. It was important in this instance that the design didn’t look like a luxury cookery book with recipes that were out of the reach to the audience. At the same time it was equally as important that way the design was styled didn’t visually ‘talk down’ to those that would need to use it. While such thoughts may affect the image-making process, the background analysis that is involved to question a stylistic approach involves a degree of clarity—any critical rationale for choice of imagery requires a core understanding of nuances of English language in order to clearly justify visual decisions.

Working with copy

There’s no avoiding text as a graphic designer. In most cases copy is provided by the client or a copywriter. In the case of the latter, these are highly skilled professionals who have to do as much research as a designer to get the right ‘tone of voice’ and ensure what they are writing is correct for the job-in-hand. Unfortunately, in the case of the former, many clients aren’t experts in English language, let alone understand that you cannot fit 1000 words of type into a space that is allocated for 250; unless you add more pages to a document for which clients are often unprepared to pay the extra printing costs. This means that as you type-set the words you are supplied, you inevitably have to edit, re-write and make alterations. If a designer does not have a good working knowledge of the English language and punctuation, they are going to struggle. Spelling mistakes and misplaced apostrophes could at best highlight poor attention to detail, and at worst cost you future work.

Aside from copy supplied to you, a starting point with many design ideas may be word play, and this can often drive graphic concepts. On these occasions it is vitally important to use the correct words in order that an audience interprets your design as you wish. For example, the Alan Fletcher poster above, designed as an ironic sideswipe at design ‘rules’ for a Chartered Society of Designers event in Glasgow in 1993, specifically uses the word ‘dogma’. Firstly, dogma is slightly comical—it contains the word ‘dog’ which conjures up thoughts of little Fido not letting go of something, which in turn perfectly complements the leaning of the word itself. Secondly, dogma has alliterative qualities when used with ‘down’—the phrase runs off the tongue as if a chant or slogan. Thirdly, and more importantly in regard to clarifying meaning, if alternative words such as ‘authority’, ‘rules’ or ‘system’ had been used, these would have been too suggestive of a political stance and would overshadow the piece’s intrinsic wit.

Selling your idea

Of great importance to any designer is convincing their client that their idea is the best idea. In contemporary practice this can often be through design studios pitching for a contract against each other. If you are lucky enough to be the sole company in line for a job, you will still need to communicate your ideas in a presentation or client meeting, treading the fine line between using design jargon and language a non-designer would understand. You may have a killer idea, but if the client is skeptical and you are unable to convince them otherwise, then you will either need to compromise your design integrity or the client may procure the services of someone else.

Degree study

I hope I have managed to set out what I believe is the importance of English language to graphic design. One of the ironies of the relationship between the two is that at degree level study, many of the students that come to this arts based discipline are dyslexic or have a ‘fear’ of writing. It can then be a shock on starting a design degree at university to find out just how much of an equal emphasis is placed on research as on image making. As a counterpoint, those students who come to an arts-based degree with an excellent grasp (and/or love) of English language—maybe because they chose English as one of their A level subjects alongside an arts discipline—don’t always appreciate how this will benefit them as young designers. The realisation that their multiple skills can feed into a single interest can be a revelation: that their ability to think in words can be of equal use to them in the field of graphic design as it can to traditional A level progression route onto English related degree courses.

Further reading:

AsburyandAsbury.com  Website of creative team Nick Asbury, (a writer) and Sue Asbury, (a designer).

Heller S. (2012) Writing and Research for Graphic Designers: A Designer’s Manual to Strategic Communication and Presentation. Massachusetts : Rockport

Horberry R and Lingwood G. (2014) Read Me: 10 Lessons for Writing Great Copy. London : Laurence King

Nigel Ball is course leader for the BA (Hons) Graphic Design programmes at UCS, Ipswich, lecturing across both practical and contextual modules. Alongside teaching, Nigel takes on graphic design commissions, produces personal projects and writes a critical art and design blog under the moniker Dubdog. He has also written for the blog of respected graphic design publication Eye magazine; and peer-reviews publications for Bloomsbury art and design imprint Fairchild Books. Nigel is currently studying for his Masters in Arts Practice.

Join EngLangBlog

In September this blog will have be celebrating its 10 year anniversary, which makes me feel older than I normally do. Which is like bare old? And shown by my feeble attempts to use teen slang and MLE-style youth sociolect. And not write in full grammatical sentences?

Anyway, all of that aside, it would be good to expand the pool of people writing for the blog beyond the existing team (me and my dog). The launch of the new AQA English Language A level specification which kicks off in September 2015 seems like a good time to get new people involved, especially if you are a teacher of English Language A level or someone who is studying it/has studied it. So, if you fancy writing for the blog, just tweet me via @EngLangBlog and we can get you set up.

New AQA A level resources

If you are coming here to find new material for the September 2015 AQA English Language A level, it will be coming soon and labelled as "AQA new spec".

As the current spec is still running and students are doing exams at the moment, I don't want to post anything here that will confuse them, so will start posting new spec material later in the month.

Everybae People

The recent news stories about Scrabble are a gift to A2 students revising Language Change and Discourses, so have a look at these links for some good stuff on new words, and lots of "OMG, how can that even be called a word?!" reactions.

Here's Ben Farren of The Guardian listing lots of them.
Here's The Daily Telegraph looking at both sides: from Sue Bowman of the Association of British Scrabble Players who reckons it's "an abuse of the English language" to Gyles Brandreth, founder of the National Scrabble Competition who says "hang loose and get down on the street". Yeesh!
Meanwhile, Elaine Higgleton offers a staunchly descriptive defence of the new entries in this Radio 4 clip.

Language change hit the headlines a little while ago too in the aftermath of a thinly-disguised marketing exercise for a new Samsung phone, with several articles looking at how older generations claim to feel completely bamboozled about young people's new slang.

Here we have The Guardian explaining how language is changing faster than ever before.
Then, there's The Daily Telegraph saying the same thing in a slightly older and more baffled way.
The Daily Mail reckons it's all the fault of trades unions, gay marriage, Red Ed and immigrants (probably).
The Huffington Post keeps it fleek.

But just to prove that older people have always struggled with young people's language, here's Ben Zimmer looking at an American newspaper from 1911 saying nearly the same thing.

Thanks to various Twitter people for the links (@languagepigeon @agwilliams9 @tonythorne007 @bgzimmer)

Language Change: political correctness and technology

Recent Language Change questions on ENGA3 have featured pairs of texts (one old, one contemporary) on the same topic and offered you the chance to analyse how they use language to create different representations of whatever it is they are focusing on: rugby matches, the city of Bradford or coffee, in recent years. You are also expected to think about how the times the texts are from might have influenced their language. It's worth remembering though, that this isn't the only type of question for ENGA3, so you might want to think about some others. Remember too, that any topic that turns up in Section A of the paper can also appear on Section B as a Language Discourses question.

Political correctness (PC) is worth a look at as a language change topic. It's a movement to change language and redress some of the perceived inequalities in how language represents traditionally less powerful groups in society, but it's always controversial. A question on PC could offer you examples of words that have been changed to make them more inclusive and/or less discriminatory (like this) and perhaps extracts from a text like this one which offers a range of opinions and arguments about how homophobic language can affect people.

Even in Section A, it would be hard to avoid addressing attitudes to PC and there's no reason to steer clear of this kind of debate, because it is covered in the mark scheme. However, what you need to bear in mind is that it's Section B where you will find texts that offer opinions and discussions about language and this is where you can engage more fully with debates and discourses.

The following texts are worth a look to help you think about the arguments.
Gender-neutral language and arguments around PC
Simon Heffer gets wound up about PC (from this page)

Feminist academics upset the Daily Mail and its readers by suggesting that 'Miss' is less respectful than 'Sir'. Full story here.

The other kind of question that has cropped up before is where texts show evidence of the use of new language. Back in June 2011 the paper had an extract from a review of a digital camera. Here you would be looking at how new words are being used and how they reflect technological change (amongst other things), but as with any question on this paper, you're also looking at how language represents the topic, in this case, how the reviewer represents the digital camera. Don't forget either, that - as with the PC questions above or the ones on pairs of texts in recent years - any analysis of the text is also expected to cover how the writer represents him/herself and how s/he addresses the ideal reader. These ideas around positioning and stance are always worth mugging up on to help you secure AO3 marks, whatever kind of text you have to analyse.

It would be quite possible to get a question that had a text featuring a lot of slang and/or new words from popular culture, so you would apply the same analytical skills but perhaps focus in BP2 on a few other areas of language change. Have a look at these examples of news pieces on emojis for some ideas about this.
Emojis on the up
Emoticons are changing the language

As with PC, it's quite possible you could get a Language Discourses question on Technology and Language, so here are a few pieces to have a look at.
Is the internet destroying English?
A similar one from Steven Poole in The Guardian
Robert McCrum updates George Orwell's famous attack on poor English to cover the internet

Mode mini-moments mark 1

In the run-up to the ENGA1 exam in a couple of weeks, here's the first in a short series of short posts on Language and Mode. Today it's about Mode...

What is mode? If you can't answer that question by now, I'd respectfully suggest that you should do some basic work on the topic. After all, the first part of the paper is called "Language and Mode", so you might be advised to understand what it's all about.

So, what is it? Mode, on a really basic level, is how a text producer conveys something to a text receiver. The text producer could be a person writing, texting, tweeting, talking face-to-face or telephoning and the text receiver could be one person or a much bigger audience. So, the mode part of this is what is in the middle - how it gets from A to B. Historically, mode has been separated into spoken and written forms, based upon the channel through which the text is received (visual - i.e. read or auditory i.e. heard) but that's too binary, so the way we generally conceptualise mode for this course is along a continuum. This approach owes a lot to the linguists Doug Biber and Dick Hudson who have both written about the ways in which certain texts exhibit particular mode characteristics or dimensions.

Jarvis Cocker demonstrates his knowledge of 2nd person
pronouns & multi-modality through gesture

More recently, a wider view of mode has been suggested (by, among others, Gunther Kress) in which mode does not apply simply to speech and writing but to other forms of meaning making too, such as gesture and images. This means that a written text with pictures might be seen as multi-modal, as would a spoken lecture accompanied by a power point and gestures (not the kind of gestures I am fond of making to my students to demonstrate first and second person pronouns).

So, if you think about mode early on when addressing the texts you are given in the ENGA1 exam, you can start to make some useful observations about the nature of each text before you start considering more familiar elements such as genre, audience, subject and purpose.

General Dejection

You might have missed it, but there was a General Election last week. While many of us in Sixth Form Colleges are still weeping, wailing and gnashing our teeth - not to mention drowning our sorrows in red red wine - at the prospect of another 5 years of underfunding and fragmentation, at least the election gave us some good stuff to look at for language analysis. Every cloud has a silver lining...

Anyway, here's a quick round-up of things that you could look at for English language A level related to the recent campaign.

First off, it's the rise of the hashtag #Milifandom. For a while, it looked like people might actually vote for Miliband, and the rise of the Milifandom hashtag seemed to crystallise the feeling among a (clearly deluded, in hindsight) minority that the time of the geek had come. Obviously, it hadn't...

Accommodation was also under the spotlight: not the kind of accommodation that we need - you know, houses and stuff - but accommodation in the form of Howard Giles' Communication Accommodation Theory. A year or two ago, we looked on this blog at George Osborne's attempts to converge to working class speech but this time round it was Ed Miliband who was mocked for his apparent convergence to Russell Brand's Essex/mockney style.

Have a look at this piece which explains some of the background to the Milibrand interview and the ways in which such convergence can happen and is often viewed.

And in a separate article, David Shariatmadari looks at the glottal stop and its stigmatisation, making the following observation:

The glottal stop (more specifically, the glottalisation of “t”) is a feature traditionally associated with male, working-class speakers. But even as far back as 1982, linguist John Wells noticed it being picked up by young speakers of “prestige” British English – otherwise known as received pronunciation. It’s difficult to say exactly why that happened, but Labov’s idea of “covert prestige” makes intuitive sense. Some sounds, even though they’re generally regarded as markers of an “inferior” dialect, are nevertheless used to signal group membership, solidarity or cool.

Away from the two main male players in the General Election, Cameron and Miliband, the three female party leaders of the Greens, Plaid Cymru and SNP attracted much media coverage. Was this the first election since Thatcher's in 1979 that would see women making a splash? Well, yes and no, Sturgeon's splash appears to have seriously dampened Miliband's chances of taking power or exerting any influence on a hung parliament, with the SNP butchering Labour in Scotland and then Labour failing to make gains in England.

But what about the speech styles of the female party leaders? Were these women breaking the mould of adversarial Punch and Judy politics by injecting some much needed co-operation and civility into the debates? 

Deborah Cameron, ace linguist and author of The Myth of Mars and Venus, looked at this with a sceptical eye in this really interesting piece about gender and the debates, arguing that much of the coverage of the three female party leaders has succumbed to tedious stereotyping:

The specific ways in which women are said to differ from men (more supportive and less aggressive, more into consensus and less into point-scoring, etc.) could come straight from the pages of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. These are hoary old gender stereotypes, which in other contexts feminists would decry as crude and sexist. Yet in the context of the election campaign they are being dusted off and trotted out as if they constituted a feminist argument. ‘Look, women are different from men, that’s why we need more of them in politics’. There is an excellent feminist case for equal political representation. So why use an argument whose basic assumption is that women deserve a place because they’re from Venus rather than Mars?

As she points out elsewhere in her article, female speakers aren't all the same:

Some differences among women are produced by the intersection of gender with other social divisions like ethnicity and class; others reflect variation at the level of individual personality or life experience. It’s true that ‘female politicians’ is a much smaller and less internally diverse category than ‘women’. Even so, it cannot be assumed that they have a single style of speaking. In fact, it’s obvious they don’t: even among the three female party leaders I've been discussing there are clear individual differences.

Perhaps what has shaped so much of this coverage of the female party leaders and their 'female language style' is the sheer novelty of seeing women in power, and that is hugely depressing in 2015. As much as I detest pretty much everything Margaret Thatcher ever did, I can still recognise that having a female Prime Minister was still a pretty big moment in history, but 36 years later there still hasn't been another woman PM and we are still short of equality for the sexes in parliament. 

So, even when things look apparently very different, they actually stay the same. Or get worse...

Women lead the way

Yesterday's Word of Mouth on Radio 4 had a really good discussion of how language change around the world - and not just in English, but other languages, including Arabic - is being led by young women. It's definitely worth a listen if you're revising gender for ENGA3 Language Variation or even Language Change and reasons for change.

You can find it here.

The focus on women as linguistic innovators is also picked up in this 2012 New York Times article, which suggests that features as diverse as vocal fry (or 'creaky voice'), high rising terminals and new slang are all driven by young women. It's not just in spoken language that women are having an impact; in this Slate piece from 2013, Amanda Marcotte looks at how language styles on Twitter are often related to gender and speculates on how this might lead to men adopting a more 'female' style (more emojis, ellipses and exaggerated punctuation).

Revision stuff coming soon...

Apologies for not updating the blog in recent months; other things have had to take priority for a bit, so I've not had as much time and energy to blog as I'd have liked. Anyway, with AS and A2 exams on the horizon, I'll be adding lots of new posts very soon.

Sweary Mary

If you are interested in swearing, profanity and the myriad, foul-mouthed joys of rude words, the Strong Language blog will be right up your strasse. Featuring articles on the wonderful pubic wig known as the merkin, DIY oath-making and a hugely impressive - nay fan-f***ing-tastic - resources archive, it really is the bee's knees, the mutt's nuts, the dog's bollocks and the ultimate shiznit.

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

Heart in the Right Place, Mouth Not...

Benedict Cumberbatch - a famous actor whose face has been likened to that of an otter  - has apologised for causing offence by his inadvertent use of the term 'coloured' to refer to Black people. In an interview (ironically) about opportunities in acting for non-white actors, he dropped the c-bomb (not that one...) when he said, "I think as far as coloured actors go, it gets really different in the UK, and a lot of my friends have had more opportunities here [in America] than in the UK, and that’s something that needs to change." (from The Guardian).

'Coloured' is a strange word and one that causes a degree of confusion to a lot of people. The Civil Rights movement in the USA was often supported by the organisation NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) but in South Africa 'coloured' was a term used to segregate anyone who wasn't white but who wasn't entirely black.  For a lot of older/middle-aged people in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s 'coloured' was often seen as a less stark term than 'black' . Perhaps 'black' was viewed as too dark? This link to a piece on this blog from 2005 might help contextualise it a little.

Interestingly, this piece by Robert Lane Greene on The Economist's language blog also looks at how attitudes to swearing and taboo language have changed over time, including how racial terms have become a more stigmatised form of language while religious and sexual terms now clause less offence. But what it also shows is that as language changes, not everyone can keep up. The language we are brought up with often gets embedded in our mental vocabularies and is harder to shift from even when we know it's probably less appropriate in the modern day.

So, while Benedict Cumberbatch was obviously talking sense about the representation of black people in acting, he may well have offended a few people through his terminology. Having said that, in a time when racist and xenophobic political organisations are talking up the threat of immigration and multiculturalism, is Cumberbatch's well-intentioned but clumsy phrasing as worth getting upset about as some of the vile online postings by various UKIP and Britain First knuckledraggers?

Help with research

If you are an A level English Language teacher, Ian Cushing & Marcello Giovanelli are interested in hearing about the factors that influence your choice of specification for a piece of research they are carrying out.

You can access the survey here.

Oh man!

While sitting at home, feeling sorry for myself with a bout of man-flu, this article about a curious phenomenon called manterrupting popped up on Twitter. Apparently, manterrupting is when males interrupt women in meetings and/or co-opt (or bropropriate*) their ideas as their own.


It's a man-word like these explained here by Stan Carey on the MacMillan Dictionaries blog and makes use of the man- prefix that has become so productive in recent years. So far we've had...

• mansplaining: patronising explanations delivered by men to women of things that women probably already know more about (Urban Dictionary definition here)
• manspreading: sitting on public transport and spreading one's sweaty flannels in order to secure more seat space (Collins Dictionary definition here)
• manscaping: removing unsightly body hair to make oneself more attractive (Oxford Dictionaries definition here)
• manslamming:aggressive pavement action involving a man barging into people (often women) who he believes to be in his way (explained and illustrated in The Daily Telegraph)

But what others can you can come up with? A couple of possible ones suggested on Twitter have been:

manterpreting: (a male way of interpreting a woman's words...although when @sooze8968 suggested this I perhaps did my own manterpretation of it).
manter: (pointless chat amongst men possibly making them both late for whatever)

Any more?


*And I'm also doing just that, because Sally Flower at Colchester was the first person to mention some of these this week. Anyway, I can't help it: I'm a man and it's in my genes. 

Slang archive

Following yesterday's post about other top tips for articles about language, Tony Thorne of King's College London sent this link to a whole range of articles he has gathered on the topic of slang. There's plenty there for anyone studying Language Change and Variation at A2 and lots of good stuff to read. Thanks very much, Tony.

2014 round-up

Just in case you missed them, here are some of my favourite links to articles and stories in the world of language from this year. I've grouped them by broad topic areas linked to the AQA A specification.

If you've got other suggestions or ones that I've obviously missed, please tweet me at @EngLangBlog

Words of the year: Language Change (ENGA3) 
From well jel to mahoosive: new words added to Oxford Dictionaries
Ben Zimmer's word vortex - new words of 2014

Language Change (ENGA3)
Everything is 'awesome' (in the Daily Mail) and done much better here by Lynne Murphy
25 years of LOL
10 slang phrases that sum up their era
War of words: how WW2 shaped language
Looking a bit UKIP: how UKIP has started to become a term of abuse.

Swearing and attitudes to it: Language Discourses (ENGA3)
The sweariest place in Britain?
Coprolalia (or potty mouth syndrome) is one of many excellent (but obviously rude) posts on a new blog dedicated to swearing, Strong Language

Technology and Language: Language and Mode (ENGA1); Language Change (ENGA3)
Why fears about texting are misplaced
Texting improves young people's spelling and grammar

Accents, dialects and varieties: Language Variation (ENGA3)
Dialects from Trinidad to Hawaii shaping the English language
Um or er? Why um is growing

Attitudes to 'good' and 'bad' English: Language Discourses (ENGA3)
Why our language prejudices don't make no sense
A plea for linguistic tolerance
What are the 'correct' rules of English grammar?

Gender and language: Language Variation (ENGA3)
Who interrupts whom in the workplace?
Why young women shouldn't have to talk like young men

Language and Representation (ENGA2)
Why the language of domestic violence matters
Sir and Miss: sexist and depressing

And my least favourite article was (of course) from the Daily Fail and its pathetic coverage of the English A levels (in this terrible article) which prompted this angry blog post.

Thanks for following in 2014

Thanks very much to all of you who have used the blog this year and especially if you've also followed via the @EngLangBlog twitter account or given me top tips for articles and links.

2014 has been a very busy year with work projects, so I've not had as much time to post stuff to the blog. Some of that work will become a bit more obvious in the next year with the new A level English Language specification from AQA starting to be taught in September 2015, something that I've been involved in (along with plenty of other people who actually know what they're doing). In the run-up to the new spec being taught, I'm planning a lot of new material (and to rework older material) to help students and teachers with the new topic areas and approaches, so this should start appearing in April and May.

In the meantime, I'll put together a few round-ups of recent tweets and links before doing a few more ENGA1 and ENGA3-related posts in the Spring and Summer terms. Anyway, all the best for Christmas and the New Year. Peace etc.

emagazine English Language conference 2015

In case you haven't already noticed, emagazine is organising its annual conference for students and teachers of English Language A level and some tickets are still available. It's been such a huge success in previous years that it's now taking place over two days in London. The speakers include some of the best and most knowledgeable experts on language (and a Max from Eastenders-lookalike on the Friday who must have bribed his way onto the bill).

For more details, visit this page and to get tickets go here. See you there (on the Friday, at least).

Technology traumas: language discourses for ENGA3

Just a quick post to flag up this nice clip from the excellent Ben Zimmer talking about technology, language and fears about language change. If you're doing your ENGA4 investigation at the moment (and you blinking well should be if I teach you) this is the sort of thing we'll be spending more time on after Christmas as we start to look in more depth at Language Discourses. Meanwhile, if you're an AQA B teacher, this is the sort of debate that will feature on the new AQA English Language spec that's coming in from September 2015.

F-Bombs for Feminism

With more f-bombs than an English teacher getting a paper cut from a late, U -grade essay, this video from FCKH8 comes with a Parental Advisory sticker as big as your mum. If we'd still been looking for an F in our A-Z of representation, this would have been there.

Fantastic stuff for representation of women, girls and little sparkly princesses in need of rescue...

Potty-Mouthed Princesses Drop F-Bombs for Feminism by FCKH8.com from FCKH8.com on Vimeo.

Representation alphabet

Are you planning your ENGA2 Investigating Representation coursework? Here's an A-Z of ideas for potential topics put together by various members of the English department at Colchester Sixth Form College.

·         A  Amal Alamuddin’s and George Clooney’s  wedding as an event, or Amal Alamuddin as an individual.

·         B  British Muslims: how are Britain’s Muslims represented in the media and how do they feel about it, especially with IS claiming to represent their faith?

·         C  Calypso. What the flip? You’ll be even more gobsmacked when you hear the UKIP Calypso. But have a look at the debate and responses created by this appalling song. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/mike-reads-calypso-car-crash-for-ukip-campaign-9807020.html

·         D  Disability: are some people with disabilities not worth the minimum wage? How are disabled people represented in the media?

·         E  Ebola: coverage of the spread of the disease around Africa, Europe and USA.

·         F  Ferguson (or #Ferguson). The shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer in the US state of Missouri sparked protests and violence. It raises questions about racism, policing and social cohesion http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/michael-brown-shooting

·         G  Gamer Gate: sexism and misogyny in the world of gaming. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/20/gamergate-internet-toughest-game-woman-enemies

·         H  Hong Kong: representation of pro-democracy protests and the government’s  response

·         I   Immigration: a political hot potato but often used to whip up prejudice and resentment to gain votes. How is it viewed by those who move to Britain, those already here and why do people think there are far more immigrants than there really are?

·         J   Jennifer Lawrence: how has JenLaw been represented around the great Fappening scandal?

·         K  Kobane: the Syrian town defended by Kurds against IS. How has the battle been represented? What about the Kurdish women soldiers at the forefront of the fight against IS or the Turkish anarchists who have joined them?

·         L  Linda Bellingham: coverage of the actor’s illness and death

·         M Marriage: gay marriage and equal marriage. An institution under threat or one being redefined for a new century?

·         N  Nigel Farage: how did a privately-educated, millionaire, ex-banker manage to cast himself as an outsider voice to the Westminster establishment?

·         Oscar Pistorius: coverage of the athlete’s rise to fame and the trial for shooting his partner, Reeva Steenkamp.

·         P  Kevin Pietersen: cricket scandals are over the newspapers again with Pietersen’s autobiography bowling googlies at his former team-mates.

·         Q Queer politics: how are gay people responding to discrimination against them? The recent kiss-in at a Sainsbury’s in Brighton and the homophobic abuse suffered by two men on a bus in London highlight different social attitudes towards LGBT people.

·         R  Reeva Steenkamp: how has the woman killed by Oscar Pistorius been represented?

·         S  Sex education: it’s being discussed again by MPs. When should young people get sex education and will it save their lives, protect their health or turn them into leering, sex-crazed perverts?

·         T  Trolls: sad, lonely people in need of a hug (https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/523909281448755200), or dangerous criminals in need of jail?

·         U  UKIP: their political rise and the different perceptions of them. Unprincipled Knuckledragging Incompetent Parasites or angry voice of the silent majority?

·         V  Videogamers: representation of them as a social group

·         W Weather events: storms, hurricanes, climate change and natural disasters

·         X  Xenophobia: with the rise of UKIP and online halfwits like Britain First, why is fear of foreigners fast becoming such a political issue? Does it reflect genuine hatred of different people around the world or a time of insecurity and confusion in British identity?

·         Y  Malala Yusafzai: Nobel Peace Prize winner, girls’ education campaigner and victim of a Taliban shooting

 Z  Z-list celebs: pick any recent vaguely famous non-entity from a reality show and see what’s happened to them in the press since their moment of glory.

What's proper?

Language debates are all over the media again and rarely seem to be too far aware, which is great news if you are an A level English Language student and looking for material to analyse, ideas to glean and references to add to your notes.

This article from Christian Rudder in The Huffington Post offers an analysis of Twitter language in response to the perception that social networking is degrading and/or destroying the English language. It's a common argument and one that has been knocking around for centuries. Ever since there has been technology to communicate - the pencil, the printing press, the mobile phone - there has been someone complaining about its disastrous effects on English.

This article challenges the declinist discourse and suggests that far from dumbing us down and forcing us to communicate very little in 140 characters, Twitter is not that different to other forms of communication:

A team at Arizona State was able to reach beyond word count and length, and into the sentiment and style of the writing, and they found several surprising things: first, Twitter does not change how a person writes. Among the many examples they tracked, if a writer uses “u” for the second person in e-mails or text messages, she will also use it on Twitter. But, likewise, if she generally spells out “you,” she does so every-where -- on Twitter, in texts, in e-mail, and so on. The decision to refer to the first-person singular as "I" or "i" follows the same pattern. That is, a person’s style doesn’t change from medium to medium; there is no “dumbing down.” You write how you write, wherever you write. The linguists also measured Twitter’s lexical density, its proportion of content-carrying words like verbs and nouns, and found it was not only higher than e-mail’s, but was comparable to the writing on Slate, the control used for magazine-level syntax. Everything points to the same conclusion: that Twitter hasn’t so much altered our writing as just gotten it to fit into a smaller place. 

Elsewhere, Ammon Shea, whose new book Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation looks well worth a read, has also written a piece for The Huffington Post, considering what's happened to the meanings of the words that were being worried about a hundred or so years ago. Shea finds that words like awful and talented rarely attract complaint these days, but were viewed by some as being totally unacceptable in the past. Meanings change: get over it, seems to be the key message here.

And if you want to help somebody who is actually researching attitudes to "proper" English for a PhD project, Carmen Ebner is collecting views through this link to her online questionnaire, so please take part and give your views. It's particularly good if you are an A2 English Language student and starting to look at language discourses and attitudes to change and variation as part of your second year work.

Welcome to EngLangBlog

With the new term underway, I thought I'd say welcome to the blog and introduce you to some of its main features.

First of all, the blog is designed to help you with your English Language A level. It's primarily aimed at the AQA A specification (as that's what I mostly teach and if you're a Colchester Sixth Form College student, that's the spec we do with you) but you'll find material here to help with AQA B, WJEC, EdExcel and OCR.

Most of the time, there will be posts on here about language in the news, so these will help you read around the subject and perhaps give you a few interesting angles and examples to get you thinking about different topics. At other times, there are longer posts which are tied to specific exam papers and questions. At exam time, I put up a lot of tips and hints about how to approach particular questions and topics for both AS and A2. There's already a big archive of these from previous years, so if you are looking for exam advice, try those. I'm an AQA examiner and moderator, but obviously I don't know what appears on the papers until you do, so none of this is inside information, just the ramblings of a sad language nerd.

If you've not used the blog before, you might find some of the following features helpful:

Labels

Labels can be found on each post and in a cloud on the right sidebar. If you are looking for all the posts on a particular exam paper, coursework topic or issue, just click on the label and you will be taken to all the posts with that label. So, if you're looking for Language Change, Child Language or Language Discourses, that's where you want to go.

Links

The links bars take you to some good sites for English Language study. Emagazine and Babel are aimed at A level students and are both excellent reads. If you're a Colchester student, get the log-in details from your teachers.

Tweets

The blog's Twitter account @EngLangBlog has lots of links and good ideas from linguists, students and other teachers, so it's a good idea to follow it. I've been posting short news items via Twitter more than the blog recently, so that's where to look for the latest news.

Finally, please contribute your own ideas, either through comments on blog posts or via Twitter. I'm always interested in hearing other points of view, finding out about language stories that I've missed or being shown links to interesting examples of language in use.

Feisty sluts being abrasive

There's been lots of good material in the papers recently about language and gender, so it's useful for anyone thinking of investigations at AS into representation of social groups & individuals.

The Telegraph looks at words which only seem to be used to label or describe women, while The Guardian has its own take on the issue. Fast Company also has a look at the ways in which language is used differently for men and women in their performance reviews, with abrasive being used to describe women much more than men.

Elsewhere, the discussion about what slut and sluttish mean - or has meant in the past - is picked up in The Guardian.