ENGA3 revision: some links

Here are a few links to recent articles about different topics relevant to ENGA3.

@backwellengdept have provided this link to an article about World Englishes.
Professor Julie Coleman (whose book The Life of Slang is on my summer reading list) has written this short piece about 7 slang words.
Autocorrect is making us bad spellers, apparently from this article...
...or not, if you believe this take on the same story.

Goodbye ENGA1, Hello ENGA3

Now the AS exam paper is done and dusted (a decent paper? I think so...) we'll devote the time between now and June 11th to ENGA3.

I'll start posting some new revision material for this unit early next week.

ENGA1: good luck

Good luck to anyone taking (or retaking) ENGA1 tomorrow.

If you have any last minute questions or worries that aren't addressed in the previous revision posts, post a comment here and I'll see if I can help. I can't promise an instant reply, but will try to respond today at some point.

ENGA1 Language Development: quick revision ideas

There's not really much time to go until the exam, so I'll concentrate on a few pointers to help with this section and then point you towards relevant resources and previous posts.

First things first:

• Only spend 5-10 minutes on the data question. It's worth 10 marks and what you need to do is pick out, quote and label 5 different features. That's it...no explanations, no theories, no extra waffle. Make sure your 5 points are sufficiently different to allow you to get 10 marks (e.g. don't identify two examples of substitution and then label the other three as virtuous errors).
• 5 bullet points/short sentences is enough!

Essay tips:

• Answer the question! Don't expect to be able to roll out a prepared response and get good marks. Try to grapple with what the question is actually asking you: maybe define the terms of it in your own words, early on in your opening paragraph.
• Use examples: you can even use the data from the first question if you can't think of other examples, but it's better to have a few of your own.
• Integrate and evaluate different theoretical models. Examiners are keen to see students thinking about the pros and cons of different theories for the question that's been set.

Resources that might help:

Last year's (and 2010's) revision tips can be found here. They still stand.
Some helpful links to various snippets.
And some stuff on new approaches if you're feeling brave.

If you look down the right sidebar you can also download 4 theory sheets from my Twitpics.

ENGA1: quick revision tips 4

Today's post on ENGA1 (coming up this Friday - yikes!) is about addressing meaning in the texts you analyse.

Recent principal examiner reports have made the point that as students get better at discussing language features and mode, meaning still seems to be a problem for many people. And that's not necessarily a big surprise. Given that you're probably primed and ready to pick out lots of language details and link them to mode, it's often easy to forget that the texts themselves mean something and represent ideas, people, events in particular ways. In many ways it's less easy to prepare for this AO.

But some ideas that might help are as follows:

• As you're using your 15 minutes of reading and annotating time, try to summarise, in 25 words or fewer, what each text is actually about and what it is saying about that topic. Imagine you were being asked by someone "What have you just read?": try to think of what you would say. "Oh, it's an article about higher education that's trying to persuade you that university is a good thing," might be your response.
• How is the subject matter being represented? You will also have done the ENGA2 unit in your AS year. Think about what you have learnt about representation. Language choices shape our perception of issues, events, individuals and institutions. What clues are there in the language about the viewpoint or perspective being taken? This could range from quite obvious points about adjective use to more subtle points about the passive voice being used to hide agency (e.g. "The use of mobile phones has been banned in this college." Banned by whom?) or nominalisation being used to turn a  verb process (e.g. dropping out of university) into a state of affairs or even a person, i.e. a noun (e.g. someone who has dropped out is referred to as a dropout).
• Texts also reflect a degree of positioning on the part of the text producer (the speaker/s or the writer). How are the text producers representing themselves? How are pronouns used to position speakers or writers? 
• If there is more than one speaker or writer, do they offer different perspectives? How do Text A and Text B differ?

If you're smart, you can weave points about meaning into your analytical sentences, rather than saving big chunks of your answer to deal with meaning, but it's also a good idea to allocate at least one paragraph to addressing meaning on its own and how the texts handle it in similar or different ways.

Tomorrow, it's time for some quick Language Development tips.

Double-dippy

If there weren't evidence enough already that David Cameron is a prize chump - privatisation of the NHS, steering us into a double-dip recession, having a face like Iggle Piggle - the report on the BBC News site today that he thought LOL stood for Lots of Love should be the final nail in his coffin.

In his texts to former News of the World editor, Rebekah Brooks, it is claimed he signed off with LOL until it was pointed out by a flunky that it meant Laugh Out Loud.


And this man is supposed to be running our country. ROFLMAO.

Language Wars - more skirmishes

As previous posts on this will no doubt reveal, this blog is a big fan of Henry Hitchings' The Language Wars. It's a great read for any student or teacher of English Language because it covers the areas we study and offers an erudite debunking of prescriptivist myths and pronouncements.

It's recently been published in the USA and has had a bit of stick from The New Yorker's Joan Acocella, who basically describes Hitchings as a hypocrite because he uses the "rules" in his own writing that he derides in the preachings of others. She says of the author, "Hitchings went to Oxford and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Samuel Johnson. He has completed three books on language. He knows how to talk the talk, but, as for walking the walk, he’d rather take the Rolls. You can walk, though".

It's a pretty flawed argument, as John E. McIntyre explains here when he says "Identifying a usage does not equate to endorsing it; and even if a usage is endorsed, that does not make in compulsory".

Whatever your take on The Language Wars, the whole spat is very much at the heart of the Language Discourses section of the ENGA3 paper, so well worth a look because of that.

Edited on 14.05.12 to add:

Language Log provides a great response to all of this (with some really good comments afterwards).

ENGA1: quick revision tips 3

Mode is the name of the game in this quick revision post.

The first section on ENGA1 is called Language and Mode, so you'd have to be a mug not to mention it, but what is it? At its simplest, mode is basically the way language passes from text producer to text receiver. So, that can be via the visual channel in the form of written texts, or the aural channel in the form of spoken texts.Simples, no?

But mode is also quite a slippery concept in that it relates to the ways in which we understand other ideas about how texts are produced and received, so we use the notion of the mode continuum to talk about different dimensions along which we can place texts. The clickable graphic of this can offer you a few pointers as to which dimensions are most relevant at this level. You might have used different terms for some of these (e.g. asynchronous for delayed, or synchronous for immediate) but it's all the same really.

How do you address mode in the exam? I'd suggest tackling it head-on at the earliest stage. You've probably been told how to structure an essay for this question already, but an approach I always like is to use the acronym GASP: Genre, Audience, Subject, Purpose. This allows you to think about the type of texts, who they're aimed at, what they're about, and what purposes they serve; so I'd suggest that mode is dealt with as a concept as part of Genre. For example, you could talk about Text A or B being an example of a spoken mode anecdote, a written mode piece of fiction, a blended mode Twitter timeline, etc..

The other thing about mode is that examiners are keen to reward students who see the subtleties of mode across different texts, or even within the same ones. I'm always banging on at my students about not treating texts as "uniform blobs" - homogeneous, unchanging, fixed and straightforward - but as places where different things can happen.

For example, in a spoken interaction it would be daft to assume that each speaker used the same degree of standard/non-standard language or to assume that a speaker was always being interactional rather than transactional, so the same is true to an extent for written texts: they may exhibit some features of one mode dimension at one point and then another aspect of that mode dimension at another point. A written text might start as a formal and transactional piece, but develop into something more informal and interactional. Look for shifts within texts, but also of course between them. Always provide evidence for your observations though, because you need to show the examiner that what you are saying is linked to actual examples of language in the texts, rather than vague generalities plucked from thin air.

The other interesting area of mode is, I think, that of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) where we see texts which are primarily visual in their channel, but quite spoken in their style: tweets, emails, online chat and message forums, and text messages perhaps. However, these texts pose their own questions and again examiners like to see students who can respond to what's put in front of them, rather than make blanket judgements about CMC texts always being (say) non-standard, informal and instant.

We see, for instance, a huge range of language styles in emails, depending on who has sent them, to whom they've been sent and what they're about. If you're a Colchester Sixth Form College student you'll soon be able to look on Moodle to see the excellent presentations done by AS classes where they pulled apart different emails to see how they varied in style and structure. If not, bad luck, but you can easily find a few examples of your own.

Overall, I think mode is a really interesting area of language to look at and one that allows you to open up texts for really careful scrutiny. It helps if you can combine discussing it with other ideas about the texts' contexts - very much as Marcello Giovanelli explained at the recent EMC Language conference - but it's also something that can be linked neatly to specific language features for AO1:

• minor sentences used as a form of elliptical, abbreviated, rapid writing/typing (e.g. "Well done!" used in an email from parent to son about a new job)
• syntactical reordering of spoken language to put emphasis on particular bits of a sentence (e.g. "That one I really like, that one I don't")
• inclusive first person plural pronouns being used in written texts to create synthetic personalisation and position the text producer as a friend or ally ("It seems that we can't get enough of Kirsty Allsop")

The next post will be on meaning...

Omnishambles and others

We've already had plenty of new words appear this year and if you're looking for a few contemporary ones to spice up your ENGA3 Language Change/Discourse answers (should the need arise), here are some to think about.

What do they mean and what word formation processes have created them? Kerry Maxwell's Buzzwords on the MacMillan Dictionary site is always a good source of information on new words, so there are links to a few of them here:

Omnishambles (already consists of Granny Tax and Pastygate among other ConDem disasters)
Titanoraks
Lifelogging
Fomo


Can you think of any other new words which have appeared this year? Add them as comments if you can.

Edited on 14.05.12 to add:

Here's Zooey Deschanel. She's adorkable, apparently. I tend to agree.

Chatterboxing has also had an impact this year: it's when you tweet while you watch something on TV. For example #TheVoice Why is Danny standing on a chair and pumping his fist? It's only the title music.

ENGA3 revision tips: dialogue and variation

Recent ENGA3 papers have included extracts of dialogue from novels such as Victor Headley's Yardie and B.K. Mahal's, The Pocket Guide to being an Indian Girl (as well as the usual transcripts, blogs and newspaper extracts) so it's perhaps a good idea to think about how non-standard English is represented in fiction. it's not only useful to acquaint yourself with the features and functions of different varieties of English but also some of the literary uses of it.

Beth Kemp, who has written lots of great stuff for this course and examines it too, has posted a few suggestions to her blog about texts that feature teenspeak, so you can have a look here at what she offers, but you could also have a look at texts like The Scholar or Society Within by Courttia Newland, East of Acre Lane by Alex Wheatle, Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh or The Afterglow by Antony Cartwright, which feature (respectively) London and Black British English, MLE (with a touch of Ghanaian), working class Edinburgh English and Black Country (West Midlands) dialect. And they're all darn good reads.

ENGA1: quick revision tips 2

Today's top tip post is a very quick one connected to AO1.

This AO assesses two things: your ability to use language frameworks and your ability to write accurately*. In this paper, you can be rewarded for simply picking out a feature and giving it the right label, and I think that's a good thing. Knowing stuff is important, and being able to apply your knowledge deserves reward. So, feature spotting language in the texts can actually get you quite a few marks for AO1 (which is worth 15/45 marks in the Language and Mode part of the exam).

In an ideal world, you would then make links between the language features you've noted and the modes of the texts, and their meanings, but picking out a few key language features which always get rewarded highly can help you score a few more marks. One really good thing about the ENGA1 mark scheme is how transparent it is. If you correctly identify a noun, that'll put you in the 5-8 band, but if you add more detail and label it as an abstract noun, that bumps you into the 9-12 band. The more detail you offer, the more marks you get...so long as you are accurate.

Here are a few to look out for:

Modal auxiliary verbs. There are only 9 of these, so they are easy enough to remember. If you're not sure what they are or what they do, look here. The good thing about modals is that they often have a very clear effect, helping you link to AO3ii (meaning).

Minor sentences. These are sentences which aren't really sentences. They are often fragments of speech or elliptical structures like noun phrases that are punctuated like sentences (e.g. Nice one.) or clauses missing a subject (e.g. Going out later.). Again, these can be pretty easy to spot and are often good for linking to mode, be it CMC texts like Tweets, emails or text messages, or spoken texts in which utterances rather than sentences are the basic unit of meaning.

If-clauses (clauses of condition) and because-clauses (clauses of reason). Even if you're not entirely clear about clause level analysis, these types of clause are quite easy to spot and again, while they can give you lots of AO1 marks, they often link to meaning nicely too. If you want to find out more about these, check here.

 Next time, we'll look at Mode and why it's so important.

(*It's a bit of a silly combination, because they aren't really the same thing at all. For example, you could write really well, but say nothing interesting about the language of a text, or write really badly yet be full of insightful language points. But anyway, that's not AQA's fault; it's the fault of the people who made the awarding bodies jump through hoops to create new specifications.)

ENGA1: quick revision tips 1

This is the first in a series of very short revision tip posts on the AS exams for AQA A spec English Language.

Today, it's how to pick up marks by writing analytical sentences on the Language and Mode question.

This question is assessed using three Assessment Objectives (AOs):

• AO1 Language analysis and written accuracy
• AO3i Mode
• AO3ii Meaning

If you develop a basic template for most of your sentences, you can get marks in all three AOs each time you say something. As you develop your approach, you can mix and match and start changing the order round a bit, adding a touch of stylistic variation.

The simple template is:

• Identify a language feature to discuss (e.g. "Oh look, there's a modal verb...")
• Label it accurately ("This is a modal auxiliary verb...")
• Exemplify it ("The modal verb "must" is used in the first sentence of the article...")
• Explain its effect and significance ("It is used to place responsibility and pressure on the reader of the text...")
• Link to context and mode, if possible ("The genre of the piece - a written charity advertisement - lends itself to this use of modals. The text is designed to address the reader directly and place responsibility on the them to take action...")

The Principal Examiner's report for this unit often flags up points that need improvement each year, and one that is clearly important is how you talk about meaning, so when you analyse the texts for Language and Mode, try to think about what it is that is actually being talked about/written about in each text.

What is the subject matter and how is it being represented?
What language choices are being made to create this impression?
How are the writers/speakers in the texts positioning themselves in relation to the subject matter?
How are they positioning themselves in relation to the other participants/speakers or audience?

In other words, are there language choices being made which tell us something about what the writer/speaker thinks about (say) university, childcare, graffiti or (as in January 2012) the "Cultural Olympiad" (no, really...it does exist)? Perhaps these language choices also tell us something about how we're being addressed and how the text producer/speaker wants us to view them.

We'll come back to this in a day or two as we move on to language features,  mode and meaning as separate AOs, but I hope that's at least a start for thinking about this question and how to answer it.

ENGA3 revision planning

I've also had several requests for help with revision for ENGA3, so I'll be running a few blog posts on this unit in the weeks to come.

But, given that you still have a good 7 weeks until the exam (11th June, I think) a couple of things you can do now are:

Read Henry Hitchings' The Language Wars (accessible, packed full of knowledge for your exam, and very funny too)!
Read Deborah Cameron's The Myth of Mars and Venus (as above)!

Go on: I guarantee you that these will help.

I'm also happy to take questions about this unit if you have anything you want to ask. I'll try to answer... 

ENGA1 revision run-in

With ENGA1 only a couple of weeks away, I'll be running a few revision blog posts to help students focus their minds on the exam and what's involved.

First off, we'll look at Language and Mode and some of the ways to pick up plenty of marks across all the AOs, through using analytical sentences. Then we'll have a think about the notion of mode itself - what it is and what to say about it - before moving on to AO3ii's focus on meaning and how to deal with it.

We'll get cracking on these tomorrow...

I'm also happy to take questions about this unit if you have anything you want to ask. I'll try to answer...

Resources for teachers (and students)

There's a new site - set up by the people behind the Linguistics Research Digest blog - which aims to provide teachers of A level English Language (and GCSE Spoken Language Study) with resources for the study and investigation of spoken language. The material includes ideas for language investigations, explanations of terminology and features of spoken language and soundclips of London English.

they're still adding to it, but it's got the makings of a valuable resource.

Darwinian battle for existence

Another quick link, this time to an article about words and their "Darwinian" battle for survival. It's another one that I'll try to return to in the run-up to ENGA3 exam preparation posts in the next week or two.

Losing the language war

Just a quick link here to a BBC News Magazine piece on battles over usage. I'll come back to this in a post on ENGA3 Language Discourses exam preparation in a few days.

Boys will be boys, girls will be girls and hen will be both

Back in 1884, Charles Crozat Converse decided that English needed a new pronoun, a singular and gender neutral pronoun. He proposed it be called thon, apparently a blend of that + one. In 1971, Casey Miller and Kate Swift proposed that we introduce three new pronouns - tey, ter and tem (to operate as singular versions of they, their and them). In 2005, Dr Richard Neal applied for intellectual property rights over two similar pronouns hesh and hir (the former being an alternative to he and she or s/he, the latter her/his). None of these really caught on, as this 2007 OUP blog post by Ben Zimmer explains in more detail.

So, are all such attempts doomed to failure? If new words as varied and inconsequential as jeggings, upcycling, bromance and mankini can be readily accepted, why not new pronouns? Clearly these terms haven't entered standard usage, but there has been an increase (at least, anecdotally and in my own experience) in attempts at gender neutrality through s/he, he or she and the use of they.

Perhaps these words are harder to change because they are so common. Research a few years ago suggested that our most commonly used words are the most resistant to change, despite often being the most irregular. So, while we're happy to adopt jeggings as a word (although the day I wear the actual clothing is the day I die) but slow to adapt our pronoun use.

Perhaps we should all just give up and accept that English was historically built by men, written by men and is probably destined to reflect an imbalance that favours men? Perhaps not.

While prescriptivists will no doubt cry that changing or inventing pronouns to avoid gender bias is "PC gone mad", and pedants will argue that the current best-placed alternative they shouldn't be used for singular subjects (because it's always been a plural pronoun), we know from academic research that gendered terms (including pronouns) do matter.

Words have a huge impact on how gender is constructed and words can often hold the key to how we define ourselves in so many different ways. Just have a look at a catalogue for children's toys and how gender roles are not only differentiated by colours and activities but by words and phrases.Then have a look at this piece of research from 1972:

In 1972… some three hundred college students were asked to select from magazines and newspapers a variety of pictures that would appropriately illustrate the different chapters of a sociology textbook being prepared for publication. Half the students were assigned chapter headings like “Social Man”, “Industrial Man”, and “Political Man”. The other half was given different but corresponding headings like “Society”, “Industrial Life”, and “Political Behavior”. Analysis of the pictures selected revealed that in the minds of students of both sexes use of the word man evoked, to a statistically significant degree, images of males only — filtering out recognition of women’s participation in these major areas of life — whereas the corresponding headings without man evoked images of both males and females…. The authors concluded, “This is rather convincing evidence that when you use the word man generically, people do tend to think male, and tend not to think female” ([Miller et al. 1980, pages 19-20], quoted by Spertus; emphasis added).
(source: http://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/grammar-and-syntax/gender-neutral-language/ )

Swift and Miller (referred to both in the first paragraph and in this quote) later went on to write their influential Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing which played a significant part in drawing attention to the systematic derogation (or outright denial of the existence) of women in some aspects of language. But in an earlier book, Words and Women, they set out to - in the words of Swift in this illuminating interview with the writers - draw attention to the imbalance in language:

All we wanted to do was to point out to people that ours was a male-centered language. We all have this male-imposed view when we first acquire language, and it gets reinforced in the recess of using language. We wanted people to think about this and then try to come up with their own ways of solving the problem. There is no set solution such as every 'man' should become 'person,' so we refused to make this a how-to-do-it book.

When it was released, it garnered favourable reviews and in the words of Benjamin DeMott of the New York Times was...

...a complacency shaker. It convinces you, if you need convincing, that belief in the inconsequentiality of many of the customs and conventions under examination is, in fact a species of complicity in the continual humiliation of half of the human world. 

So, why come back to this 2012? Hen, that's why. Swedish writers have now taken up the cause and produced their own new gender neutral pronoun, hen, which is explained in this Slate article. There's an interesting take on it from this blogger too, who argues that "It is simply another form of domination and since it lacks substantial support among grass roots it will not succeed".

Will hen catch on as thon, hesh, hir, tem, tey and ter failed to? God knows and hesh ain't letting on yet.

Having a LAFA

Language Variation around the world is the topic that I'm doing with my A2 (ENGA3) students at the moment, so this piece by Afua Hirsch in The Guardian from earlier in the week* is really timely.

In the article, Hirsch looks at the use of Ghanaian English and debates around it, particularly at the ways in which it is pronounced. She outlines the debate early on in the piece:

On one side of the fence are the old-school Ghanaians who were taught throughout their education to mimic received pronunciation – or BBC English, as it is popularly known – with varying degrees of success. On the other side, a backlash is growing against the old mentality of equating a British accent with prestige. Now the practice has a new acronym, LAFA, or "locally acquired foreign accent", and attracts derision rather than praise.

Conveniently for A level students, this is another very neat example of a language discourse or debate around a variety of English, so it's good territory for an ENGA3 paper. And while for many of my current students in Essex, Ghanaian English may seem a long way away, for my old SFX students in south London it was a lot more common. Even if you're not overly familiar with this particular variety of English and can't really tell your Nigerian pidgins from your Jamaican Creoles, the same bigger arguments are at play here: the same pushing and pulling between forces of change and forces of tradition.

Hirsch explains that part of the argument comes down to prestige:

...the idea that sounding "British" carries prestige also has a long history in Ghanaian society, manifesting itself in the country's struggle for independence in the 1940s and 50s, when an ideological difference emerged between an Oxbridge-educated Ghanaian elite and more radical, left-leaning leaders.

As with regional varieties and many other national varieties, the way you say something isn't always treated neutrally. While the sounds themselves don't really mean anything beyond the words they convey, they often signal much more - class, background, outlook and upbringing - so the arguments around how Ghanaian English is pronounced tap into all of these concerns.

 For Question 2 on the ENGA3 paper, the emphasis tends to be more to do with features of language rather than attitudes towards its use (although there is crossover) so this site, linked to in the article, gives an interesting (and bizarre) range of examples of Ghanaian English phrases for you to analyse.


(*thanks to @JaneSetter (blog here) for the link)

Updated on Monday 16th April to add:

This Pakistani-based newspaper website also refers to the Afua Hirsch article and adds its own local dimension to the argument. Definitely worth a read if you're working on World Englishes at the moment.

Rhyming slang: they haven't got a Scooby

There have been some interesting responses to last week's story about Cockney Rhyming Slang's supposed death. In The Independent the linguist, Tony Thorne questions whether it actually constituted a genuine dialect and looks at the new slang that's taken its place:

The cliques who occupy the high ground of cool these days, at least in their own minds, are the hipsters of Shoreditch and Hoxton, the patois-speaking street gangs and their imitators, Lady Gaga and Nicky Minaj-fixated teens, and their gloomy emo counterparts. These groups all have one thing in common: they completely lack humour, and rhyming slang is above all a joke, a feature of a mind-set for which cheerful irony, back-and-forth banter and self-mockery are mainstays.

He goes on to describe  the language of these "patois-speaking street gangs" as "pseudo-Afro-Caribbean 'Jafaican'", which I'd argue isn't really a good way of describing it, but he has a point about the constant reinvention of slang, and as an author and expert in the field, he knows his onions.

Elsewhere, Jenny McCartney in The Daily Telegraph laments the passing of Cockney Rhyming Slang describing it as "obscure and expansive, relishing the playful drawing-out of speech" (scroll down to last item here). This is worth considering from a Language Change (ENGA3 and ENGB3) perspective, as there are many reasons why people use language and they're not always related to making things quicker and simpler, often being connected to wordplay and acts of identity.