Responding to accent attitudes

This post follows on from this one where I set a Paper 2 Section B pair of questions based on the two texts here. My current Year 13 students did the Question 3 as a homework task and have given me permission to share extracts of their work, so thanks to them for writing such good answers and for agreeing to share their work. 

I’m not sharing their full answers as I think that’s a) a bit extra and b) slightly risky when there are centre-assessed tasks round the corner. So, I’ve selected what I thought were useful extracts to illustrate various aspects of the question. As ever, the comments I’m making are my own views and shouldn’t be taken as being official marking policy (whatever that is) or anything remotely ‘right’. I hope they’re helpful though and I’m happy to discuss them further via the EngLangBlog Twitter account.

Quick reminder:

Text A: Oh Come off it, France. Laughing at Accents is a National Sport - David Mills, The Sunday Times, November 2020

Text B: Life Has Been So Much Smoother Since I Adopted a Posh Accent - Susan Gray, Daily Telegraph, February 2020

We used the 2019 mark scheme for this as it was the closest to the task set, so you might find it helpful to refer to that.

Openings

Let’s think about what makes a good opening to an answer on these texts.

 

Remember that you’re dealing with two texts together, so it makes sense to compare and contrast the two texts throughout your response and you can start that in your opening paragraph. You could start with one of the following points (or some combination of them), for example:

1. Both texts are about social attitudes to accents.
   
2. Both texts draw on personal experiences and testimony to paint a broader picture of collective experience.
   
3. Both texts are op-eds published in right-wing/right of centre British newspapers and advance arguments that linguists might consider prescriptive.
   
4. Both take a recent news event to launch into a wider reflection on the role of accents in British society (Text A responds to calls for a new law in France & Text B picks up a call from a Yorkshire poet that Northern accents should be more widely represented in the media.).
   

It’s probably a good idea not to write too long an intro - and definitely avoid just being too generic and listing where they were published, broad comments about the supposed age and politics of the readership - but it’s also a good idea not to leap into too much close analysis of language right at the start. 

These examples below work quite well, to my mind, but in different ways.

Both text A and text B are opinion pieces on the importance of being able to code switch between regional accents and the possibilities it can open up for speakers. Whilst text A is a Sunday Times article and text B is a Telegraph article, they both use personal testimonies to portray reasons as to why their own original regional accents get put to the side from time to time to propel themselves forward.

• Quite concise and to the point.
  
• Makes connections between the texts in terms of style and content.
  
• Could perhaps offer a more developed view of what arguments are being made.
  

Text A is a newspaper article from The Sunday Times, which is widely read by a lot of right leaning, middle-aged adults. The language is written with a conversational tone, in a relatively accessible register. The primary purpose of the article is to entertain the readers, but also inform them of the recent French legislation proposal, to illegalise Accent Discrimination in France. Text B is a newspaper article from The Telegraph, which is mostly read by a similar demographic to that of the Sunday Times- middle aged, conservative, and those who are middle class. The register of Text B is colloquial and similar in style to Text A, and there is an anecdotal nature with a few contextual references, specific to Britain. The primary purpose of text B is to entertain the reader and provide the audience with the author’s personal experiences, as an individual who has upwardly converged their language for the sake of their professional success.

• Covers more ground: content, audiences, style/register, purposes.
  
• Connects the two texts but at different parts in the paragraph.
  
• Could be edited down a bit by combining reference to both texts from the start.
  
• We probably don’t want to see lots of specific examples in an opening paragraph (they should come later) but is there a risk that the comments about register and style might sound too general?
  

What’s the best way to proceed after the intro section? There are different options here.

 

• You could choose to focus on one text in more detail to begin with and then start linking it to the second text.
  
• You could plan topic paragraphs where you discuss both texts together throughout.
  
• You could concentrate on the ways accents are being represented in each text before moving on to consider author positioning and wider discourses.
  
• You could start with the wider discourses and then zoom into the details of each text.
  

Somewhere along the line, you’ll need to do most of these things, but the order is up to you. Remember that for AO4, you’ll need to make language connections across both texts to hit level 3 and to make links to meanings and wider discourses to hit levels 4 and 5, so it does make sense to link the analysis of the two texts where you can.

Looking at how accents are represented in the texts

Here’s an example of where someone has focused on how Text A represents an accent. What would you credit here and why? What could you add to take this a little higher?

The extended noun phrase of ‘the high, constrained whining of the Brummie’ is foregrounded to show the writer's clear distaste for the accent. The premodifying adjectives ‘high’ and ‘constrained’ are used to present the accent as feminine and wrong - attributes particularly not desired by most men who are encouraged by society to fulfill their gender role. Mills describes their speech as ‘whining’ in order to show that his opinion matches that of the stereotype - which enables him to distance the Wolverhampton accent from it.

Good things to credit:

Things to develop:

This next example focuses more on how accents and dialects, more broadly, are represented in one of the texts.

In text B, the writer states that: “Tying people to their dialect of origin is not a social mobility springboard but a trap.” The pre modified noun phrase ‘social mobility springboard’ is interesting here as the implication is that using standard English will facilitate social mobility, and potentially be a door opener to opportunities in the field of work. The use of the concrete noun ‘trap’ carries connotations of imprisonment and perhaps even deception.

Have a quick look back at the mark scheme (levels 3 and above) and see what you might credit in just this short extract. While AO4 is normally about connections between texts, it can also be about connections between one text and the wider discourses around the issue, so you might find some AO4 to credit here as well. I’ve completed this one for you.

AO1 to credit:  pre modified noun phrase  concrete noun connotations

AO3 to credit: Engages with what the noun phrase represents and means (its connotations and implications)

AO4 to credit:  Discourse of opportunity - but room to further explain this and go into more depth. Discourse of entrapment suggested - scope to develop this too.

Here’s a different take on that same part of the text.

Finally, her most compelling statement is: “Staying loyal to your regional dialect is not a social mobility springboard, it’s a trap.” The phrasal verb ‘staying loyal’, presents the idea that maintaining your regional dialect as an ongoing battle. By using the gerund of the dynamic verb ‘to stay’, it makes it appear that loyalty is a continuous action and therefore more of a commitment. Furthermore, the second independent clause ‘it’s a trap’, again makes reference to the idea of entrapment and how using specific dialects will restrict you. The concrete noun ‘trap’, implies that there is a sense of deception for people who use certain dialects, and perhaps ‘trap’ acts as a form of metonym which represents the entire hierarchy of class.

Again, have a look at the mark scheme and see what you might credit here,

AO1 to credit:

AO3 to credit:

AO4 to credit:

Here’s another example where someone has written about how an accent is represented. I’ve highlighted in red what I think are some of the strengths of this extract and in blue what I think could be developed or queried. 

Although Text B has a negative view of regional accents, her opinion is not as direct. Instead Susan Gray presents RP as superior: ‘Life is unquestionably smoother if you are well spoken.’ The noun phrase and collocation ‘well spoken’ implies that speakers of RP are on a linguistic pedestal compared to those with regional accents. This is a common belief in the UK, with projects against instances of ‘accentism’ whereby people are faced with hardship in the workplace due to accent prejudice. The sentence is a declarative, which therefore presents her opinion and personal experience as a fact. The conditional clause ‘if you are well spoken’ implies that the only way to make your life easier is if you speak in this way, which encourages you to take the same changes that she has. Additionally the adverb ‘unquestionably’ acts as an intensifier (in the same way as Text A) to exemplify her point and persuade the reader to follow her view.

• What would you say about each highlighted bit here?
  

Looking at how the writers position themselves in the texts

This is quite a neat example of looking at how an accent is represented in the text and how the writer is using that to address and position the reader. 

In text B the writer states that having a regional accent, “doesn’t mean you have to be lumbered with the accompanying dialect for the rest of your life.” The verb “lumbered” deliberately uses an informal register to enable the writer to align himself with his readers and create a relationship to then offer advice. However, this may not be an effective choice of lexis as the connotations of “lumbered” insinuates that many are hindered and burdened with an accent. Hence, this may have the effect of readers feeling disadvantaged due to them not having a ‘posher’ accent. 

Another example where positioning is looked at effectively:

Text A differs from Text B in this way as the writer consciously makes an effort to distance himself from his background and others with an accent. However, the texts are similar in that this is an effective line of argument because it conveys the idea that we all have the knowledge and skill to code-switch and consequently all opinions could be treated equally as importantly as those with ‘posh’ accents. This is especially clever as many of the readers of the Telegraph may have experienced accent discrimination and this offers advice on how to deal with it. The writer says “I haven’t once regretted ditching my London Irish accent...”. The use of the contraction “haven’t” as well as the material verb “ditching” creates an informal tone which therefore uses synthetic personalisation.

Looking at wider discourses

This is an area that I think could have been developed for everyone (a little bit, at least). Specifically mentioning the word ‘discourses’ can help, I think. And having some named discourses to refer to can also be useful. The linguist Jane Sunderland says that there isn’t really a ‘dictionary of discourses’ and she’s right, but if you can name and describe the discourses you see, you can construct your own dictionary of them. 

For example, accentism often taps into discourses of restriction/freedom, burden/benefit, advancement/hindrance, good/bad language (morality?), local/(in)ternational, etc.

Where do we see the discourses appearing in the texts?

 

Nice example here

Gray also feeds into this discourse, slightly more subtly, in her extended metaphor where she compares adopting a new accent to owning a ‘really good fake painting’. On the surface this seems like a good comparison, however more pragmatically, when one thinks about the world of art and paintings, it is often an industry associated with the upper class. Owning expensive paintings is a symbol of wealth. Therefore she presents the idea that RP is the ‘real’ painting, people who mimic RP are a good ‘fake painting’ which means that non-RP speakers must be a bad ‘fake painting’. In the world of art, a real painting is more valuable and treasured than a fake painting, therefore you could argue that she presents the idea that RP is the ideal and most valuable variant of English.

Bits that not everyone looked at

There were one or two answers where someone looked at aspects of the texts that others didn’t talk about. 

He creates a sense of nationalism within this article through the use of his references to France and the negative connotations he attaches to Parisians. The simple modal sentence “Parisians could soon be sneering a lot less.” By using the post-modifying comparative adjective ‘less’, is humorous because it implies that Parisians will always be sneering, but reducing accent discrimination will reduce this. This is an effective choice because the writer is aware of the target audience and what misconceptions they may have, one being that all French people look down on those around them. However, on a deeper level it also feeds into the ongoing competition between the French and British people, and the hostility they have had with one another for centuries. By referencing the French in the first and last paragraph of this article, not only is structurally cyclical - which is a stylistic feature, but also is a method of encouraging the reader to agree with the points the writer is making because if they are in agreement with his perception of French people, than they may hold perceptions of other societal issues. Therefore it is an effective way of presenting his argument because before mentioning his main points within the article, he has already generated reader support.

What I liked here:	Bits to check/develop:
The focus on the references to the French and how these are used to align to the readers’ supposed values The linking of discourses of nationalism to prescriptive attitudes towards language The focus on the references to the French news story as part of a cyclical structure to the text	Not sure I’d use the term ‘modal sentence’ ‘A lot less’ is working as an adverb here (postmodifying the verb ‘sneering’)

This second example picked some good things to look at but could have been developed a bit more.

Mills states that the Wolverhampton accent ‘leaves the seat up, doesn’t wash its hands and calls a spade a shovel’. By personifying the accent via the third person pronoun ‘it’, Mills is implying that the way of speaking is directly associated with the stereotypes of people from that region. The triplet structure enables Mills to paint a picture and create a stereotypical image in the reader’s minds.

Within the clause, the phrasal verbs used describe failing to do the basic actions of going to the toilet, washing your hands and labelling objects. This implies that the typical Wolverhampton citizen is unhygienic and lacking in intelligence. Therefore Mills is stating that using a Wolverhampton accent portrays you as being a certain type of person.

What I liked here:	Bits to check/develop:
The focus on personification as a technique to represent the accent Linking this to stereotypes about the users of an accent The description of phrasal verbs	Why does he create this image of fellow Wolverhampton speakers? What does he hope to achieve by representing them in this way? Are any wider discourses about accentism signalled here? What about this ‘calling spade a shovel’ expression?!

"Call a spade a spade" or "call a spade a shovel" are both forms of the figurative expression which state that the speaker should call, or has called, a noun by its most suitable name without any reservation to the strained formalities that may result. The implication is telling the truth regarding the nature of the thing in question, speaking frankly and directly about it,even if it is considered coarse, impolite, or unpleasant. (Wikipedia)

So, what's he saying here? Is he trying to represent the speakers of the Wolverhampton accent as simple, straightforward and perhaps rather unsophisticated people? It appears so. Perhaps there's an element of admiration in there too for their authenticity, but it all sounds a bit unhygienic, especially during these hand-sanitised times. 

Anyway, I hope that provides some ideas for how you might approach texts like these. I’ve not covered everything and I think there’s more that could be said about the wider discourses, the links to other news stories about accents and perhaps more about the genres and expectations of op-eds like this but that leaves you with some things to think about. 

Thanks again to the students who have shared their work here.

Analysing accent attitudes for Questions 3 & 4: an example question

 

We’ve been doing some work on Paper 2 Questions 3&4 recently as we wait (and wait) to see what Ofqual and the exam boards tell us about how centre assessed grades will be worked out this year. And as part of this, I’ve been putting together a few Question 3 and 4 text pairings on different topic areas. As accentism and attempts to challenge it have been in the news a lot, it seemed like a good idea to focus on that. 

There have been loads of stories about it (I mentioned a few in this post) and plenty of interesting articles for analysis, so it’s ripe for discussion. It’s also quite close in theme to the paper that was set in 2019, so the mark scheme for that paper can come in handy. Do you remember 2019? When exams were a thing and examiners got paid for marking them, rather than teachers being expected to mark them for nothing. Not bitter, honestly… just sad and quite a lot poorer. 

Anyway, all that aside, here’s one that I put together based on these two articles.

Text A is by David Mills in The Sunday Times (November 2020).
Text B is by Susan Gray in The Daily Telegraph (February 2020).  

(Trigger warning: there is a picture of Margaret Thatcher.)

Q3 

Analyse how language is used in Text A (Oh Come Off It...) and Text B (Life Has Been So Much Smoother...) to present views about accents. 

In your answer you should:

• examine any similarities and differences you find between the two texts 

• explore how effectively the texts present their views. 

Q4 

Write an opinion article on views about accents. In your article you should assess the ideas and issues raised in Text A and Text B. 

You should refer to ideas from language study and argue your own views. 

Even better, I’ve got a few nice extracts from student responses for this that I thought I’d share, along with my commentary on why I thought they were good (and in a few cases, what might be developed a bit more). I’ll put that in a second post along with some activities you might want to use to go with it.

Popular discourses around accents

Everyone has got an opinion about accents and that’s OK, but when those opinions and personal preferences start to influence how people are treated and made to feel, that becomes more of a problem. Part of the problem is that the language most people use to describe accents is often rather general and non-specialist, and tied to personal judgements about people’s characters. So, for example, even when we think we’re being nice by saying that one area’s accent is ‘warm’ or ‘friendly’ or that someone else’s accent is ‘charming’ and ‘educated’, it uses language that has a flipside. For each of these adjectives there’s a set of opposing qualities, which we’re implying might be used for other accents: cold, aloof, unfriendly, hostile, charmless, uneducated… stupid. 

You might shrug your shoulders and think ‘So what?’ and that’s probably a fairly common response, but when you’re studying English Language at A level, I’d argue that it matters. It matters, partly because we’re studying language and we need to do better than just use casual descriptions that might cause offence or hurt, but it also matters because we want you to be able to analyse discussions about language with a critical eye on Paper 2 and these terms are one of the ways in to doing that, so it pays to be alert to them.

Articles about accents have appeared quite frequently in actual exam papers for Paper 2 and in textbooks and teacher resources for the paper, because accents are always under discussion. Whether it’s attitudes to regional accents, discussions about social class and accent, people dropping their accents or being made to feel ashamed about them, or even accent prejudice being made illegal, there’s plenty of material out there that would make good Paper 2 Section B texts.

But generally speaking, they aren’t written by linguists, so many of them recycle rather dubious attitudes that some people don’t have accents, that some accents are intrinsically better than others, that we should encourage people to drop their home accents, or that we should discourage young people from using regional varieties in school. In other cases, they might be written by experts in one field – voice coaching, say – but not by experts in language study itself and those pose their own difficulties, because they can often appear pretty knowledgeable but still peddle some unhelpful and linguistically unsound concepts. They can also – like the article I linked to earlier today – get their geography a bit shonky…

And then we have discussions about accent on social media, where opinions about a person’s character, personality and political persuasion may well seep into comments about their accent or language style, comments that in any other case would probably be seen as disparaging and unfair. This has certainly been the case in recent comments about the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, whose accent includes a feature sometimes called -g dropping, but which is probably more accurately described as using the alveolar /n/ rather than the velar nasal /ŋ/ so words like singing, talking and moving are pronounced as singin, talkin and movin. Whatever your views on her politics (and mine are…umm… *quite* negative) it’s not really fair to attack her accent, because attacking that is likely to make others with that accent feel that their speech is being singled out. And they've done nothing wrong.

So, where does this lead for Paper 2 Language Discourses work? One thing you can do is to extract some key quotations from a few of the articles I’ve linked to in this blog, or some of the social media posts about accent features, and have a think about how accents are being represented through language. You might ask yourself a few of the following questions:

· Which adjectives are being used to describe different accents or ways of speaking?
· What connotations are attached to those descriptions?
· Are sounds being described in a figurative way (ie using metaphor or simile)?
· What wider discourses are being constructed or reproduced by these descriptions? Are we, for example, seeing a discourse of disability or obstruction associated with certain accents? A discourse of success attached to others? Accents being presented as ‘opening doors’ or ‘paving the way to success’?
· Are the speakers of these accents grouped together in any way that might be problematic? Could these representations be challenged from a linguistic standpoint?

Thinking big: planning and structuring Paper 2 essays

This is a guest post from Jon Palmer who is an English teacher and language geek based in Oxfordshire. Thanks a lot to Jon for writing this.

Having read a recent post on EngLangBlog, which discussed AQA Paper 2 Section A AO1 and advised on using sentence stems, connecting phrases and the like in order to help students grasp the idea of evaluation and construction of a guided argument, I made the mistake of responding with a brief mention of how I’ve been developing using AO2 subject knowledge to help plan responses to potential questions and arm my charges with the best possible chances upon entering the exam.  Dan responded with a suggestion that I write a contribution to the blog and - short story shorter - here we are.  Go easy on me: I’m new round these parts.

My planning sessions (always with Year 13) revolve around the class identifying the potential questions that could come up in the exam and explicitly discussing how we would respond to these in the exam.  This is always teacher-led (visualiser is key) and can take several weeks from start to finish.  Because we’re going over course material in order to create our plans, this also forms a part of our revision process, so I’ve found the best time to do this is the first half of summer term.  We should also note that the below is intended to be used in conjunction with, not in opposition to, Dan’s AO1 guidelines.  Using both together will help students understand the requirements and rigour of evaluation.

Considering this, it’s important to establish, at this point, that what we’re not doing here is creating a series of identical essays which pupils memorise and then regurgitate in exams.  If nothing else, having worked as an examiner and marked dozens of essays starting ‘language is not a static monolith’, I have too much respect for my fellow teachers than to make them sit through a whole centre of identical responses.  Moreover, it inevitably doesn’t work.  Exams aren’t designed for that, and neither are Year 13s.

Instead, what we do is try to crystallise the course into the Big Questions that we ask at A-Level Language study.  Identifying these helps us to recognise that, whilst there are many different areas that we study, the interconnectedness of language study and discourses means that there are overlaps, and, whilst questions can be rephrased and different vocabulary used, essentially we are often being commanded to perform the same tasks.  This’ll usually take 10-20 minutes of the first lesson (also useful to assess understanding, knowledge of the course and misconceptions) and will leave us with a list that might look something like this:

Evaluate the idea that…

-    language change is destructive/damaging…

-    language change is accelerating due to technology/social change/movement

-    language can/should be controlled

-    women and men speak differently

-    some accents are better than others

-    world English is a family

-    the language used to (self) represent social groups is significant

-    social groups affect language

That last one, I know, is broad.  But so far, on the A-Level at least, that’s about as specific as we’ve had in terms of Language Diversity outside of gender.  Although the possibility that a question like ‘Evaluate the idea that Occupation Register is anathema to civil discourse’ isn’t zero, I’m confident that, with the choice of questions, it is unlikely that pupils could ever be stung by the choice between two such ‘write what’s in my head’ essays that push them to answer based on knowledge of a specific and limited part of the course.  In general, we know that it’s the interaction between various elements that make language study so interesting, and we should encourage our classes to reflect this in their essays.

So, having done this, we move onto my planning method for arming each student with potential essay plans for their exams.

The idea is that we choose standard discourses that we can use as a planning tool for a generic essay template to cover each potential topic, with the explicit understanding that it will inevitably need tweaking on the day of the exam depending on the exact wording of the question.  As above, it isn’t a case of ‘learn an essay by heart’ but rather the creation of an adaptable revision resource that will pre-arm students with the basic building blocks for ensuring that their AO1 organisation is fully supported by an embedded AO2. It’s a modular system that means that we can insert the relevant paragraphs where we need them in order to create a guided, conceptual evaluative response.

Within the plan each paragraph needs to have the opportunity to explore the area in depth and evaluate, offering support or challenge from other theorists as appropriate.  It needs more than anyone would ever write in an exam so that the right choices can be made depending on the nature of the question.  Each reference to research or theory needs a variety of real-world examples that can be used depending on the argument – we don’t want to be dreaming these up in exams, we want them easily accessible in long term memory.

After coming up with our plans we then practise writing a series of paragraphs and essays using them, to practise how we could modify our approach depending on what’s expected by the question and what our thesis is. In the past few weeks, I’ve trialled using the AO1 techniques from the last EngLangBlog entry and have found that these two approaches to work together excellently. If you haven’t yet used a visualiser, I’d like to take a minute to sing their praises.  Writing an essay out in full, by hand, whilst providing a commentary on my thought processes to classes has been the single most effective change in my teaching in recent years.

Before I show you some examples, a word on introductions and conclusions.  I’ve found these can be some of the most difficult parts of the essay for students to engage with.  Essay structure isn’t really taught pre KS5 (in English at least) beyond a quick two sentence summary at the end, and maybe a signposting intro.  So, if they write introductions at all, they tend to be vague and task-focussed, maybe looking a bit like ‘There are lots of opinions about X.  I will look at these opinions in this essay and try to decide which are best’.  At best these are pointless, at worst they are obfuscating word salad that can prejudice examiners against anything that follows.  I explicitly teach the formation of thesis statements early in the course. These one or two sentence argument summaries mean that a student can front end their essay with a focussed argument from which the rest of their essay can proceed – helping to secure props for AO1 guidance.  So, for the questions posed above we may come up with a series of statements looking like this:

-    language change is destructive/damaging…

·   Despite negative attitudes toward language change, there is very little to suggest that there is anything negative about the process; the English Language is instead characterised by its diachronic history.

-    language change is accelerating due to technology/social change/movement

·   The changes made to our culture by technology, such as internet communications, easier global travel and the need for lingua francas within multi-lingual communities, do suggest that language change occurs at a faster rate than it did historically, when changes such as the Great Vowel Shift took place over centuries.

-    language can/should be controlled

·   Attempts to control language have, with a few notable exceptions, been unsuccessful, and resistance to these attempts themselves create new forms of language and discourse.

-    women and men speak differently

·   Any perceived differences in language between genders reflects on cultural expectations within society rather than any biological differences.

-    some accents are better than others

·   The nature of language means that it is in a state of constant change; any notion that some accents are more prestigious than others can, at best, only be temporary.

-    world English is a family

·   The collection of pidgins, creoles and koinés that make up World Englishes have far more in common with each other than differences and are better regarded as a family than individual languages.

-    the language used to (self) represent social groups is significant

·   Language use forms a huge part of personal and group identity, and the language used to represent those groups can have huge effects, both negative and positive, on their perception by others.

-    social groups affect language

·   Sociolects are evident in many different social groups, such as socio-economic class, occupation and age, and it is clear that a person’s language use, and by extension their idiolect, can be significantly affected by these.

Once we have a thesis statement, the formation of a coherent introduction becomes much easier: state your intentions, give an overview of the subject in question and signpost your arguments for the rest of the essay. For my more able students I may encourage them to consider how a creative metaphor (again, nothing related to geology) can add cohesion to their essays, and, when fully considered in advance of the exams, can help them to start their responses running.  Successful pupils have generated sporting, literary, performance and masquerade metaphors to introduce their essays.

For conclusions I preach brevity.  Summarise the argument again, discuss some other ideas (if appropriate) and add a final thought.  A couple of sentences, four at the most. Much like this paragraph.

In the spirit of Rosenshine, I’ve provided a worked example for the first plan and reduced my input as I work through some of the questions above.  With some areas I’ve shown what sort of questions I may ask my classes while we write our plans.  These may prove to be more useful – I’ve rarely found any classes to have the same ideas as others – and helping them to individually formulate their ideas is far more useful and productive than prescription.

 

Language Change

The obvious structure here revolves around Aitchison’s metaphors.  A paragraph each focussing on the discourses that surround each metaphor and evaluating their success.  There are some debates over the usefulness of Aitchison, and a tendency by some weaker pupils to mistake her for a prescriptivist (no matter how many times they’re told…) so these can be planned as ‘attitudes to language change’ rather than framed within Aitchison’s ideas if necessary.  I believe Dan is looking at exploring this area in future, so watch this space.  In the plan below the sentence in parenthesise for each paragraph is the ‘safe’ option.

 

My plan may look something like – with potential examples in italics:

1 – Damp Spoon.  (Language change is due to laziness).

Support – prescriptivist viewpoints in general, existence of style manuals, people like Lynne Truss, the historical Grammarian movement, Mackinnon’s contrasts. Examples: droppin’ of consonants in speech, glottal stop, h dropping is ‘osptial’,

Challenge – Halliday’s Functional Theory, Lexical Gaps, Deutscher’s model of language change, Examples: Great Vowel Shift (current pronunciation not considered incorrect), rebracketing (‘an eke name’ became ‘a nickname’ whilst ‘a napron’ became ‘an apron’.

 

2- Crumbling Castle. (Things ain’t what they used to be).

Support – veneration of Shakespeare & Dickens et al, rise of taboo language and swearing (Dr Love’s work on the spoken corpus is useful here) John Humphrys, Goodman’s Informalisation Theory. Examples – can be useful to have a couple of hallowed phrases from literature here – ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ (Shakespeare), ‘The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again’ (Dickens), increased use of ‘fuck’ between 1994-2014 as identified by Love.

 

Challenge – Milton’s Golden Age, Tide Metaphor. Examples: worth noting that Shakespeare himself is credited with inventing (or at least being the first to write) dozens of words and phrases into the language.  Differences between Chaucer (‘And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche’) or even earlier works (‘If ȝe wyl lysten þis laye bot on littel quile’ – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) to demonstrate the changes even between 14th Century and Shakespeare’s 16th/17th. Paul McCartney wrote ‘take these broken wings and learn to fly’ long after any supposed Golden Age had passed.  Newer functions of swearing (again from Love)

3- Infectious Disease. (We pass on language change: we all know how diseases work these days…)

Support – Substratum Theory, Hockett’s Random Fluctuation, Chen’s S-Curve. Examples: Haitch, on tender hooks, slang, contractions.

Challenge- Wave Model, Postal’s Random Fluctuation. Examples: eponyms, anthimeria (changing functions of words) e.g. to google, to text)

 

Gender

Two choices here, you can choose 3 of Tannen’s contrasts or use a basic Deficit, Difference, Dominance plan.  I’d veer to the latter, but it may depend on your group.  Tannen’s contrasts run the risk of pushing conclusions toward a Mars/Venus dichotomy.  I prefer to work through the models in turn but ensure that the plan allows for clear evaluation of each one rather than just writing a potted history.

  

Attitudes to accent

Here I’d lead the conversation to identify what those attitudes are (as in the planning above with language change).  The conversation will help us to formulate our plan. I may ask questions such as:

What does dialect levelling suggest about attitudes to accent?

Why might convergence or divergence (Accommodation Theory) be something people feel are necessary?

What does Matched Guise research suggest about attitudes to accent?

 

Social Groups –

In which ways does a person’s occupation affect their language use? Is this permanent?

How does socio-economic class affect language use?  Do people take pride in how their sociolect reflects on their origins?

How does language change with age?  Do people change how they talk when they get older, is it a system of constant change, or is there some mixture between the two?

Guiding the reader: essays for Paper 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example 1 

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

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

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

Example 2 

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

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

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

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

On the other hand, it is important to consider… 

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

Example 3 

These are simple but effective examples from two different essays. 

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

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

One variety of language that can be explored is… 

However, a factor that needs to be considered is… 

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

Example 4 

These are taken from two separate answers. 

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

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

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

Example 5 

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

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

Example 6 

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

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

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

Planning and writing Paper 2 essays

Recent appeals for help and discussions on Twitter have prompted me to think a bit more about Paper 2 Section A essays and how they can be approached, so I’ve put together a few thoughts here. I can’t claim any great originality or insight but you might find a few of these things useful.

I’ve had a look back through older blogs for this specification and highlighted a few areas that you might want to look at alongside this one, so they are listed here:

What's the difference between discuss and evaluate? 

Understanding the links and connections between change and diversity

Topics, areas and overlapping on Paper 2

What to do with your knowledge for AO2

I think one of the first things to work out is what you are being expected to do for this part of the paper. You’ve got about 45 minutes to plan and write an essay on either Question 1 (Diversity) or Question 2 (Change) where there’s also a fairly good chance there will be overlap between the two topics areas (after all, diversity and change are intertwined). That’s not a huge amount of time, but it should be plenty to show what you know and – more importantly – to answer the question that’s been set.

You are being given an idea to evaluate. That means you’ll need to do more than just offload everything you know about everything to do with change or diversity; you’ll need to focus clearly on the idea you’re being presented with, assess its merit, discuss different positions, select the most helpful examples and evidence for those positions and come to a conclusion.

Unlike questions where there’s data (ie texts to analyse – Paper 1, Qs 1&2, Paper 2 Q3 - or data sets to discuss and link to an idea – Paper 1 Qs4 &5) the AO1 is mostly assigned to the structure and clarity of your essay, so it’s not about labelling and describing language, although you do need to use a ‘linguistic register’ in your answer. To my mind, that means subject specific terminology eg sociolect, dialect levelling, RP, descriptions of sounds and grammar features in your examples. You need to guide the reader and have a structure to do well with AO1.

Ideally, you’ll use your planning time to work out a roadmap for your answer and that will mean having a clear end point in mind. I don’t think it’s a good idea to just ramble through different ideas and then chance upon a conclusion; it’s really important to have a clear destination in mind and guide your reader through the arguments to get there. As you’re being asked to evaluate, you are being asked to decide for yourself – based on the linguistic knowledge you have and the evidence you produce – what you make of the idea. And yes, I think that involves offering an opinion. How else do you evaluate something?  You will need to make a judgement.

So, what will your roadmap look like? You’ll need to look at different ideas along the way (that’s what Level 4 of AO2 requires you to do), so that means thinking of the most appropriate arguments and examples to explore. One useful tip might be to think of examples that can be used to argue both sides of a debate and illustrate different perspectives on the idea being presented.

For example, in the 2019 question ‘Evaluate the idea that language variation has decreased over time’, you could consider the role that technology has played in language variation. On one side, it could be argued that technology has led to a huge upsurge in variation: groups of people – gamers, bird watchers, hackers, conspiracy theorists and music nerds - find new communities online, spend more time in those virtual communities and, as a result, their language diverges more from the norm. That’s an increase in language variation.

On the other hand, technology has also reduced variation by putting more of us in touch with each other than ever before and allowing us to converge in our language styles with people whose language styles might in the past have been very different. That’s a decrease in variation, but both of these have been brought about by technology.

You will need to do more than just discuss ideas broadly, so where will the language knowledge, the theory, the case studies and the examples come from?

Well, you could look at what Susie Dent talks about in her Modern Tribes book about the in-group language of different occupations and social groups to discuss the first point. You could bring in ideas from Lave and Wenger to discuss ‘Communities of Practice’ and you could explore the ideas of jargon and slang from linguists like Julie Coleman, Tony Thorne and many others. What about examples? Modern Tribes is jampacked with them and I’m sure you’ll have a few too, from your own work on language varieties.

And that’s just one aspect that you could explore. Language variation is a really broad area and you might decide that it would be interesting to look at gender variation changing over time. Were those stereotypes about male and female language ever true? If so, how have they changed as social roles have changed? What about the increased focus on non-binary and trans identities in recent years?

You could bring in age-related variation, dialect levelling, accent change and even – because the world is quite literally your oyster - world Englishes. So, as you can see, selecting the most useful material is a big part of doing well in an essay like this. And that will be different material depending on what you’ve been taught and what you’ve researched and studied yourself. Not everyone will answer the question in the same way and there will be loads of different ways of doing well.

In the next post, I’ll suggest a few ways of ‘guiding the reader’ and showing that you’re evaluating.