pupoture

There's never been a better time to be doing your ENGA2 Investigating Representations, I reckon. We've had some huge stories about not just individuals and events but institutions and issues too, even social groups . Here's a quick list of suggestions for possible topics and a link or two to get you started. INDIVIDUALS Russell Brand calling for global revolution Is he a trivial twit? Capitalism is ace, says a capitalist. Nafeez Ahmed takes a more positive view on Brand ISSUES Racism in football rearing its ugly head again Kick It Out SOCIAL GROUPS The Gypsy (Roma) people getting it in the neck again and having their blonde-haired babies taken away from them. Here's a brief history of the Roma Muslims: a BBC Newsbeat survey showed polarised attitudes to Muslims. INSTITUTIONS The Police and how Plebgate has seen confidence in them fall to a new low . How can we trust the police? If the police can stitch up a Government minister, what can they do to the rest of us? MILEY...

The recent slang ban in a London school was debated on a Canadian radio station recently and you can hear what was said through this link .

Basically, tings is getting bare random with this kind of shizzle, yeah? In another (futile) attempt to control behaviour in a school - and language is clearly a powerful type of behaviour - the Harris Academy in Croydon has tried to implement a "slang ban". The BBC covered it here , the Daily Mail here and The Guardian here . It was also discussed by the linguist Paul Kerswill on today's World At One (start listening after 13.30 to hear it). We've gone over the arguments about this kind of ban on several occasions on this blog - first in London , then in Manchester , then Sheffield , and finally in Middlesbrough - so there's not much else to add. Edited on 17.10.13 to correct Guardian link and add Guardian Comment is Free link to Will Coldwell article

In a week or so, we'll be looking at the representation of young people as a social group for our ENGA2 AS English Language lessons, so it's kind of nice of David Cameron to give us some extra ammunition for our classes, even if in the process he's basically sticking two fingers up to every under-25 in the country! Here's Ally Fogg of The Guardian on Cameron's announcement yesterday: It would be wrong to think of David Cameron's proposals to take key benefits away from the under-25s as a new initiative. They form merely the latest chapter in a chilling horror story that began shortly after the coalition took the reins, with the tripling of university tuition fees, the abolition of educational maintenance allowance and the future jobs fund , and was still under way this summer when the chancellor's spending review slashed another £260m from the further education budget. It would be also be a mistake to describe this as a "war on the young" ...

While I was tapping out a blog post about Lindsay Johns' Four Thought programme, the linguist Paul Kerswill was already on the case, writing a response directly to him, which he has kindly allowed us to post here. As one of the linguists involved in the Linguistic Innovators project - the work that put Multicultural London English (MLE) on the map and kicked off so much discussion about slang, dialect and code-switching in the media - he's well placed to offer a more considered reflection on what Johns has presented in his programme. Thank you for your Four Thought programme this evening, which taught me how linguistic action on the ground can make a difference to young people. But I feel I need to challenge you on several points. First (and let me get this off my chest straight away), exactly who are these middle-class, culturally relativist academics who wish to oppress young people by withholding Standard English from them? Maybe you are thinking of academic linguists ...

Fresh from his appearance at the Conservative Party conference , where he angrily denounced "trendy teaching" and "hip hop Hamlet" productions as "viciously racist", while (not so freshly) trotting out a tired Stevie Wonder joke, Lindsay Johns made an appearance on Radio 4's Four Thought programme, with a 15 minute attack on his old favourite, "ghetto grammar" .  We've looked at Johns' arguments about this subject - the need for Standard English and the dangers of street slang to inner city youths - on this blog before and, to be honest, much of what he says in the Four Thought lecture is a slightly reheated version of his older articles which you can find here and here . Unlike Johns, who sees the issue in stark terms - Standard English = good, slang = bad - the issue is more complicated than he suggests. I think he probably realises that, but why let research, reality and facts gets in the way of a good rant? And hey, it seems to ...

Following on from last week's Tonight programme and its focus on attitudes to regional accents, here's a great piece by accent coach Erica Buist on what she describes as snobbery and disdain for foreign accents among many English people. While accent prejudice is nothing new, it's troubling to see how it can apparently stand in the way of well qualified people getting jobs and being accepted. As Buist points out: Even out-and-out xenophobes start sentences with, "I don't mind foreigners, but …" While it's tedious to hear bigotry tarted up as a point of view, at least the lie is an acknowledgement that xenophobia isn't acceptable. But companies don't start sentences with, "we're not xenophobic, but …" – they make it company policy. Elsewhere in the piece she quotes research from the University of Chicago that suggests foreign accents undermine a speaker's credibility with listeners, even if the listeners aren't aware of ...

Last time there was a teachers' strike, I put the blog on strike for a day; this time round, I've decided not to. I'm on strike but have decided that the blog is a labour of love, for which I get no payment, and anyway, I update it so infrequently at the moment that nobody would be able to tell it's on strike. A bit like my teaching, in fact... Anyway, today's post is a quick one about the rules of grammar - which ones to worry about and which ones not to - by The Guardian's Style Guide author David Marsh . In it he deals with some of the arguments people have about things like split infinitives, starting sentences with conjunctions, who/whom and all the rest of it. It's a particularly useful article for A2 students looking at ENGA3 and Language Discourses, but is also handy for anyone who cares about writing clearly and how clarity can be improved with a a bit of careful thought.