pupoture

If you're revising Paper 2 of the new AS level, there have been some really helpful articles about some of the topics covered, over the last few days. This piece from The Guardian on Friday (thanks to @ENSFCEnglish ) looks at research carried out by Dr Alexander Baratta into accent prejudice in education and quotes some staggeringly ill-informed views about how trainee teachers should speak. The story is also covered in The Sun  (thanks to @paulkerswill ). A couple of years ago, this story about a teacher made news when it was suggested she had been told to 'tone down' her northern accent while working in a soft, southern, shandy-drinking school (thanks to @Lisa7Pettifer for that link). Elsewhere, Rob Drummond at MMU kindly posted the results of a short survey he had carried out into attitudes towards young people's language and you can find them here . All of this material is useful for both sections of the new Paper 2 (AS and A level) where you might see examples ...

While marking my students' recent work for the directed writing task on Paper 2 of the new spec, I've been jotting down a few ideas about how to address the main areas that need improvement. Apart from some of the stuff I've blogged about recently - making the opinion pieces accessible to non-specialist readers, including enough language knowledge to hit the higher levels of AO2 and developing effective openings and conclusions - one thing that has struck me is this part of the mark scheme for AO2: Under the 'Performance Characteristics' heading (i.e. the general expectations of what students will be doing to be in this Level, rather than the more specific 'Indicative Content' for each paper), the key thing seems to be the notion of identifying different views, approaches and interpretations . If we assume that students already need to have "show detailed knowledge of linguistic ideas, concepts and research" (Level 3), then what Level 4 seems to be...

Section B on Paper 2 of the new AQA AS-level sets a directed writing task which means that students will need to get used to writing in a different way about language topics. In Section A of the paper, they will be writing an essay in response to some stimulus data and a "Discuss the idea..." essay prompt. The sample material on the AQA site has one task (you can find it here and a student response to it with examiner commentary here ) asking students to "Write an opinion article in which you discuss the issues surrounding people changing their accents". The stimulus text is a short extract from the Mail Online looking at media celebrity Donna Air changing her working class Geordie accent to something closer to her posh boyfriend's accent and it's pretty clear that this is not the kind of article that students will need to write for themselves, because a) it's very light on language issues (and AO2 is worth half the marks here) and b) it's a very sh...

One of the big topic areas on the new AQA English Language AS level (and the A level) is Language Diversity, in which we look at how language varies from person to person and place to place. Much of the work done on this topic has focused on spoken language - accents and dialects, for example - but language can vary in written and electronic forms too. Twitter has proved a really useful way of both producing and collecting this kind of data and more is explained in an article looking at the work of Brice Russ at Ohio University, who examined the language in some 400,000 tweets, looking initially for how people in different parts of the USA used either soda or pop to describe fizzy drinks. Gabriel Doyle explains some of the ways in which Twitter can be used to chart change in language and how changes in language spread in this lecture clip. Rachael Tatman, blogging from the Northwest Linguistics Conference in April of 2015 , also noted how Twitter cold be used to identify not just lexi...

If you're looking for material on the topics for paper 2 of the new AQA English Language spec, there'll be some posts coming up after half-term. There's plenty on the blog already, though but it's labelled using the old specifications. So, if you're looking for stuff on regional variation, try here . Accent material can be found here . For social variation - class and social groups, try here and here . For occupation and language, try here  and here . And for gender and language, try here . And for Language Discourses and attitudes to variation try here and here (but be aware that language change, ethnicity and world Englishes are A-level only topics and don't appear in the AS level).

With the new term starting and new A and AS levels being taught for the first time, I thought it might be handy to think of ways to get classes starting to think about the kinds of things they'll be doing as the course goes on. I'm sure lots of teachers already have plenty of starters and ice-breakers up their sleeves, but it might be worth thinking about tasks that link to some of the newer areas of the specification. For example, for the first time in ages, we'll be teaching accent, dialect and sociolect to AS/1st year A level students, so why not look at a couple of things connected to that? Here are two ideas based on Language Diversity and another on Textual Variation . Language fingerprints : ask each student to think about what characteristics make up their own unique language identity.  Where were they born?  Where else have they lived?  Which other languages or dialects have they spoken? Where were their parents from? Do they work part-time or do volunteering?...