pupoture

One of the challenges of exams is that they not only test you on what you know but they also test you on how you interpret the question to show what you know. A case in point is last summer's AS Paper 2 in which lots of students (including many of my own, I'm sure) saw a question about gender and thought "Woo hoo! We've done this one already - it was on last year's Paper 2". Or words to that effect... Of course, a gender question was set on the 2016 paper, but with a very different focus. The problem with this is that - like all the other areas you do for Paper 2 in the AS and the A level - you have to select the most relevant knowledge to address the question that's been asked... not the question you'd have liked to be asked. And with Question 3 on Paper 2, the focus was very much supposed to be on representation of gender. That means that it's not really relevant* to talk about studies into language use and interaction. What's more, the qu...

Gender as a topic area features in both the AS and A level, and can appear in either part of Paper 2. You could get an AS level "Discuss the idea that..." or an A level "Evaluate the idea that..." question in Section A or gender might feature as part of 'language discourses' in Section B. What is meant by 'discourses'? Well, it's something that I've defined elsewhere as a debate or argument about language, but it can also be treated as a way of thinking about, talking about and describing language. If you want to get academic about it (and why wouldn't you?) here's what the linguist Paul Baker has to say about it in his excellent book about language, gender and sexuality, Sexed Text s: Language constructs ideas about gender, represents them to us and often helps establish them as 'common sense'. When people write about gender, they often articulate many of the existing discourses - that gender interaction is like a battle of...

Looking for an example of how language and gender makes the news? Then go no further than these two pieces about the same story. Not only do you get a good sense of how language can be part of a wider battle about gender roles and social inequality but you also get a lesson in language discourses for free. Just have a look at how The Guardian and Mail Online report the same story, use different sources, experts and language techniques to frame their views.

Still on the subject of gender, one area which has long been debated and contested is that of gendered pronouns and what we do when we don't want to signal gender. For example, an expression like "Each student should bring his own lunch" begins with an indefinite determiner ( each ) uses a male (singular) pronoun (or determiner, more accurately here) but assumes that all students will be male. Using his/her is an alternative, but is often seen as a clunky and still puts the male first. "Each student should bring their own lunch" runs into problems with subject and pronoun agreement (singular each and plural their ) but has often been seen as an acceptable way to phrase something like this. However, many formal publications and style guides have ruled against 'singular they' and seen it as a grammatical faux-pas. But even that seems to be changing, and the Associated Press this week announced that they would accept 'singular they' . The case for...

Here are links to old posts on this blog that address language and gender from a representation perspective. Slutwalks Everyday Sexism Pyramids of Egregiousness Calm down, dear And here are some links to more recent discussions of language and gender (thanks largely to Nicky B and her social media antennae):

We've made a start on revising gender for Paper 2 of the A level this week and I've also been finishing off gender with my AS classes before we head into lots of exam revision. There's not a lot of time to teach everything on the A level part of the course after doing the AS last year, so we're relying a fair bit on the material students covered in class last year and hoping they revise the key things themselves, but I've been trying to find a way of approaching it that works. Anyway, today's Daily Mail front page provided an absolute gift for the representation of gender. If you haven't seen it, it's this monstrosity below. While the picture and caption make me want to bang my head repeatedly on the keyboard, shouting "This.Is.Not.The.1950s!" there's something in the whole way that this is presented that goes beyond what I've traditionally taught for this topic and made me consider another angle. A lot of the focus on gender and langua...

Over the summer, you might have read about vocal fry; that’s the kind of deliberately croaky voice demonstrated here by my favourite sit-com teenager, Dalia in Suburgatory .  Recent coverage of vocal fry has all the features of typical media stories on language and gender, and is a great example of why we should be sceptical when reading mainstream media coverage of linguistic issues.   Reading and analysing mainstream media coverage of linguistic issues is, of course, something  A2 students will need to do in your exam; you’ll also need to create your own piece for your intervention coursework.   First, newspapers will pick up on a recent bit of linguistic research, or maybe something they've seen mentioned on Twitter or YouTube.  Journalists are particularly keen on using headlines which express a clear and simple difference between men and women, so they will either reduce complex, nuanced findings to simplistic ‘men do this/women do that’ headlines lik...

While sitting at home, feeling sorry for myself with a bout of man-flu , this article about a curious phenomenon called manterrupting popped up on Twitter. Apparently, manterrupting is when males interrupt women in meetings and/or co-opt (or bropropriate* ) their ideas as their own. It's a man-word like these explained here by Stan Carey on the MacMillan Dictionaries blog and makes use of the man- prefix that has become so productive in recent years. So far we've had... mansplaining : patronising explanations delivered by men to women of things that women probably already know more about (Urban Dictionary definition here ) manspreading : sitting on public transport and spreading one's sweaty flannels in order to secure more seat space (Collins Dictionary definition here ) manscaping : removing unsightly body hair to make oneself more attractive (Oxford Dictionaries definition here ) manslamming :aggressive pavement action involving a man barging into people (often women)...

There's been lots of good material in the papers recently about language and gender, so it's useful for anyone thinking of investigations at AS into representation of social groups & individuals. The Telegraph looks at words which only seem to be used to label or describe women, while The Guardian has its own take on the issue. Fast Company also has a look at the ways in which language is used differently for men and women in their performance reviews, with abrasive being used to describe women much more than men. Elsewhere, the discussion about what slut and sluttish mean - or has meant in the past - is picked up in The Guardian .