We presented a workshop at this year's NATE (National Association for the Teaching of English) conference which was hosted at the British Library from last Thursday until yesterday. Thanks to anyone reading this who was there. We hope it gave you some ideas about where our project is heading and how we can integrate grammar teaching more effectively in our teaching of the subject through Key Stages 3 and 4 and into A level.
The link for the Survey Monkey feedback questionnaire is here and we will get in touch with respondents as soon as we can,along with those of you who gave us email addressses at the event.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
What Rastamouse can tell us about grammar
The new Cbeebies series Rastamouse has been attracting favourable attention for its gentle pace, top soundtrack, likeable characters and, above all, its use of Jamaican English throughout. In fact, it's probably about time the Daily Mail launched a campaign to bring it off our screens for corrupting the nation's youth with its crazy creole.
As well as being fun to watch (and I was watching with my 6 year-old daughter, so it's not as tragic as it sounds) it's a mine of linguistic interest for anyone looking at non-standard grammar. One of the themes that we focused on in this previous post was that the spread of different varieties into the English language mainstream shouldn't be seen as a problem, but an opportunity to look at both the non-standard variety and the standard itself. Rastamouse and Da Easy Crew's use of non-standard grammar can therefore be a great chance to look at areas like subject verb agreement, pronouns and case, elliptical forms, tense formation and pluralisation. Of course, it's also interesting in terms of phonology and lexis, but we'll save them for now.
In episode 6, Hot Hot Hot, for example, Scratchy tells Zoomer "Ya skip a beat" using an uninflected verb skip to signify the past tense (skipped), while Rastamouse says "Mi just not feelin' it today", using the 1st person object pronoun, me, rather than the standard I. In this construction there's also ellipsis of the auxiliary verb in the present progressive construction (mi just not feeling it today, rather than I am just not feeling it today), another typical feature of Jamaican English.
And there's plenty more. Of course, the danger of looking at all of this as a comparison between a standard form and a variety is that a deficit model is applied i.e. that all variations are seen as away from a norm and that the variations are therefore somehow inferior. One way to avoid this - and I can't claim this is foolproof by any stretch - is to highlight the fact that these aren't just arbitrary deviations from a norm, but part of a pattern. The Jamaican English has a very logical system to it and the "rules" are applied consistently to the grammar.
Linguists such as Mark Sebba and Roger Hewitt have looked very closely at varieties of English such as this and charted their influence on the language of English speakers, so if you're looking at creoles for A level English Language or just want to find some interesting resources on language variation, there's plenty to explore.
Now all I need to do is stop watching the episodes on the Cbeebies website and get to work on some resources that use clips from the show. Then all will be irie.
edited to clear up naming confusion
As well as being fun to watch (and I was watching with my 6 year-old daughter, so it's not as tragic as it sounds) it's a mine of linguistic interest for anyone looking at non-standard grammar. One of the themes that we focused on in this previous post was that the spread of different varieties into the English language mainstream shouldn't be seen as a problem, but an opportunity to look at both the non-standard variety and the standard itself. Rastamouse and Da Easy Crew's use of non-standard grammar can therefore be a great chance to look at areas like subject verb agreement, pronouns and case, elliptical forms, tense formation and pluralisation. Of course, it's also interesting in terms of phonology and lexis, but we'll save them for now.
In episode 6, Hot Hot Hot, for example, Scratchy tells Zoomer "Ya skip a beat" using an uninflected verb skip to signify the past tense (skipped), while Rastamouse says "Mi just not feelin' it today", using the 1st person object pronoun, me, rather than the standard I. In this construction there's also ellipsis of the auxiliary verb in the present progressive construction (mi just not feeling it today, rather than I am just not feeling it today), another typical feature of Jamaican English.
And there's plenty more. Of course, the danger of looking at all of this as a comparison between a standard form and a variety is that a deficit model is applied i.e. that all variations are seen as away from a norm and that the variations are therefore somehow inferior. One way to avoid this - and I can't claim this is foolproof by any stretch - is to highlight the fact that these aren't just arbitrary deviations from a norm, but part of a pattern. The Jamaican English has a very logical system to it and the "rules" are applied consistently to the grammar.
Linguists such as Mark Sebba and Roger Hewitt have looked very closely at varieties of English such as this and charted their influence on the language of English speakers, so if you're looking at creoles for A level English Language or just want to find some interesting resources on language variation, there's plenty to explore.
Now all I need to do is stop watching the episodes on the Cbeebies website and get to work on some resources that use clips from the show. Then all will be irie.
edited to clear up naming confusion
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Fight fight fight
This article by Jamie Keddie from One Stop English is a really neat way of getting students to have fun while exploring language. It uses the Google Fight website to test out the frequency of different usages on the internet, so shows you, for example, which out of different to or different from would get more hits ("different from" wins with 27,800,000 hits, compared to 769,000 for "different to", by the way).
While the website is good clean fun, James Keddie's article puts it all in context and explains its use in the classroom, along with some of its potential pitfalls. But of course, every pitfall is just another way of asking students a few more questions about language, so they can be helpful in formulating clearer ideas about how to do research.
While the website is good clean fun, James Keddie's article puts it all in context and explains its use in the classroom, along with some of its potential pitfalls. But of course, every pitfall is just another way of asking students a few more questions about language, so they can be helpful in formulating clearer ideas about how to do research.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Language Wars
There has been some interesting media coverage of a new book by the Evening Standard journalist Henry Hitchings, Language Wars. Hitchings has previously written a fair bit about language, with his book on Johnson's dictionary and The Secret Life of Words both coming recommended.
Language Wars takes on the prescriptive mindset that change is bad and lays into the self-appointed rule-makers of English. It's not a new position, but it's one argued with a lot of passion if the trailers I've read so far are anything to go by, and I'm looking forward to reading the whole book later this week. The book has been reviewed in several places already. The Evening Standard liked it (obviously) but the reviewer seemed a little taken aback at Hitchings' vehemence. The Daily Telegraph, spiritual and actual home of arch-pedant Simon Heffer (predictably) slated Hitchings' stance on "rules".
In an Evening Standard article a week ago, Hitchings picked the changing nature of London English as a good example of how we should accept and embrace language change.
While it's language in general, rather than just specifically grammar, that Hitchings looks at in his article and in much of his book, it's difficult to separate the two. Throughout history, most people's ideas about language have been intertwined with their feelings about the "correctness" or otherwise of what they write and say, and grammar has always had a huge - often negative - role in this. Many of those who have assembled the "rules" have offered grammatical guidance that is often dubious in its nature. Many of the "rules" have been poorly explained or just designed to mark out one section of society as correct and the rest inferior in their usage, so it's no great surprise that to many people grammar is a word full of negative connotations.
Language Wars takes on the prescriptive mindset that change is bad and lays into the self-appointed rule-makers of English. It's not a new position, but it's one argued with a lot of passion if the trailers I've read so far are anything to go by, and I'm looking forward to reading the whole book later this week. The book has been reviewed in several places already. The Evening Standard liked it (obviously) but the reviewer seemed a little taken aback at Hitchings' vehemence. The Daily Telegraph, spiritual and actual home of arch-pedant Simon Heffer (predictably) slated Hitchings' stance on "rules".
In an Evening Standard article a week ago, Hitchings picked the changing nature of London English as a good example of how we should accept and embrace language change.
While it's language in general, rather than just specifically grammar, that Hitchings looks at in his article and in much of his book, it's difficult to separate the two. Throughout history, most people's ideas about language have been intertwined with their feelings about the "correctness" or otherwise of what they write and say, and grammar has always had a huge - often negative - role in this. Many of those who have assembled the "rules" have offered grammatical guidance that is often dubious in its nature. Many of the "rules" have been poorly explained or just designed to mark out one section of society as correct and the rest inferior in their usage, so it's no great surprise that to many people grammar is a word full of negative connotations.
Friday, November 12, 2010
The Clamour for Grammar - thank you
Thanks very much to everyone who came to our Clamour For Grammar day on Wednesday. It was a small, specially-selected - some might say "elite" - group of teachers and advisers who came along for the day and we were really pleased to meet you. We've already had some very positive feedback and are thinking ahead to similar days next term and/or in the summer. If you are interested in coming along to another grammar day (Grammar Hammer, perhaps?) or have specific ideas for what you would like covering in future sessions, please let us know by emailing Dan on the address on this page. We're also interested to find out the best time of year to organise such days.
Thanks too to Seth Mehl for his help on the day.
Thanks too to Seth Mehl for his help on the day.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Spreading the word
We've been trying to raise the profile of grammar teaching and the ideas involved in our project by talking to various other sites and publications, and you can see some of the fruits of that in the following links.
Interview with Ben Zimmer of Visual Thesaurus website: part one & part two. The discussion after the interviews is probably worth having a look at too.
Article in today's Times Educational Supplement by Dick Hudson and Dan Clayton and news story here. Supporting page with further links and reading can be found here.
Thanks to Ben Zimmer for the Visual Thesaurus coverage and Rita Ofori for her help with the TES article.
Interview with Ben Zimmer of Visual Thesaurus website: part one & part two. The discussion after the interviews is probably worth having a look at too.
Article in today's Times Educational Supplement by Dick Hudson and Dan Clayton and news story here. Supporting page with further links and reading can be found here.
Thanks to Ben Zimmer for the Visual Thesaurus coverage and Rita Ofori for her help with the TES article.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
"Correcting" local dialect and slang
The history of grammar teaching has often been associated with prescriptive models in which the "correction" of perceived faults in language has been paramount. While linguists are careful these days to talk about what is "grammatical" or "ungrammatical" and "standard" or "non-standard", rather than what is "right" or "wrong", there is still a tension at the heart of the teaching of English.
Emma Thompson hinted at this when she was widely reported in the media last week as having criticised the language of young people at her old school (Camden School For Girls, incidentally one of the nine secondary schools we're working with on this project) for its supposed reliance on likes, innits and off ofs. While she was fairly careful to couch her criticisms in a liberal language of acceptance of slang in its context and awareness of the need for two languages, at the heart of her attack lies a prescriptive view that some forms of language are just bad and that they make the user of them look bad too.
The grammatical arguments about the terms she chose to pick up on are quite interesting. Innit has been studied in the last few years, and identified as an invariant tag question (a tag that doesn't change to agree with the subject of the statement it follows: so it's innit at the end of she's nice, I am pleased, we are going there and they are bad, etc.). Grammatically, it has become something new. You might - like Emma Thompson - dislike it, but it's got its uses and it is quite a powerful device. Another use, and probably a more recent one is as a response to its tag question form. So, younger speakers often employ it in a conversation to show agreement to it being used as an affective tag.
Also, with like we have a word that has often been used as a filler, but that has now become something else as well. In its quotative usage, we can see that it is used to perhaps dramatise and emphasise elements of reported/direct speech in storytelling. For example:
But it's not just slang that causes upset to a prescriptivist mindset: dialect is a threat too. In yesterday's Daily Mail, a short report told us that teaching assistants in Portsmouth (two of them - close to a national scandal) had been criticised by OFSTED for their use of local dialect. The example quoted in the story, "I likes football", sounds like a fairly typical example of south coast dialect to my ears.
Why is it a problem? Well, if you read the comments that follow the article (never a good idea if you're trying to stay balanced and the right side of happy on a dreary Monday morning) you'll see a splenetic outpouring of disgust. Teachers are illiterate! Tony B-Liar is to blame! Education, education, schmeducation! Country bumpkins shouldn't be allowed near our kids!
That's fairly typical for the Daily Mail's message boards, and among the vitriol and badly spelled attacks on immigrants and left-wing teachers who use street slang is an undercurrent of dismay that the grammar of Standard English is at risk. And here is the tension referred to earlier.
The common perception of regional dialects among many English speakers is that they belong to the lower social orders, that they are inferior forms, but the reality is that many of us use regional forms without being particularly conscious of them. Whether it's the Cockney we was or the Reading he done it, regional dialect is still alive and well, and it has a grammar of its own. The tension comes in establishing its place in relation the grammar of Standard English in the education system.
If one of the key aims of teaching Standard English is to establish a shared, mutually intelligible form of the language for everyone educated in the UK then does having a teaching assistant who uses a local dialect damage the educational opportunities of young people? Probably not. I think an argument that might be effective here is that if we properly study the grammar of both Standard English and regional varieties (and sociolects like slang varieties too) we will learn a great deal more about not just grammar as a system, but also about the history of the language, feelings we have for our own varieties of language and the connections we have to our own communities of practice and social backgrounds.
So, I think it should be argued that neither slang nor dialect should be seen as a threat to the education of young people, but as legitimate and rewarding areas of language study, both of which can help students enrich their understanding of language in all its varieties.
I'd be interested in any views from readers, so please post comments.
Emma Thompson hinted at this when she was widely reported in the media last week as having criticised the language of young people at her old school (Camden School For Girls, incidentally one of the nine secondary schools we're working with on this project) for its supposed reliance on likes, innits and off ofs. While she was fairly careful to couch her criticisms in a liberal language of acceptance of slang in its context and awareness of the need for two languages, at the heart of her attack lies a prescriptive view that some forms of language are just bad and that they make the user of them look bad too.
The grammatical arguments about the terms she chose to pick up on are quite interesting. Innit has been studied in the last few years, and identified as an invariant tag question (a tag that doesn't change to agree with the subject of the statement it follows: so it's innit at the end of she's nice, I am pleased, we are going there and they are bad, etc.). Grammatically, it has become something new. You might - like Emma Thompson - dislike it, but it's got its uses and it is quite a powerful device. Another use, and probably a more recent one is as a response to its tag question form. So, younger speakers often employ it in a conversation to show agreement to it being used as an affective tag.
Also, with like we have a word that has often been used as a filler, but that has now become something else as well. In its quotative usage, we can see that it is used to perhaps dramatise and emphasise elements of reported/direct speech in storytelling. For example:
I'm like, "You're not getting in. You weren't invited".Again, whether you like it or not, it's now got a new way of being used, reflecting the flexibility of our evolving language.
And she's like, "What you gonna do about it?".
But it's not just slang that causes upset to a prescriptivist mindset: dialect is a threat too. In yesterday's Daily Mail, a short report told us that teaching assistants in Portsmouth (two of them - close to a national scandal) had been criticised by OFSTED for their use of local dialect. The example quoted in the story, "I likes football", sounds like a fairly typical example of south coast dialect to my ears.
Why is it a problem? Well, if you read the comments that follow the article (never a good idea if you're trying to stay balanced and the right side of happy on a dreary Monday morning) you'll see a splenetic outpouring of disgust. Teachers are illiterate! Tony B-Liar is to blame! Education, education, schmeducation! Country bumpkins shouldn't be allowed near our kids!
That's fairly typical for the Daily Mail's message boards, and among the vitriol and badly spelled attacks on immigrants and left-wing teachers who use street slang is an undercurrent of dismay that the grammar of Standard English is at risk. And here is the tension referred to earlier.
The common perception of regional dialects among many English speakers is that they belong to the lower social orders, that they are inferior forms, but the reality is that many of us use regional forms without being particularly conscious of them. Whether it's the Cockney we was or the Reading he done it, regional dialect is still alive and well, and it has a grammar of its own. The tension comes in establishing its place in relation the grammar of Standard English in the education system.
If one of the key aims of teaching Standard English is to establish a shared, mutually intelligible form of the language for everyone educated in the UK then does having a teaching assistant who uses a local dialect damage the educational opportunities of young people? Probably not. I think an argument that might be effective here is that if we properly study the grammar of both Standard English and regional varieties (and sociolects like slang varieties too) we will learn a great deal more about not just grammar as a system, but also about the history of the language, feelings we have for our own varieties of language and the connections we have to our own communities of practice and social backgrounds.
So, I think it should be argued that neither slang nor dialect should be seen as a threat to the education of young people, but as legitimate and rewarding areas of language study, both of which can help students enrich their understanding of language in all its varieties.
I'd be interested in any views from readers, so please post comments.
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