Language change gets owned

New words reflect new values, and language change often feels insidious rather than enabling.

So says Henry Hitchings in a review of a new book, The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English by Mark Abley in today's Telegraph. According to a quick check of Google definitions, it's a battle between language change "working or spreading in a hidden and usually injurious way" (insidious) and language change making things possible or allowing them to take place (enabling). So, it's basically down to the age old debate about prescriptive versus descriptive views.

According to Abley's book, "words seem unusually volatile" at the moment and change is taking place at an incredibly rapid pace, driven in part by the spread of electronic communication. He looks at the growth of virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft and the influence they have had on mainstream language, along with the ways in which "plastic words" are used by governments and business to obscure meaning.

The review makes the book sound like good reading for any A level Language student, and it would also be good preparation for next year's new A levels for any teachers looking at the growth of hybrid languages such as Hinglish and Spanglish, as English spreads around the world and is put to use by locals in combination with their own native languages.

If you're revising for ENA5 Contemporary Language Change, have a quick look at the review and see if you can identify the prescriptive vs. descriptive positions noted above. You might also find this link to language change and technology helpful.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENGA3 (new spec) - Language Explorations

Climbing One Handed

A little piece from current TV about Kev Shields and his climbs, made by the Hot Aches team.

Step forward?

Echo Wall - the arête dry at last after the demise of the snowpatch of truth

In my last post I talked about taking one step back to make two forward. Climbing hard new routes is like this – a rollercoaster of progress and setbacks. You never know how things will turn out when you get to the next stage.

Yesterday I feel like I made three steps forward (superb!) but one large step back (doh!). This time Claire belayed me on the route on a massive top rope (100 metre rope) so I could begin making some big links now that I’ve had a good few sessions sussing the moves. The result was better than I expected with a link of the route with one hang (at the roof). Up to the roof does indeed feel like 8a+ (a scary E9 for a lead) and after the roof is 8b in itself, just to climb without placing the gear. But the problem is that it will be sick hard to stop and place the protection in the roof, especially the most crucial two wires. So overall linking plus placing the gear is looking physically harder than Rhapsody (8c or 8c+ish).

Looking back into the north face on the walk out

Unfortunately though, it gets worse. On my second attempt to link the wall above the roof, I fell at the final crux. A fall that would mean certain death on the lead. Oh dear.

I wasn’t sure if a shake out before this would allow good recovery so I could be confident I could get through the death crux every go. It seems not. So the route overall will be a bit like doing Rhapsody but the equivalent fall from the last move would be terminal.

But it’s not all doom and gloom – The up side is that my sequence is good and I feel strong enough for the route. All I need now is a vast improvement in endurance and to carry on with the constant mental preparations in the background.

Another fine sunset, the last in the present series, as it happens.

Separate from the climbing, we are also finding out that filming this climb is very far from easy. Much thought remains on adjusting our logistics…somehow??

It was almost a relief to see the return of the long lost Scottish rain, not seen in about a month! I have a couple of days work now before me next opportunity to do battle. Today was time for sheltering from the rain at the natural umbrella of Sky Pilot, trying to extend Cubby’s famous V9 traverse Beatle Back. Many days on this type of terrain are what is required now.

Normal service is resumed – rain clouds sweep in across the Lochaber mountains (from Sky Pilot).

ReadPeace.com Very Vocabulary Podcast

ENA6 - Writing In a Particular Form

I had meant to cover this at some point before the exam, but a comment from a student on a different thread spurred me into action (thanks, Jack).

First of all, question 2a is one of the two big questions on ENA6: question 1c is a fairly straightforward textual analysis worth 20 marks, while this is a creative/ editorial piece that can yield 35 marks if you get it right.

You'll be asked to write in a particular form on a language issue. The idea is that you're expected to write about a linguistic idea - maybe new words, political correctness, how people feel about local dialects dying out, how women and men use language, whatever the topic of the paper is - for a mainstream, non-specialist audience. The question paper will give you 3-4 texts to use as source material but you don't have to limit yourself to these texts; you can use your own ideas too, but it's probably daft not to use what you're given.

The AQA A spec says this about the forms that you might be asked to write in:

This type of task requires candidates to write about language issues in some common forms where debate about language often occurs, e.g.
• letters to the editor
• articles
• editorials
• scripted radio talk

Candidates are being tested on their ability to communicate their knowledge and understanding of language to an audience beyond the examination.

The topics and forms set up until now are listed in this word document.

Some top tips for this question:

Make sure you read and annotate the question paper fully before starting any of the questions, but think about using coloured highlighters to select crucial info and quotes for Qu 2a.
Don't rely too heavily on the text you've just analysed for question 1c. If you make your 2a answer too similar to the 1c text you will not have much original to say.
Try to use short quotations and paraphrased ideas from the source texts, rather than epic quotations.
Try to explain linguistic concepts in a clear fashion for your audience: don't assume that they'll know what the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis postulated or who Steven Pinker is.
If appropriate, write with a light touch and try to engage your reader with humour and style.
Don't patronise. Did you hear me? Do. Not. Patronise. Did you see what I did there? Ha.
Use information and ideas from the full range of texts: the mark scheme rewards candidates who make use of the trickier texts/data from the question paper.
Write accurately: many of the 15 marks for style depend on clarity and accurate expression.
Read lots of examples of different forms between now and the exam so you're familiar with forms like editorials and letters to the editor.

There are no doubt loads of other things to think about, so if you have extra tips, comments or questions please add them below.

Waiting for the body

Emulating the wisdom of Pusspuss. That cat knows how to do rest days.

You could see in my last post I was attempting to make myself feel a little less beaten with a bit of positive talk. Thanks for your comments on the post. It’s hard to explain, but feeling really beaten and slapped by a project is actually a great and essential thing to happen. It’s a strange feeling to be depressed from retrograde progress on the route, but pleased about this happening, all at the same time.

I guess the best way to describe it is to think of it as taking one step back to make two forward. Psychologically, it’s the real, in your face symptoms and prospect of failure, fatigue and pain that are the strongest calls to action. They make you get up and fight back like nothing else. That’s the mental aspect – so everything is good there. After a rest day, the ‘fire’ is back. That sounds cheesy, but that’s the best way to describe the return of a burning, impatient drive to run back up the mountain and rejoin the battle.

Physically, things are a bit different. I have to wait for my body to catch up. Because I am training properly for a single goal again, short term performance is removed from the priority list. Many climbers at a medium level fail to see off their ‘career best’ project because of this issue. Climbers want to their bodies to perform at their personal best level, every session, all year long. At an amateur level this is fine, but when the demands get heavier, some short term sacrifices have to be made.

To make real progress in physical training, you have to really work yourself. If you have been training long enough to handle it, this means daily work and feeling pretty wasted all the time. Feeling a little down in the dumps is totally normal during this time. When the time draws close to cash in on all this heavy work, we do something called ‘tapering’. Basically this means just going easy on yourself for a few weeks and allowing your body to fully recover and refuel from the effort. If you get all of this just right, the result is that you feel utterly bionic and destroy performance goals that were unimaginable before.

The really interesting stuff for me is to judge the intensity just right over the months of heavy work. Too little and it won’t be enough to do the route. Too much and I get injured. It’s a pretty fine line to walk and the messages from the body that inform you of which side you are veering on are not so easy to measure.

Tapering time for me begins whenever I can link Echo Wall on a toprope. If that happens some time this summer, things will get exciting. Until then, it’s time to go and put in some more hours at Sky Pilot.

introspection aloud

Today was my first day of feeling totally beaten by the Echo Wall project. I'm just not fit enough to deal with working it quickly. I keep telling myself all these days on the trot either on the route or training hard will be getting me in shape. But possibly it won't be enough. This thing is just not the same as something like Rhapsody - the climbing on that was quite tricky (at the time it was my limit) but it was right there - easy to sling a rope down in a few minutes and get climbing on it with nothing in the way. I've done the hard mountain routes like Birkett's and Dunne's too, but they were [relative to this] easy climbing - you just turn up, put in a day or two's work and crush it. This is different - the mix of 8c or harder climbing, the prospect of a groundfall on the lead, and the logistical challenge of climbing this so high on the north face of the Ben. That is why it will be another level beyond any of the other routes. That is what I am after on the whole.

I'm finding that it's too much for me to train hard to be in rock climbing shape to climb Echo Wall, and walk into the Ben several days a week to work on the route. Right now my body feels pretty worn out. Perhaps after a rest day, it'll all feel different? I guess thats all part of the experience of climbing and training hard. I've had that before too, and I'm looking forward to having the pring return to my step after 36 hours rest.

That I need to remind myself of here is that running into this type of 'wall' is what I'm here for. If I was looking for a route to nail in a couple of days, I could go do some more E9s or repeat some more routes in the Lakes like I did before. But I've done those things - I'm in this to get really worked. So, when it happens I should react well.

Reacting well may involve sleeping... now... goodnight.

PS: for my rest day I'm working at the new Go Outdoors store in Coatbridge Glasgow (Sunday), coaching youngsters and chatting to folk about gear, climbing etc. Maybe see you there?

Some good calls, some bad...

My fitness is obviously not there yet. I found myself completely unable to get my body to take me up the Ben for the third day in a row beasting myself on Echo Wall. Getting out from under the duvet felt like a good E7/8 in fact. It was a good call anyway with the cold winds one would normally expect of a highland spring returning to the glens.

So I went to Sky Pilot to work on a mammoth traverse project. The moves were done - a good feeling to hang from crimps for several hours. Today we we set off to return there, but after five I got the hesitancy and sensed the chilly wind might be cold enough for redpoints on the Skeleton boulder's big traverse instead. So we turned on our heels and headed for that. It was bitter up there in a howling gael!

The traverse there gets steadily harder all the way until some real gut busting tensiony moves on perfect crimpers bring it to a breathtaking culmination. I say breathtaking since I seemed to be unable to breathe for the last two moves (and the foot moves between them). There was so much tension, both physically to will my foot onto a distant foot move, and mentally, soo see if I could manage it - I could only hold my breath. Until, that is, I fell off in a heap and released all that tension in a big scream. People sometimes laugh at climbers who scream when they hit a move or fall off in climbing movies. When you see this one in our film, you will undoubtedly think it's ridiculous! But when you really concentrate hard and give a brutal, grinding physical effort on a climb, it's sometimes hard to make soft noises. The tension just has to come out, and sometimes it spills into your voice on it's way to be delivered at the muscles.

At the very last move I had a moment of intuition to change my sequence and use a different foot position, but stupidly I stuck to my usual way and fell off. Of course I pulled immediately back on to see if this new idea for the move that popped into my head worked - of course it did! A lesson learned. For now I have to wait until the next cold day before I can hang those razors again.

Tomorrow morning, the Allt a' Mhuillin pilgrimage begins again...

ReadPeace.com Very Vocabulary Podcast

ENA6 - Feature Spotting

You've had the chance to practise lots of 1b questions over the last few weeks, now it's time to practise the other 5 mark question in question 1. This is pretty simple: you're asked to "comment linguistically" on 3 different language features (the nature of which depends upon the topic of the paper). This basically means that you pick out 3 interesting language features and label them accurately (2 marks per feature up to a total of 5). It's that simple. You don't need to explain the features, or who has researched them: just label them. You can - if you feel a bit insecure - say a little more about them to clarify what you mean.

An example might be the one below:

Comment linguistically on 3 features of child language in the following extract.

Parent: Did you have a nice day at nursery?
Child: It was good. Some childrens from big school came and play guitars for us.
Parent: That sounds fun.
Child: My hurted my knee at nursery.
Parent: How did you do that?
Child: My falled over.
Parent: Where did you hurt it?
Child: On my knee, I telled you dat.
Parent: But where were you. Inside or outside?
Child: At nursery. I was riding bike.

So, for one feature you might say "The child has used overgeneralised past tense endings on the verbs hurted, telled and falled". And that would get you 2 marks out of the 5 you need.

What else could you pick out and label to get you the full 5 marks?

ENA6 - Investigating New Words

So back to ENA6 question 1b practice. There'll only be one more after this and I'll also add some 1a practice questions later today. If you're an SFX student, please check Moodle as there is now a new section on the ENA6 area with texts and advice on this unit.

This week's question is:

How would you go about investigating how new words are formed in the English Language?

The format I'd like you to follow in your answer is outlined here, so you need to give a 5 point answer which outlines your:

AIM/ANGLE
METHOD of DATA COLLECTION
FRAMEWORK for ANALYSING YOUR DATA
CONSIDERATION of EXTRA LINGUISTIC VARIABLES/ VALIDITY/ ETHICS
WHAT YOU EXPECT to FIND

All that way to drop my shunt in a crevasse

After todays pilgrimage to Echo Wall I was well psyched to climb on it properly after last nights freezing conds. It was still below freezing, but I spent another hour finishing off the snowpatch with the shovel to get warm enough to think about climbing. After abbing down and more or less completing the cleaning and searching for gear I got my rock shoes on and proceeded to drop my shunt. It bounced down the slabs below straight into a super deep crevasse in the snow slopes below. Game over.

I could still mess about on single moves on the gri gri, and I did make much progress with figuring out the gear on the route. But still a pretty damn frustrating day. Back again tomorrow after a visit to the climbing shop...

All that way for 20 minutes...

I'm getting into a good rhythm on Echo Wall now. Today we got a late start after work but got up to the route by 4pm. It was well baltic - around freezing but the wind was bitter. Not a day for sitting still. I knew I only had one burn before my fingers (still suffering from a dose of frostnip) would be frozen. Now with the whole route finally dry I could work on the upper crux (the bit you cannot fall from on the lead) and the rather more chilled but still very poorly protected stuff above. The good news was this part felt much more doable that it did in summer 06. I came back up and was waaay to cold to move the rope and head back down for a shot on the lower crux. Logistics logistics logistics are running through my head - there is so much to think about to plan for a lead of this climb - how to work it, how to get the gear to work, which belayer should run. How can I find two people to belay me for the most serious route I've ever seen? I think I'll need to start off with two ropes, drop one after 50 metres, and the other after 60 and solo the last ten metres of the pitch. But the bigger problem (as I hinted at in Committed) is still maintainence of fitness. Today's cold only allowed 20 minutes of climbing. So now it's after midnight but I have to make up my daily volume of climbing on the fingerboard. I'm not totally sure there is another way around this. I'm glad I've been doing so many long and physical days though - it's really reminded me how much the body can respond to deal with whatever you ask of it. I feel good. So, after another cup of tea, I'll do my hangs, get some sleep and head back into the north face in the morning. Thank god for ipod is all I can say. Otherwise I think all this walking into the same coire would send me over the edge.

Claire has been amazing over the last couple of days. As you can imagine, after 15 years of visiting it, the north face of Ben Nevis and the approach to my project (climbing most of Tower Ridge) doesn't seem quite so big as it did when I was 16. But if you've never done much mountaineering, chain days following a psyched man up the ridge, jumping about ledges with a camera all day, then abseiling into the void for a long slide down the snow slopes below would be more than many a tough guy/girl would deal with. She seems to be dealing extremely well with the near vertical learning curve of big mountain fitness/soloing head/rope logisitcs/shooting film. Inspiring stuff.

Elsewhere on the internet I read that Sonnie Trotter came close to repeating my climb Rhapsody tonight. I hope the fall was not too nasty. I'm sure it'll go down shortly. I wish him good friction for his impending send - gaun yersel!

Mountain Equipment Pro Team Ts are here

Our stock of Mountain Equipment Pro Team Ts finally arrived this morning, so they are available right now from the shop. Thanks to everyone that pre-ordered – yours are in the first class post.

Let the forecast decide

With the freezing levels dropped back down to around the same elevation as my project on the Ben, I’ve taken a couple of days out and just gone out climbing in the Glen after work. It’s been a tricky call – the secret to getting stuff done in Scotland is to do whatever the current conditions dictate. And when I say dictate – I mean it really does dictate what you do! If you try to work against the Scottish climate, it can turn into one of the most frustrating and futile exercises you can imagine. I meet a lot of people who visit Scotland to climb and have a frustrating time. 99% of the time it’s because they have a single objective, that turns out to be not in sync with whatever the Scottish weather gods have dished out at the time. Hint: When visiting Scotland to climb, start with the forecast, and then look in the guidebook, not the other way round.

Climbing as much as I do in Scotland then creates a funny situation. Basically It demands a daily routine of forecast checking, for which I receive a frequent ribbing from my (non-climbing) friends and family. At least with the climbers I know it’s different (instead they ask me what the forecast was and where would be the best spot for today’s climbing).

Yesterday I checked in at the Skeleton boulder and sussed the beta for the big traverse. It might be a V11 or 12 if the winds of send get going and give a really cold day. After came down at 8.30pm, I wondered if it might be a good time to go home for my tea. But the training plan for Echo Wall involves spending super long days out. My default approach has got to be to just go for it at any opportunity right now. No holding back – the more work for the body, the better. So I trekked up to another buttress and spent some more hours cleaning a lovely route until darkness and the thought of the chicken in my fridge were too much.

Today I headed for Sky Pilot and checked out another monster traverse project. I started off thinking I’d made a good call with numb fingers. But later, things got warm and the dreaded midge sent me packing for the first time this season. It’s so easy to forget how fierce they are after a long spring of their absence. So the conds have dictated that the Nevis daily pilgrimage starts again in the morning. Some snow showers are forecast. But if so, the spade is still up there!

Programming the brain

Two articles from the Daily Telegraph shed some light on how our brains are programmed for language.

In the first, researchers at Bristol University have found that babies exposed to foreign languages when young, show more alertness to different sounds of languages in later life. So, children who have been exposed to the sounds of French before they are one, will be able to distinguish between a wider range of phonemes at a later stage, while children who aren't can't hear any difference.

This is linked to what is called phonemic expansion and contraction: children are "born universal" and can produce and discern any sound of any world language when young, but as they become more acclimatised to their native language, their range of phonemes contracts and they lose the ability to pick out the other sounds. What this research suggests is that exposure to other languages actually helps programme the brain to be more flexible and alert to other sounds, perhaps making it easier to learn languages in later life.

The second piece of research is a weird experiment in which powerful magnets are used to disrupt a reporter's speech. By finding Broca's area, a part of the brain that is responsible for aspects of language, scientists can "disable" speech. Strangely, the reporter could still sing but couldn't speak. Read on for more about what this tells us about our brains and language.

Useful for:
ENGA1 (next year's AS spec) - Language Development

ReadPeace.com Very Vocabulary Podcast

Electronic renaissance

Thanks to Mr G for this one; it's a report about research into instant messaging, a blended mode of communication like text language that's somewhere between spoken and written. Parents, teachers and prescriptivists have long been concerned that this sort of electronic communication will lead to falling literacy standards, poor spelling and sloppy communication. But as the report in New Scientist tells us, this panic seems unjustified: young people seem to be much more standard in their IM language than might have been expected. They use fewer abbreviations than the stereotype of lazy teens might suggest: LOL, TTYL, KMT, OMG only making up 2.4% of the vocabulary studied.

Perhaps this shouldn't really come as a great surprise. As we've studied in the Language Change topic, many prescriptive views about falling standards have little basis in fact and have been floating around for centuries in one form or another. Have a look at Julie Blake's excellent Bilious Pigeon article in emagazine for a survey of such attitudes and how they're often founded in prejudice and snobbery.

So, as one of the Toronto University researchers puts it, IMing is "an expansive new linguistic renaissance" rather than a slide into illiteracy, short attention spans and moral depravity.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENGA1 (next year's AS spec) - Language and Mode

ENA5 - Language Change

Now the AS exams are done and dusted, let's have a look at the A2 units. You should still have a good few weeks to revise for ENA5 and ENA6, so there is plenty of time to plug holes and think about the wider issues for each paper and each topic. I've uploaded quite a few files - worksheets, powerpoints and audio - to a separate website (and if you're an SFX student it should all be on Moodle) so you can access various online.

With the first question on ENA5 texts from a different time, there's no real substitute for wide reading. But if you can't face wading your way through long texts, try this link* to shorter extracts.

One idea is to apply the same basic GASP (Genre, Audience, Subject, Purpose) framework to each extract and then use this as a starting point for more detailed study of meaning, attitudes and how the text reflects the period it was written in. This is more complicated at A2 because you might not be as familiar with some of the genres: diary entries were very popular; travel writing was common; sermons, treatises and homilies found their way into print. But as with any genre, there are certain language features you would expect to find, so start looking for things like 1st person pronouns, past and present tense, modal auxiliaries, ellipsis, sentence type variation and sentence functions.

Another complicating factor is that your grammatical labelling must be more in depth: at A2 you're expected to know about tense and aspect (present, past, progressive, perfective), clause and sentence types: simple, compound, complex sentences; subordinate, coordinate and relative clauses, as well as the more basic word classes from AS. You're also being asked to look at the text is an historical document and to place it somewhere along the language change continuum.

So to revise grammar, use either this link or this one.
To get a sense of how language has changed over time, try these language change time lines, but remember that the earliest period you will be assessed on is 1600 (Early Modern English).

*Edited 24.11.10 to fix broken link

Good luck!

Good luck to everyone taking ENA1 and ENA3 tomorrow morning.

Remember to have a good night's sleep, eat some breakfast to feed your brain and get to the exam hall by 8.45am at the latest!

See you there (grisly daughter permitting).

Today's psyche level

The extreme snow throwing training paid off – today, the bottom third of Echo Wall was dry enough to abseil down and begin actually climbing!!! In my 2006 sessions I was unable to down-aid through the initial twelve metres of 45 degree overhanging wall. With some acrobatics and more sussed ropework I managed it tonight and for the first time I have a sense of what the whole climb is. The 45 wall looks about 8a+ up to the roof below the crux section. The climbing looks exquisite and there is some gear too. I cannot wait to get working on those holds now they are getting cleaned up. It was a real eye opener to get back on the crux though. In 2006 it felt utterly sick and seemed significantly harder than Rhapsody (my best effort at the time). I figured It would be realistic if I could come back climbing 9a. Hey presto – it felt realistic!

I could do the moves quickly. YEEEEESSSSS! One thing I forgot was how amazing the rock is. It’s quite simply the best piece of rock I’ve ever touched.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to get into the flow of working on these moves over the next few months. I feel that I have got to the basic level of fitness required to begin working on this route now. The approach is taking less effort, I am dealing better with the daily routine of expending a lot of energy, and I am in the flow of the logistics of managing the work.

But now it’s time for a short break. Tomorrow I go to Argyll with Claire to watch my friend get married.

Last light this evening in Coire Leis.

Again and again...and...

I have spent the last four days straight shovelling snow from the top of my project, as hard as I could until wastedness strikes. I've eaten more than 5000 calories every day and fallen asleep instantly as soon as the light went out (the most unusual aspect for an innsomniac such as myself). This morning I simply couldn't face the fingerboard before walking up again. So I just stuck Andrew Marr on the ipod and got walking again, off in a world of thought until time to dance up Tower Ridge again (can you believe I know every move and it's only May!).

This excercise has been really good for three reasons. First, it's been a brutal wake up call what it's like to properly work your body hard intsead of pissing about like I was before. Second, its taught me the lesson about Nevis new routing once again; estimate how frustrating trying a Nevis project could be. Double it, add a bit more, and you might be getting close. Finally, its reminded me again that it's worth just doing what you need to do to get shit done. If it takes five days to clear the snow just to start climbing, then clear it. It's worth it (see next post).

When it comes down to it, getting stuff done is often about getting out and getting amonst it, again and again...

And again

Until it's time for a cup of tea.

ENA1 child language acquisition revision

Child language acquisition might seem tricky but if you've got the basics of the linguistic framework - lexis, semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology and pragmatics (you know it really) - and some idea about the stages and theories, you'll be laughing. Oh, and make sure you have plenty of examples of what children say.

Here's some stuff from the blog 2 years ago about preparing for this topic. The same things apply, but it's probably worth noting that there's been a more recent focus on data-based questions; these are ones that give you some child language data and ask you to comment on what it tells you about "the nature of child language acquisition". It's therefore a good idea to look carefully at the data and think about what it might reveal about issues like imitation, interaction, cognitive and . Check the feedback sheet here for some ideas about the data from a year or two back. Also, check the feedback sheets that I put together for 2 other questions here and here if you want some more detail.

There's also more feedback and some data examples in this powerpoint.

Top tips for ENA3 transcript analysis

Following on from yesterday's quick tips for ENA1 textual analysis, here are some for the transcript analysis on ENA3. I'm not an examiner for this unit, but have picked up advice from those who are, so hopefully this will help. If you want more detail, check Beth Kemp's excellent site.

Do:

Read and annotate the transcript carefully at the start of the exam.
Use highlighters to mark out different speakers' turns if this helps you see patterns more quickly.
Label word classes, sentence functions and sentence types (e.g. The use of the noun phrase acting as a minor sentence "stupid men" by speaker x is a humorous utterance which serves to draw the speakers together.).
Discuss and label the features and effects of interaction (e.g. The use of a tag question by speaker y when she says "we studied this text last week didn't we" helps to facilitate a response from the other students in the class.).
Think about context all the time - much of what the speakers say will be linked to the type of talk they are engaged in and what they are doing.
Use the bullet points on the question paper to help cover all the assessment objectives.
Take an overview of the whole interaction and discuss patterns that you see across the transcript.

Don't:

Discuss the transcript line by line; this is usually boring and unhelpful.
Make "deficit judgements" about spoken language with comments such as "this is bad grammar", "speaker x uses broken English" or "no one really speaks like this".
Try to apply theory to everything, especially if all you're doing is talking about Grice's (bloody) maxims; if you see accommodation, patterns of female/ male converstaional behaviour, face threatening acts, by all means mention them, but don't write too much.
Forget the context; context is everything in spoken interaction.
Assume every micropause or non-fluency feature is a significant hesitation; we all use micropauses and false starts.

ENA1 textual analysis top tips

Just a quick one this time to flag up a few reminders for the ENA1 textual analysis.

Do:

Make sure you read the text properly and make notes as you read it.
Think about GASP (Genre Audience Subject Purpose) and address these in an intro paragraph.
Try to pursue at least one of these in your first paragraph proper e.g. look at the ways in which the purpose of the text is reflected in certain lexical and grammatical choices (imperatives in a recipe, modals in an advice column, 1st person pronouns and past tense verbs in an autobiography).
Label word classes wherever possible, with as much detail as you can: a proper noun gets you more marks than a noun.
Try to look at how the subject of the text is represented by the writer, be it an issue, a person, a film etc.
Think about how the audience is positioned in relation to the subject matter.

Don't:

Waste time talking about clauses and sentence types (simple, compound, complex): these are not assessed on this paper.
Go on about graphology: graphology is for losers. If you spend more than 1 sentence talking about graphology draw a big L on your head, remove your clothes and leave the exam hall claiming mental feebleness.
Talk about how alliteration "makes the text flow": texts don't flow; rivers do.
Misspell common words: alot, grammer, sentance, writter. Get these write. I mean right.

If you have any more ideas or suggestions, please add them as comments!

crags beware- psyched man let loose on four wheels

blogging from my phone sms so must be brief. Today was a good day, got up, passed my driving test (first time). Then carried more load up the ben and put in another five hours with the spade on the snowpatch of truth. I think after tomorrows session the battle may be mine and I can quit labouring and start climbing on this thing. Today I had my digging method much more sussed, cutting nice igloo blocks and lobbing them fiercely into the void along with the other impressive bits of ice and rock hurtling down from melting ice routes every few minutes. I bet I'm gonna be in pain in the morning but the fingerboard should wake me up for another jog up tower ridge. Dig for victory, n' aw that.

Roll on Sunshine!

The best spring in Scotland in my lifetime rolls on. Every day, the sun keeps shining - what has happened to normal Scotland??? The only problem is, a badass massive snowpatch is still going strong soaking my project. Yesterday I got up trained and then beasted up the Ben again with a shovel and spent the rest of the day digging snow until I could lift my arms no more. I reckon I shifted a good few tonnes, but I laughed at the pitiful dent I had made in it by 9pm! I reckon I got about a tenth of it shifted. The things you have to do...

The punishment begins

Michael Tweedley climbing Rocklord E7 6b, Yosemite Wall, Glen Coe. Photo: Claire MacLeod

Well, when I say ‘the punishment begins’ it’s all relative. It has been the most gorgeous week in the Scottish mountains, but legs and arms are in pain today. As soon as I saw the forecast I knew it was time to make an early start on the Ben season. A tad to early perhaps…

I bounced up the Ben path and Tower Ridge to get to my project, super excited at the thought of getting to grips with it again after so much time thinking about it.

The Echo Wall project, still a bit wintery right now despite the warm sunshine! Note Smith’s Route and Indicator Wall still hanging in there to the bitter end.

Sadly, it was not to be – a long bank of snow is still melting slowly straight over the top of the wall. It looks like it will be there for some weeks to come, although there are options (more later) to accelerate things.

Instead we looked at some other new lines to come back to (also being melted onto at present) and generally tired ourselves out carrying big loads all over the mountain.

Claire on the Nevis plateau

For an easy day the following day, Michael and I went to check out Yosemite Wall in Glen Coe – a Malham like overhanging wall of overlapping undercuts, except nae bolts here!

Michael cleaned up Cubby’s route Rocklord E7 6b while I inspected a serious looking new line through a big roof. The crux looked like a rather amusing large dyno blindly around the roof to a very distant edge, followed by some more nastiness on the headwall.

Michael cleaning untouched rock, Ben Nevis

A return raid was deemed necessary and the next morning we both dispatched. Michael reckoned it was the scariest lead he’d held my ropes on. Maybe I should do more training? Claire didn’t seem so phased by filming my jumping around without any useful runners. But perhaps the consecutive days on the Ben and the Coe were a bigger deal. Sublime E8 6c was a lovely way to spend time waiting for snow to melt…or preferably vaporise.

Go away!!!! Large bank of snow I wish would melt faster...

Thieving and promiscuous

Thieving and promiscuous: a description of binge-drinking, ASBO-served British teenagers? No, it's a description of our beloved English language as discussed in this review of a new book called The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English. I'm reading it at the moment and it's an interesting survey of where our vocabulary comes from. Then again, I'm only 15 pages into it, so what do I know?

The review is very useful reading for ENA5 revision, as it gives lots of reminders about processes such as borrowing and coining. As the review of this book points out, English has always been an acquisitive language, trading words (mostly nouns) with foreign countries (often the French, it has to be said) and exporting our language and culture around the world in the process.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

Back to beige

No, beige it is. That's it, no more fiddling.

That's settled...

I'm going to stick to this template, so sorry for the psychedelic/ beige nightmare yesterday.

Language & Representation revision

For those of you working on ENA1 revision for next Friday's exams, here are some top tips for Language & Representation that I originally posted in 2006, which I've updated for this year.

This essay question deals with the links between language and thought - whether we control language or it controls us - and the ways in which language is used to label different groups in society.

First off, it's important to be clear that this topic has nothing to do with how men and women speak (that's on ENA3) so don't start writing about interruptions, overlaps etc.

Secondly, you need to be clear that when the question talks about "social groups" (as it often does), it's referring to ethnic groups, the different genders, social classes, age groups, or even what people often term subcultural groups like grungers, goths and rap fans. You can also add to that list groups defined by their sexuality and people with disabilities. Of course, some of these labels themselves are problematic and you can talk about how they define individuals as parts of larger groups, removing their distinct identities and generalising about them, if you wish in your answer.

Thirdly, you could (for revision purposes only of course - it's not a good idea to do this for fun) write down as many unpleasant words you can think of for each of those social groups and start to look at the common threads that emerge. We might find that words used to label gay people focus on their difference from the norm ("queer", "bent"), their supposed sexual practices ("batty man", "shirtlifter", "arse bandit") or throw up some words which you'll have to explore more etymologically (Where does "faggot" come from? What did "gay" used to mean? What's a "chi-chi man" when he's at home? Well, probably still a homosexual, but you get the picture...).

For women, many of the words that emerge are used to trivialise females as sweet, edible, consumable items, usually a bit decorative, but certainly not there to be taken seriously ("tart", "crumpet", "sweetie", "cupcake"), or again focus on a particular body part to define a woman solely by her appearance/sexual function to men ("the club was heaving with fanny", "oi, big jugs!", "gash").

Ethnicity and the words used to label different ethnic groups allow us to explore the etymology of terms like "nigger", "paki", "pikey", "cracker", "coon", "half-caste", "taffy" and "gyppo". A quick look at the OED online or online etymology should help you track how these words have originated in racist attitudes (or not, as the case may be) and developed over time. And remember, white people are an ethnic group too! Have you ever met a black chav?! Actually, Croydon readers need not answer that rhetorical question... But of course, words like "black" and "white" can be explored in themselves for their negative and positive connotations, the words they tend to collocate with, and indeed the word "chav" is interesting as it is believed to has its roots in Gypsy slang for "child" or "lad" but has been used against Gypsies (and now any working class white person who dares to sport Burberry, Reebok Classics or sovereign rings).

The next step is to look at some of the linguistic concepts and terms that can be used to explain these words and the patterns we notice. This sheet on the SFX Resource site should help. You could also look at research/texts by linguists such as Dale Spender (Man Made Language), Deborah Cameron (Verbal Hygiene), Muriel Schultz and Mary M Talbot whose work on gender is pretty interesting. There have been loads of blog posts about racist language so you could do a search on here using keywords and find material to bolster your knowledge.

In terms of theory, it's important to understand linguistic reflectionism, determinism and wider concepts such as relativism and universalism, so check the article I did for December 2005's E Magazine which should help you. If it's not on the E Magazine site (log in details are in the LRC), it's certainly in the periodicals section of the LRC. Alternatively, you could use Wikipedia and look up "Sapir Whorf" and find out where my (ahem) "inspiration" from. While you're at it, you could search for "Political Correctness" as key words and have a look at why there has been a move to change language.

The trickiest part is linking this together, but good answers can take many forms. You could explore the links between offensive words and the attitudes that create them - or even the language that shapes these attitudes - or you could take a range of examples and look at why they've changed over time and what this tells us about the society we live in. There are plenty of good, model answers we can give you too. Have a quick look at this planning sheet and this one too if you're after a more detailed model for your writing. And for more on arguments about Political Correctness, try this link.

I've probably missed lots of things out here, but you can fill in the gaps...

ENA6 Question 2a - editorials and letters

Here are two texts that might help you revise for the 2a) part of this paper. The first text is an editorial from The Guardian which should give you some idea about how to put together a piece of writing like this. Note the lack of first person pronouns (no I or we) and the emphasis on strong opinion expressed through modal auxiliaries, in the last paragraph particularly. If you’re asked to write an editorial, remember that you’re expressing the newspaper’s own view on the issue and that while you should look at both sides of the debate (arguments about male female talk, political correctness going too far, language change being a bad thing etc.) you should always come down one side of the debate more than the other (e.g. “texting can be a useful tool, but if it is allowed to spread into the written language of this country’s young people, standards will fall…” or something like that).

The second text is the nearest equivalent to a letter to the editor that I could find. On the exam spec a letter is mentioned as a possible form for this question, but most letters in broadsheet newspapers are pretty brief. This personal response is structured a little like a letter. It responds to a previous article (so you might be responding to one of the texts in the exam paper); it refers back to the original article by paraphrasing a few points and quoting briefly from it; it then constructs an argument against the original article, using personal observations and statistics. This is exactly the sort of structure you could use if you were set a question like this.

ENA6 - Investigating Male & Female Speech Styles

Thanks for all the responses, questions and follow-up discussion for last week's snappily titled "ENA6 question 1b challenge". Ufuoma, Lisa and Adesola win the Haribo.

This week, the question is about gender and conversation styles: how would you go about investigating similarities and/or differences in the ways men and women use language to interact?

Remember to follow the 5 point plan as laid out below:

AIM/ANGLE
METHOD of DATA COLLECTION
FRAMEWORK for ANALYSING YOUR DATA
CONSIDERATION of EXTRA LINGUISTIC VARIABLES/ VALIDITY/ ETHICS
WHAT YOU EXPECT to FIND

On your marks...get set...Haribooooooooooooooooo

Mountain Equipment Pro Team Tshirts finally available

Some of you may have noticed that I quite often wear a Mountain Equipment red T-shirt? No, really Dave?

I know this because I’ve had loads of emails from folk asking where you can buy them! ME have been giving them out to their sponsored athletes for years, but never made a commercially available version.

Well, now they have. I asked ME if they would make a production run for me to make available from my webshop, and they agreed! So now you can get hold of what has got to be one of the more accomplished climbing T-shirts around, having done E11, 9a, V13 and soloed 8c.

It’s available exclusively from my webshop for £15 and my standard £1.50 postage wherever you are in the world. We’ve gone for it’s most famous colour; red, and made it from organic cotton in male and female size ranges.

Thanks to everyone who got in touch to ask about these over the years.

Fort William bouldering wall opening

The team - Scott Muir, climbing wall builder. Alan Kimber, climbing wall owner. And the route setter...

Steven shows the rest how it is done.

Last night we enjoyed a gathering of climbing types at Fort William's new bouldering wall for its opening party. Claire took a pile of shots which are up on her blog here. But I got a couple too...

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