‘The Language Detective’: Working with gifted and talented A level students

1. ‘The Language Detective’:Working with gifted and talented A level students Billy Clark, Middlesex University (b.clark@mdx.ac.uk) LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

2. Summary A brief report of a course on linguistics for the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (NAGTY) and Villiers Park Educational Trust taught by Billy Clark (Middlesex) and Graeme Trousdale (Edinburgh) this summer. More information, including this presentation, at: http://billydug.typepad.com/languagedetective/

3. ‘The National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (NAGTY) was established by government in 2002. Its role is to drive forward improvements in gifted and talented education by developing a national, government supported, catalyst that can provide leadership and support for professionals working in this field. To achieve this NAGTY works with students, parents, teachers, education professionals, specialist providers, universities and business.’ http://www.nagty.ac.uk LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

4. http://www.villierspark.org.uk ‘Villiers Park Educational Trust is a national charity working to create inspirational classrooms for 14 to 19 year old students by facilitating the sharing of knowledge and best practice between teachers, lecturers and students at school, college and university. Our experience and expertise are widely recognised in the educational sector. We have a long-standing reputation for providing high-quality educational activities for students and their teachers at our Cambridge Centre and at schools and universities throughout the UK. Our current focus is to create inspirational classrooms for the Gifted and Talented. We believe that this emphasis benefits whole school culture and is, therefore, in the interest of all students.’ LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

5. The students Students came from schools on the Villiers Park contact list all over England and Wales. Usually (as with this course) there is no more than one student from any one school. LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

6. Our aims To introduce the students to linguistics To present lesson plans developed by the A level working group To find out more about the students’ current experience of language and linguistics To see what the students would make of the topics and activities we presented LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

7. The students’ aims To have fun To find out more about NAGTY To find out more about linguistics In some cases, with a view to deciding whether to take options in linguistics at university LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

8. Typical course structure Five Days (Monday to Friday) One visiting speaker One study visit in the middle of the week Group projects Group presentations on Friday LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

9. Our programme Monday: Arrivals, introductions, linguistics sessions, video Tuesday: Linguistics sessions, visiting speaker Wednesday: Day trip to British Library, Linguistics Olympics Thursday: Linguistics sessions, work on projects and presentations, video Friday: Presentations and farewells LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

10. Linguistics sessions ‘So What Is Linguistics?’ ‘How To Be A Language Detective’ ‘Pattern in Language Structure’ ‘How Languages Mean’ ‘Language Change’ ‘Explaining and Creating Meanings’ ‘Becoming A Super Sleuth’ LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

11. Course content real examples(e.g. ‘Save Yorkshire’, ‘men no less chatty than women’) ways of investigating language (corpora, intuitions, …) what linguistics is languages and dialects prescription and description everyday discussion and systematic study phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

12. Course content ‘puzzles’ and tasks (e.g. linguistics olympics tasks, transcription tasks, analysis) cross-linguistic, synchronic and diachronic data questions and ideas on how to answer them the relationship between data and theories LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

13. Some activities comparing spelling and sounds looking at historical data exploring dictionaries and meanings critiquing news reports on language working out morphological and syntactic facts about a new language (e.g. Lakhota) LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

14. Some Welsh borrowings from English actif 'active‘; ffigur 'figure‘; ffocws 'focus‘; lefel 'level‘; proffesiwn 'profession‘; tancer 'tanker‘; cic 'kick' What observations can you make about the relationship between sound and spelling of certain consonants in Welsh, based on the data above? What are the phoneme correspondences for these Welsh letters? Is there a general difference between the spelling of borrowed words in Welsh and in English? Which language is likely to have more regular correspondences? Why do you think that might be?

15. Visiting speaker Bas Aarts (UCL) spoke on ‘Using a Corpus’ This session included some hands-on work with the ICE-GB corpus (the British component of the International Corpus of English) http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/ice-gb/

16. Study visit to the British Library Two sessions divided by lunch: ‘Text-Messaging’: A workshop on how to explore texts ‘Sounds Familiar’: An introduction (from Jonnie Robinson) to this British Library resource on accents and dialects http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/index.html

17. Our Linguistics Olympiad 4 rounds of tasks in ascending order of difficulty taken from the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad http://namclo.linguistlist.org/ Plus a bonus ‘unscramble the languages’ round LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

20. Videos: ‘Silent Children, New Language’ BBC Horizon video on Nicaraguan Sign Language ‘My Fair Lady’ (Ethically suspect but linguistically amusing) musical LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

21. Student projects We discussed how to identify, explore and present work on linguistic topics. The students were extremely resourceful in coming up with ways of investigating the topics they chose given the practical constraints of time and location. Students worked on five projects: LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

22. ENGLISH: IS THE “VIRUS” SPREADING?

23. Comparing Germanic and Romance Languages(German and Spanish)

24. Idioms

25. Let’s Talk About Sex (and turnips)

26. The regional accents of mainland France • What are they? • How do we distinguish between them? • Where are they found?

27. Some things we discovered Students were very keen, and keen to try difficult and challenging tasks Students were interested in linguistics and wanted to do more work on linguistics Some of them wanted to study linguistics as part of their degree programme rather than the whole programme LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

28. Some things we discovered Students were able to cover a LOT of ground in the time They were very interested in dialectal and crosslinguistic comparisons The prescriptive-descriptive distinction was completely new to most of them LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

29. Some things we discovered We had to be aware of possible sensitivities about language and identity Students particularly enjoyed: Bas’s talk; the chance to work with the ICE-GB; the presentation on the British Library’s ‘Sounds Familiar’ website LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

30. Some things we discovered It was fun It was particularly good to be able to be flexible about time and to be on hand to deal with any queries the students had Villiers Park are keen to run courses on linguistics again with a slot booked in for next academic year LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007

31. The End More information, including tutors and students’ presentations, and this presentation, at: http://billydug.typepad.com/languagedetective/ LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007