CLA article on not telling your child they're naughty and other ways not to "screw them up"

The ideas in this article will help you mention key concepts to do with how you speak to your child that may well come up in the transcript in the exam.

A2 lesson 24/2/15

Calmnesses,

as the deadline looms, do what you can to improve your coursework. If I have given you feedback, use what you can in the time available and disregard the rest; when it is done, stop worrying and refocus on exam work straight away - don't give yourself time off for coursework being completed, work steadily and sensibly (see my last post).

Today, make sure all your ts are crossed and your is are dotted. Your bibliography must be complete with all the sources you have used (Harvard referencing). Your word count should be done for the investigation and media text separately. Your sub-headings, tables and footnotes should be clear and so should your appendices (especially clearly labelled and referenced in the text where necessary). Please ensure you have no plagiarism in your pieces - any paraphrasing or quoting of other people's work must have a footnote showing who is being referenced. Any plagiarism may be cause for disqualifying your folder and may result in you being withdrawn from all your AQA exams, as well you know!

You will be handing in the complete folder of work tomorrow (2.30-4 in C108) but we will do the topsheets (and fastening the coursework together with a treasury tag) on Friday.

When it is done, please post your coursework as a single file to Turnitin.

If you have done all you can on your coursework, either help someone by doing some peer assessment or do some research into the key topics this year.

Urgent reminders

Perspicaciousnesses,

don't forget the writing competition - big money for your well-polished skills (skills that pay the bills!). Remember they want it to be used with new students in September, so bear that in mind as you are deciding what to write: what would have reassured and inspired you at that difficult time of transition?

BBC sports journalist Caroline Chapman will be in the Sports Hall speaking to students on Thursday between 11 and 12 - go along if you are interested in TV, journalism etc.

As we finish with coursework, terminology and theory learning, wider reading and revision are the names of the games. Make a plan and use your 4.5 hours per subject per week to balance learning new things and revising.

One of my students had better win the writing prize BTW! You are all so good!

A2 conclusions/evaluations THIS POST GOT LOST SOMEHOW - REPOSTING

Lovelinesses,

good news - the deadline has been pushed back til Wed 25th Feb 2.30-4.0 in C108 (this is after half term).

I would like you to bring a printout of your current version of your analysis to the lesson on Monday, whatever stage it is at. The deadline for your conclusion/evaluation (which can be combined or under separate headings) is next Friday (6th Feb).

Conclusion:

• Draw tentative conclusions, evaluating what they key findings are and relating them to your hypotheses and any relevant theory
• Show you understand the context of your data and the pressures on languge that this context creates (why the techniques used are used)
• Show you understand the factors that limit your investigation (whilst still impressing the reader with what thought you put in to combat these)

Evaluation: 

• Were you able to answer the research question effectively?  Why?  Why not?
• Were there any aspects of your analytical approach that seemed a good idea at the design stage but were less effective than anticipated?  Why might that have been the case? Was there something that proved very effective?
• How could the project be developed further to make it more generalisable, reliable, comparable etc? Be careful not to be too simplistic about this and be tentative/evaluative – leave it out if you don’t have anything interesting to add.

(LC) Izzard on there being no 'British' humour

There has been a feeling as long as I can remember that different nationalities have their own brand of humour. I vividly remember going, in my gap year, to see Terminator 2 in German, after having just seen it in English, and noticing that many of the jokes had been changed when it was dubbed into German. The most popular television programme while I was there was Mr Bean (no dubbing required - even though it is British, it is just slapstick and far more popular in Germany than Britain), which I couldn't stand, despite a love for Rowan Atkinson born out of Blackadder. I felt that the sense of humour was different there but perhaps only because I had been told so. Like Tannen's 'difference' theory, it seems to ring true because we notice what has been pointed out to us and fail to notice what doesn't fit - like noticing a word you don't think you have heard for ages and then hearing it everywhere - it doesn't mean it wasn't there before; our perceptions are very subjective and we filter out anything that doesn'seem pertinent from the deluge of information around us.

Izzard says in this article that there are bound to be different senses of humour but that they don't match linguistic borders and that seems to make perfect sense. Perhaps I can lose one of my long-standing prejudices now it occurs to me to look for information to the contrary.

Redrafting conclusions/evaluations

Diligents,

when redrafting, play close attention to the skills you need to show, not simply stating what you found.

Conclusions/Evaluations

The following paragraph has instructions/considerations in italics to show how you can show off vital skills. See how ideas need to link/flow using carefully controlled complex sentences, avoiding stating the obvious by showing the connections beween ideas.

• Link back to the analysis to give overview e.g. Although open questions were the most frequent type of interrogative across the transcripts (see Table 2), and they were found to elicit the longest responses, on average (see Table 3), they were only effective in doing so substantially more often than two other key techniques when combined with pauses (see column three in Table 3). Without the pauses, prompt questions and 'I wonder' declaratives came close to matching the effectiveness in terms of MLU responses, perhaps because they function in a similar way (to open questions) in child-led discourse: to encourage the child to explore what they have already shown an interest in. Be tentative in exploring contextual explanations e.g. Perhaps open questions may sometimes miss the mark in terms of meeting a child's interests, as they rely on predictions/guesswork on the part of the caregiver, whereas prompt questions often encourage Z to explore something he has set the agenda on e.g. "Z: ... and three things in the banana H: three things?" and exploit an already proven interest. Bring in relevant theory e.g. The length of the MLU that comes from these particular caregiver responses could be seen to support Vygotski's idea of scaffolding (rather than the more general interaction theory of Bruner or Skinner's operant conditioning) because considered, high-quality strategies to promote child-led discourse seem to be more effective than just any response e.g. an agreement, although this would need to be tested consider how the experiement could be refocussed/tweaked/expanded e.g. perhaps by a control situation where H's responses were limited to minimal or monosyllabic responses (although this would skew the data as the other conversations are much more typical of Z's interactions with H and his participation might be affected, not by the strategies, but by the contrasting behaviour of the caregiver which might lead him to feel uncertain and repond unnaturally; it might be better to simply record more speech that was as close to natural as possible to obtain a similar number of low-input responses from H so that the results could be contrasted clearly).

Um or er? Interesting findings...

What do you use? I'm not sure - I will ask you to keep an ear on me...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31158167

Synchronic Language Change TED talks playlist

Most excellent.

Great extra LC terminology

This guy is great. He's written some really accessible stuff like this:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/11/pronunciation-errors-english-language

Estuary English - nuffink wrong wiv it

This is a great article from 1999 exploring the rise of an accent so familiar to us - name some high profile Estuary English users in the comments.

LC - the great vowel shift and odd English spellings

We will be using some of this video in class (A2) but you can watch the whole thing here.

Language Change - beautiful languages tree

This excellent poster shows how languages branch off from one another and allow you to see where they are connected . English is one of the Indo-European languages.