My absence

Sorry I'm not really fit to be in contact - I hope the work I sent in has been set and you can all manage. I will be back with you as soon as I can but it will be at least another week.

Gender revision

Changing ideas about attitudes towards gender are a hot topic at the moment so read around the topic but focus especially on linguistic ideas like gender neutral pronouns, the supposed need for women to speak more powerfully (contrasted with Beard's idea that we have to value women's voices more), the idea that context drives language use more than gender does, the socialisation of young children to take on gender stereotypes (watch The Secret Life of 5-year-olds on 4OD's gender episodes to get an idea of how powerful the message is) etc. In your essay and opinion piece if they are on gender, remember to only mention non-linguistic ideas very briefly.

Overview (you need to know more than this):

4 Ds:

Deficit

• main proponent Robin Lakoff
• women's language is deficient in comparison to men's due to uncertainty features like hedges and tag questions and women lack humour
• evaluation: Lakoff based her ideas on her long experience as a linguist but no specific research to test them
• contrast: O'Barr and Atkins did research in courtrooms and found that Lakoff's deficit features did appear more in the language of some than others but that the split was not along gender lines but along lines of social power so that the deficit features were 'powerless' features not 'women's' features; Pamela Fishman also argued against Lakoff's idea that tag questions showed uncertainty - she suggested they were powerful tooks for involving others in conversation and seeking consensus

Dominance

• main proponents: Zimmerman and West, Dale Spender (West and Spender are both female, like Lakoff, so watch out for that when using pronouns in your essay - I see a lot of 'he's)
• patriarchal dominance is reflected in language uses by males who are more direct and interrupt more
• evaluation: Zimmerman and West's '96% of interruptions were made by men' findings were widely spread in support of the idea that men spoke in more dominant ways but it was a small study and you know those can't be generalised to all men/women - just because they confirmed what most people felt was the case and became very famous, doesn't mean that the research was valid
• contrast: Geoffrey Beattie criticised Z&W's resaearch on the basis that it was a small sample of white, middle-class speakers from a single area, and he did research himself on a much larger sample of his students where he found that interruptions were much more evenly split between men and women (no statistically significant difference) and he also added that he interpreted many interruptions as co-operative (rather than competitive), offering support or demonstrating enthusiasm

Difference

•  main proponent: Tannen but see also the popular psychology (not linguistics) book by John Grey: 'Men are from Mars, Women Are from Venus'
• men and women speak in different (but equal) ways
• in her book 'You Just Don't Understand' (1990), Tannen offered pairs of antonyms to characterise the way men and women spoke differently (interestingly, she put the male version forst in each pairing) e.g. conflict vs compromise, information vs feelings etc.
• Like Grey's book (both published close together - Grey's in  1992), it was very popular (hers was not as popular as his!) as they both reflected ideas about gender that people found convincing because they were describing traits they already perceived to be the case - Tannen didn't need to work hard to prove the theory
• for contrast, see the next D (Discusive/Diversity) and Janet Hyde found that 78% of features that were supposed to be different between the genders were close to 0 in large-scale research

Discursive/Diversity

•  main proponent: Cameron
• "your genes don't determine your jeans" so why should biology affect language use? - paralleling language and fashion in this quote
• Cameron suggested that context was far more of a factor than biology in how people used language e.g. direct language on a battlefield and supportive language with children
• she suggested that we used certain language features to perform gender, that we 'do' gender not that we are a certain stereotypical set of traits that make up perceptions of male or female genders - that there is a diversity of gender identities and that we can adapt our language (link to Giles's CAT) but that we are socially constructed into choosing to conforming to gender stereotypes that are the norms for our local 'communities of practice' and that these vary by place, class etc. - there are no universal features that men vs women use
• wider reading on this 

 Read this research and notice there is an assumption of the difference rather than discursive approach, but it does go through the approaches in an accessible way.

Exam tips

Revisingnesses,

with the mocks coming up, I thought I'd give you a quick reminder on exam techniques:

• follow the timing recommendations on the front of the paper
• when you've read the question, note down quickly anything you might be able to crowbar in that you know and then check you've included those things on your plan when you've finished planning
• read the context (in the question, at the top and bottom of texts) and then predict what you are going to find - that way you read more actively and you will spot linguistic features that suit the context as you read the text; you will also notice anything surprising and that will always be worth exploring
• skim-read texts first (in under a minute) to get an idea of the subject, register, structure, then read and annotate in detail
• look for quotes that you can comment on using terminology from a range of frameworks e.g. the pun (lexis) is which word class (grammar) and is a cataphoric reference (discourse) to what?
• look for quotes that show patterns of language use by the producer and use more than one example (three, ideally), analysed with terminology and how the techniques suit the context
• check your plans meet the AOs - terminology, essay structure, context, theory content (if relevant), connecting/contrasting in every paragraph (if relevant) etc.
• explore ambiguities, offereing alternative explanations/interpretations that are linked to context e.g. it could be that the use of the paralinguistic feature "hahaha" in the Amelia email is meant to use orthography to covey genuine laughter and work with other features to reassure her family and friends that she is happy and well, or it could be sarcastic and a mixed-mode affordance to convey her idiolect and personality in a way that might make the recievers hear her voice strongly and not miss her so much - the audience would probably have a pragmatic understanding of which it is meant to be as they know her well.
• in theory essays, give examples and attach terminology to them e.g. talking about how the past-tense suffix 'ed' is overgeneralised by children to irregular verbs to form neologisms they couldn't be imitating e.g. 'runned', 'flied', or the plural suffix to irregular count-nouns e.g. 'foots'
• in opinion pieces, ensure that you have explained theories well to a non-specialist but included enough depth and detail to get a good AO2 mark - use examples here too and write in an engaging way that is suitable for the audience you have decided on
• leave time for proofreading and editing - quality is always preferable to quantitiy in terms of the mark scheme - have you used enough terminology, examples, clear discourse markers, theory, context? Aim for at least 3 terms per paragraph - the example on the Amelia text above uses 7 in reference to a single quote (paralinguistic, orthography, mixed-mode, affordance, idiolect, recievers, pragmatic understanding)

Monday 6/3/17 textbook work and revision

Linguistics,

continuing with the principle of focussing mainly on what interests you and then finding out more to get examples and terminology, please find and work through the following Language Change sections in the text book. Switch it up with revision on the AS key topics. Don't forget there's a search bar on the top of my blog to search within my blog for earlier posts on key topics. Post work to your blog.

Textbook sections: 16.4 (starting on p.199), anything in between, and then 16.7 (pp.216-219)

The langauge of social groups - very useful post

This is a blog you should all be following but if you are not, or if you missed it, here is a post guiding a class through an essay that you should all try on how social groups use language to exclude. Post it to your blog as revision.