Title: The Language Detective: Working with gifted and talented A level students
1The Language DetectiveWorking with gifted and
talented A level students
- Billy Clark,
- Middlesex University
- (b.clark_at_mdx.ac.uk)
LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007
2Summary
- 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
4http//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
5The 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
6Our 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
7The 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
8Typical 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
9Our 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
10Linguistics 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
11Course 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
12Course 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
13Some 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
14Some 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?
15Visiting 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
/
16Study 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.htm
l
17Our 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
18(No Transcript)
19(No Transcript)
20Videos
- 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
21Student 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
22ENGLISH
23Comparing Germanic and Romance Languages(German
and Spanish)
24Idioms
25Lets Talk About Sex
26The regional accents of mainland France
- What are they?
- How do we distinguish between them?
- Where are they found?
27Some 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
28Some 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
29Some things we discovered
- We had to be aware of possible sensitivities
about language and identity - Students particularly enjoyed Bass talk the
chance to work with the ICE-GB the presentation
on the British Librarys Sounds Familiar
website
LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007
30Some 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
31The End
- More information, including tutors and students
presentations, and this presentation, at - http//billydug.typepad.com/languagedetective/
LAGB Education Committee Session, 31 August 2007