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

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


1
The 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
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.htm
l
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
18
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19
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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
Lets 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 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
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
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