Teaching English Language 16-19

A Comprehensive Guide for Teachers of AS and A Level English Language

Martin Illingworth, Nick Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429017780
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This unique guide to teaching English Language empowers teachers to lead a successful course that will encourage students to be independent and analytical linguists. Covering all areas of linguistic investigation across different exam board specifications and rooted in theoretical perspectives, this accessible text is underpinned by years of teaching experience and is full of practical ideas for classroom activities.

Now in its second edition, this bestselling title has been fully updated to consider changes to English Language A level, including a new chapter on unseen texts and writing for the exams. Additional material includes a greater focus on accent and dialect, language acquisition, and language and the media, including discussions of 'post-truth' and 'alternative facts'. The authors outline frameworks of linguistic analysis and provide clear guidance on how to approach different topics. Chapters are full of interesting extracts for textual analysis and ideas to give students a varied diet of written and spoken texts in different genres.

Teaching English Language 16-19 will be invaluable reading for trainee teachers and practising teachers new to the teaching of English Language, as well as more experienced teachers wishing to refresh their knowledge and practice.

Chapter 1

An introductory sequence of lessons

To begin your course, you need to start to develop in your linguists an enquiring mind. You will find that the students in front of you probably take most language for granted most of the time. Opening their eyes to the complexity and subtlety of language transaction is important if they are to gain an understanding of how language works.

Here is our suggestion of how to approach the course.

Ask yourself the following question.

What will the children in the classrooms of today need to know in 15 years’ time?

Uhm! It is a rapidly changing world and the rate of that change is surely only going to increase. The O level that I gained in 1984 in Computer Studies has become a most useless and obsolete qualification.

The answer to the question may well be that we do not really know what it is that they will need to know. This, then, presents us with a problem. What shall we teach them? If times change and conventional wisdom cannot keep up, then is it impossible to prepare students for what lies ahead?

Perhaps one answer lies in the word prepare. We cannot know what needs to be known but we can help students gain the skills of interpretation, judgement and analysis. If our students can understand the world around them, then they will be better equipped to deal with whatever is in front of them. They will be prepared.

English Language A level is all about our constantly changing modes of communication. Indeed, it focuses entirely upon the ways that we express ourselves. Language changes because we have new things to describe, our society moves forward in its thinking and the experiences that we encounter need a voice. Language is one force that can keep up with change. It is a reflection of our world and changes because we change.

English Language is a growth A level, perfectly suited to the needs of providing valid modern educational experience. It is about our experiences of life and how we characterise those experiences through words. Sometimes we are simply communicating facts and opinions. However, we use language in so many other ways: to express emotion; to make ‘small talk’ creating a sense of comfort; for the sheer pleasure of making a noise; to make information permanent for generations to come; to make life seem quantifiable and ‘real’; as an instrument of thought; and as a means of creating an identity. Language is a complex, sophisticated structure that we take for granted most of the time.

At its core, English Language A level allows students to investigate the language choices that they make individually and that we have collectively agreed upon. An appreciation of the workings of language and the purposes for which it can be employed can be an invaluable tool in facing that unknowable future.

The aim of this book is to help the teacher of A level English Language. There are two distinct objectives that we have in mind. First, we wish to put forward a distinctive approach to teaching English at advanced level which makes use of investigative approaches that will create thoughtful and self-reliant pupils capable of evaluating, analysing and producing language. Secondly, we hope to produce lots of practical ideas to support the investigative approach to study. A little base knowledge is required and this will be outlined under the individual component units.

It is important that students become alert to the ways that language is being employed around them if they are to develop linguistic skills. You are looking to make them into people that question and evaluate the language choices that they encounter in their everyday lives. Resources for you to investigate can very easily come from the students themselves. You will know that your students are developing in their linguistic awareness when they start to volunteer examples of language use that they have found interesting or articles that relate to the area that you are considering. To create resource banks collectively is extremely helpful, not only in providing data for analysis but in helping to give a sense of ownership of the course over to the students.

Stimulating interest in language exploration at the beginning of the course does not require reference to textbooks full of technical vocabulary and research. Indeed, that sort of approach can seem dry and somewhat daunting. To write down Semantics and be told that it means the study of meaning is, I would contend, meaningless. To investigate the ways that actual texts create meaning, exploring the different shades of meaning that words and phrases can have for different audiences, in differing contexts, when writers or speakers have differing purposes, makes the process of discovering a much clearer and more meaningful experience. Understanding gained in this way can be transferred across texts and situations and will form the basis of good practice in a student’s approach to study. At this stage of the course, you may well be consulting theoretical textbooks to support your presentation of ideas but it is texts and transcripts that you need to be working on with students.

Activities to stimulate linguistic exploration

1. How meanings are created

Take this very simple example of wordplay.

I ordered two chocolate éclairs!

First, you could try to work out the context of this utterance. Where would such an utterance take place? Who might the speakers be? Perhaps the group will agree that the words come from a conversation between a diner and a waiter in a restaurant. This is plausible. You could then discuss the nature of the utterance. It is interesting that these words lend themselves to a certain context. You could explore the whole area of language that is context-bound, i.e. it could only be spoken in a particular set of circumstances or only retains its meaning in a particular situation.

Are the words rude? Polite? What relationship do these words have with what goes before or after? Is there a general script or framework within which speakers stay in certain contexts? Do the diner and the waiter have a general understanding of the shape that their conversation will follow?

You could examine the possible ways there are of uttering these words. If you place emphasis on different words within the sentence here, the meaning is entirely changed. If we agree that the waiter has brought the wrong order to the table, the placing of the emphasis will alert the waiter to the nature of his mistake.

I ordered two chocolate éclairs!

Here, it seems that the waiter has placed the dessert in front of the wrong person.

I ordered two chocolate éclairs!

Now, the waiter has brought the wrong number of éclairs to the table.

I ordered two chocolate éclairs!

Whoops! The waiter has brought strawberry éclairs to the table.

I ordered two chocolate éclairs!

This time, the waiter has brought two chocolate doughnuts. Oh dear!

I ordered two chocolate éclairs!

The creation of meaning with this emphasis is not quite so certain. It may be a general statement of frustration or annoyance. It may be an implied comment that no éclairs have arrived at all. This raises the idea that emphasis might not always be making meaning clear.

Of course, the way that the words are uttered will have an impact upon the creation of meaning. Said with a ‘smile’ in the voice, then the speaker will indicate that this error has not really upset them. Again here, there is a whole range of possibilities.

In working on this utterance, pupils can appreciate that meaning is not just about words and sequences of words. The situation is far more subtle than that. Spoken texts have the added nuance of the mode of transmission, namely, speech and the contextual factors and frameworks that surround the conversation.

2. Relationships between words

The English language has always absorbed words from the other languages that it has come into contact with. It has also ‘imported’ words from certain fields and created new lexical items in this way. Twenty years ago a dictionary would have told us that ‘mobile’ is a noun referring to a suspended toy in a young child’s bedroom or a qualifying adjective, as in the phrase ‘mobile home’. Now, the same word has a new, perhaps more widely used function as a lexical item meaning ‘mobile phone’. Indeed, our language has gained much of its expressive power from having a number of ways of saying the same thing. Words in isolation, however, do not really mean very much.

Investigate the word hello. What does it mean? It is difficult to say what it means. It is easy to give an example of it in use and to identify the purpose to which it is put. It is a far harder task to develop a definition of its meaning.

Ask the pupils to draw the word road. Look at all the drawings and then tell them that road was only part of a compound noun and that an undisclosed adjoining part was rail – so their drawings are no good.

Apologise for cheating and tell them that they should draw a road that cars go on. Again, inspect the drawings. Unfortunately, this time the word road came alongside an adjective, closed. What conclusions might we/they draw (haha!) from this exercise?

What is the difference in meaning between man kills dog and dog kills man? How is this difference created? Now we are beginning to look at the notion of sequencing and structure. Human language is the only sophisticated, structured language system in the animal kingdom.

By putting one word next to another, we are altering the state of the word. We are changing its meaning. The flexibility of words, their relationship with other words and the patterning of language for effect is the basis of grammar study.

3. The functions to which we put language

Pose the questions, ‘Why do we speak? Why do we write?’

The answer will typically come back that we speak/write to communicate. This is true. However, often people make use of language in different ways, ways in which no real sense of communication is made.

In David Crystal’s Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language you will find a proposal of eight ways that humans make use of language. This can be a really useful tool with which to introduce your course.

However, for me, the key is how you make use of this information. You could read the information together from the book. To my mind, if you were to do that, you would miss a wonderful opportunity to bring your course to life and to get the pupils thinking about the uses of languages straightaway.

In my experience, reading from language textbooks tends to lend the information that you are considering a certain permanence and ‘correctness’ that does not allow the pupil to form their own ideas, or indeed to work through those ideas. Things in books are ‘right’ and knowable. They are not really open to challenge. You read them, write them down and file them. I am not sure that the student will build a close enough relationship with the ideas from that approach. Also, you supplant the expertise in the roo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface
• Overview
• 1. An introductory sequence of lessons
• 2. Audience, purpose and context
• 3. General frameworks
• 4. Conventions of written and spoken texts
• 5. Language in society
• 6. Found texts and answering exam questions
• 7. Original writing
• 8. Language change
• 9. Language acquisition
• 10. Language investigation
• Concluding remarks
• Index