A fight worth fighting?

In his Fight For English book, which David Crystal will be drawing on for his talk at the conference, he makes a convincing argument for the language being in a healthy state, naturally evolving to suit the needs of its users. It's interesting to see that he's not the only one who feels like this.

"Language is fine - it's thriving" is the conclusion of Martha Gill in this short article for The New Statesman magazine. She explains that "grammar is as naturally robust as DNA and it's actually the kids who are preserving it" and relates the development of English to Creole forms of the language.

It's a brief and focused article, so a good style model for the kind of thing we're after in our Write For English competition.

Last few days to get entries in

With the conference rapidly approaching, this is just a reminder that you can still get an entry for the Write For English competition in if you want.

Send your entries to this address by Friday 1st February and remember to include your name, school/college and contact details in the email. Put "Write For English entry" in the subject line of your email.

Speaking about the spoken

With only a month to go before the conference, we'll be focusing in the next few posts on some of the speakers and their fields of expertise.

Ron Carter is one of the leading lights in Linguistics in the UK and has had a huge role in influencing how the English language is studied in schools and colleges. Spoken language is one of his main fields and he has written extensively on it as well as being involved in various initiatives to promote its study in schools.

Well before Spoken Language Study appeared on the GCSE specifications, Carter played a big role in the production of  Introducing the Grammar of Talk which took genuine spoken data, in the form of transcripts and corpus data, as a focus of investigation and learning.

In his talk - which will be essential listening for AS and A2 level English Language students and teachers of whatever specification - Carter will be looking at the ways in which spoken language is structured and uses, but also at the new technologies, such as email and text messaging, that now blur the line between spoken and written modes.

There's a good interview with him here, as featured in the English Subject Centre's magazine Wordplay, where many of his interests beyond spoken language are explored, and he's written here about the use of corpora (organised sets of language data collected for study), something that should be of interest to anyone who's thinking of studying Language or Linguistics at university.

Write for English: the first texts

Further to last week's post about the Write for English competition, here are some of the first texts for you to respond to.

Ed West from The Telegraph on 'Jafaican'

Dr. Bernard Lamb on slipping standards of English

Charles Moore on the problems with language change

David Higgerson on words that journalists should stop using

If you're thinking of entering our Write For English competition, then have a read of these articles and see what you make of them. We're after a 750-1000 response, in whatever form you like, to one of these texts and we'll be posting some more links in the next week or two.

Write for English

Some people get very upset about language. They don't like how other people speak in different accents, use expressions like youse or y'all, get really angry about innit, like, must of and your a star and start shaking and frothing at the mouth when they see text language or slang used in an inappropriate context.

There's obviously nothing wrong with caring about language and how it's used - that's why we study it and teach it - but, for the complaining community, language is going down the dumper and we must fight to restore English to its glory days. But what glory days? Many linguists would argue that while many of the examples above are non-standard, they're not necessarily wrong and that even if they are different to how we used language before, there's always been a lot of variation between speakers and writers. The examples above may even be a form of language evolution.

So, what does this have to do with you and what does it have to do with our English Language conference? It's simple. We want you to write a piece, arguing passionately and persuasively about why someone else has got it wrong about language. We want you to respond to a dubious representation of (say) slang, punctuation, textspeak, accent and dialect or spoken language features, and make a persuasive and linguistic case for the right to use that form of language. In short, we want you to Write For English.

Over the next 3 weeks, we'll post extracts and links that offer you negative representations of different forms of language use, from John Humphrys bemoaning text language to Ed West griping about 'Jafaican'. Take your pick from the different topics and then write a response.

In selecting the best entries, we'll be looking for some, or all, of the following:

• genuine engagement with the topic
• linguistic knowledge
• fluent and persuasive writing
• a grasp of the language issues
• originality, wit and flair

We're looking for responses in whatever form you think appropriate - an article of your own, an op-ed or letter perhaps, but the choice is yours. The word count is between 750-1000 words and the deadline for submission is Friday January 18th. The writer of the winning entry will be presented with a prize by none other than David Crystal at the conference.

More details about how to submit your entry will be given in the next week.

If you're an A2 English Language student doing your coursework for either ENGA4 or ENGB4, you'll be aware that for part of your work you have to produce a media text or language intervention, so you might find it's a good idea to choose a topic which relates to what you are doing for that. Hopefully, you'll find plenty of scope in what we offer you and plenty of different ideas to engage with.

Blair's babes and Cameron's chaps

When Tony Blair took office in 1997, around a quarter of the MPs elected for the Labour Party were women. Since the House of Commons had up until that point been viewed as an enclave of male privilege, this influx of women was expected to change the dynamics of the institution. Would the women change the tone of debate? Would the bear pit of privately educated middle-aged white males yelling at each other be altered, calmed down and turned into a collaborative and cooperative place for civilised and rational discussion? After all, women cooperate and men compete, don't they?

Well, not really. As one of our speakers at the conference, Sylvia Shaw, discovered, the common stereotypes of female conversational didn't really mean a lot when it came to parliament. As reported in The Guardian in 2007, what Shaw discovered was that "In proportion to their numbers, women spoke as often as men and challenged other speakers to "give way" as readily as men. In short, they were (as MPs at Westminster have to be) assertive in competing for opportunities to speak". So, in other words, the women MPs adjusted to the competitive norms of parliament, rather than changing it. But there were differences and ones that link back to previous research into gender and conversation.

Dr. Sylvia Shaw

Shaw discovered that women tended not to break the rules as much as the men. "In five debates analysed closely by Shaw, men made almost 10 times as many illegal interventions as women. If these were counted alongside legal turns, women's overall contribution shrank to two-thirds of the men's total...This, Shaw suggested, put women at a disadvantage, because taking turns illegally is a powerful strategy...Women MPs, by not interrupting, are denying themselves both visibility and influence".

In her talk at the 2013 emagazine English Language conference, Women and Men at the Top, Sylvia Shaw will be looking at some of the wider issues around how gender and interaction has been studied over the decades and then look at some of the most recent work she has been doing in the devolved parliaments of the UK, taking the research she did in the House of Commons to the new parliaments and assemblies of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

As we should be aware from work we do on Language and Gender at AS and A2, things are never as simple as just saying "women do x and men do y", or even that Men are from Mars and Women from Venus, and Shaw's talk is bound to open our eyes to some of the subtleties and nuances of how we talk to each other and how our elected representatives use language to debate and govern.

The Fight for English

Prof Crystal admires his latest love-text from a fellow descriptivist

Before the Q&A session, David Crystal will be talking about 'The Fight for English'. People moan about language use all the time: whether it's texting ruining young people's spelling, Neighbours making us talk like we're always asking questions, mate, or slang being banned in schools because it makes us look uneducated and uncouth, someone somewhere has an opinion about what's good and bad about English.

But while most people are content to moan and groan about this in the privacy of their own homes, others have taken to the web and some people have even published books attacking supposed falling standards and prescribing their own remedies: often in the form of more grammar, better punctuation and lots and lots of good old-fashioned punishment and correction.

David Crystal - a man who has written extensively, exhaustively even, about pretty much every facet of English - disagrees with these doom-mongers and finger-waggers, though, and in his Fight For English he lays out the arguments for taking a proper, linguistic look at how we use language and where prescriptive attitudes to language stem from.

We want you to be involved in this debate, so we'll be running a writing competition, "Write For English", in which we'll provide you with some examples of contentious takes on how language is used - gripes about grammar, snarkiness about slang, moans about modern words - and ask you to write a response. We'll print the best ones and the winning writer will be given their prize by David Crystal on the day of the conference. More details will follow very soon...