Gender revision / wider reading - year 12 and year 13

This is useful for everyone: Year 12, we have finished Language and Gender now, so it's all down to you. https://aggslanguage.wordpress.com/gender-interaction-theory-%E2%80%93-holmes-tannen-cameron-defrancisco/ This is a really useful post on a blog I've recommended before. You certainly don't need to learn all of this, but it's useful background / wider reading - especially for those aiming for those higher grades.

Year 13 - this may be a nice way to ease yourself into your gender revision. We'll be coming on to this after Easter.

Year 13 Homework and wider reading

Homework due for Tuesday 28th February is to analyse the Scooby Doo texts (available in the google drive if you missed the lesson). Apply everything you have learnt so far about literacy to the texts. Create a table of AO1 features that you have found (remember, you still need to label and use terminology) and link those features to an AO2 concept that we have learnt.


Some wider reading is available on the google drive in the Literacy folder. Also, I recommend this: Michael Rosen summary for a really good overview of the issues surrounding phonics teaching in schools. It's quite detailed, but for those hoping for a really top grade, it's very valuable.


There's also this that you can watch: Phonics screening video
You don't have to watch all of it (it gets a little repetitive!) but it's a great way to understand the system of phonics at work in schools, and good revision for some key terms, like phonemes, alien words, digraphs and split digraphs.


Lastly, there will be an essay to do straight after half-term, so going over your notes would be really useful and revising some of the key terms. Get those mind-maps and flashcards sorted now. You'll be thanking me in June!

Year 12 homework for Tuesday 31st January and useful revision for Y13

Miss Representation 
The Mask You Live In 

Homework – watch the two film trailers above. Below is the start of an essay that a student wrote after considering the issues raised by the film about the representation of women. Consider the issues raised by ‘The Mask you live in’ and write the opening of an essay about the effects of representation on men.

Objectification of Women:
Every day, women around the world are objectified, treated as less of an equal, and denied the same opportunities as our fellow men. 

Why? The media. 

If the media is sending girls the message that women are objects and that is their primary being, girls will think that this is their path to power. Conversely, the more girls self-objectify the more likely they are to have lower confidence, lower ambition, lower cognitive functioning and lower grades. 

Y13 Aiming for an A or an A*?

There is a summary of an article I've read recently on the Google drive. This is the link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0n14k4_2wH8a1dpN3pVWG11Z1E

It's a useful overview of where linguists currently are  in the nature / nurture debate. Enjoy!

Writing for a non-specialist audience: Y13 revision, Y12 pre-reading

Here's another example of an article written about a linguistic issue, but aimed at a non-specialist audience.

Both the AS and the A-Level paper require you to write this type of article, so it's worth reading as many of them as possible. The more that you read, the more likely you are to be able to write in this kind of style.

Notice how it transforms the linguistic ideas into language that is accessible for a general audience, for example:

"How do they even begin to separate, or “segment,” individual words from the stream of language that they hear all around them all of the time?"

Year 13 have learnt about segmenting in CLD this term. They should be able to use it hand-in-hand with the term 'gestalt expression'.

Grunwell done well? (Sorry, it's been a long day...)

Y13, I came across this Quizlet that someone has prepared to learn the typical ages that children acquire phonemes from. Add it to your list of private study tasks.

12B and 12C1 homework set Tues 27th due Tues 4th Oct - wouldn't be a bad idea for Y13 to revise too!

Homework – What do you know about Grammar?

Have notes available to check in class on Tuesday 4^th October

Note: You need to know definitions and examples.

            E.g. An adjective describes or modifies a noun, e.g. the irresponsible father.

Assumed – you must be 100% confident with the words in this column	Learn now – you should research what the following terms mean, make notes, and learn the concepts	Challenge – if you are already fairly confident with much of column 2, research some of these terms
Nouns	concrete, common, abstract, proper, plurals	Count and non-count nouns
Adjectives	Comparative, superlative
Adverbs	Adverbs of place, time, manner, degree, frequency
Verbs	Regular verbs and irregular verbs Main verb Auxiliary verb Tense (past, present, future)	Modal auxiliary verbs Primary verbs Aspect (continuous, perfect) Subject–verb agreement
Pronouns	First, second, third person	Subject form, object form, possessive, demonstrative
	Determiners	Indefinite and definite article
	Preposition	Prepositional phrase
	Conjunctions	Types of conjunction

CLA Phonology Concepts Revision

Make sure your notes include references to all of these concepts so that your revision will be easy-peasy:

Key concepts (AO2)

-       Babies live in an auditory world - remember to think about the sounds in words and not the written forms of the words

-       Babies predisposed to discern sounds – favour mother’s voice from few hours after birth and recognise own language. Mehler

-       Phonemic contraction occurs by 10 months – sounds reduced to those of babies’ own language

-       Proto-words  and babbling follow CVCV pattern favoured by English (cooing is just vowels - easier)

-       ‘Mistakes’ that children make: Substitution, deletion, addition, assimilation, metathesis, consonant cluster reduction, weak syllable deletion, final consonant deletion, reduplication 

-       Fis phenomenon (comprehension precedes production) 

-       Cruttenden 1974 football results (intonation takes long time to reach adult understanding)

-       Stages - Phonological acquisition very varied between different children but general patterns: initial consonants easier than final ones, plosive sounds easier (p, b, k etc); David Olmstead – age of 4, some sounds still difficult: l (middle of words), th, ch, dg (judge); Grunwell stages; Phonological development generally complete by age 6 – 7.