EngLangBlog

The latest episode of Lexis is out and it features an interview with Ife Thompson about lots of issues connected to Black British English, including linguistic justice, anti-Black discourses in s...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2024/02/black-british-english-vs-mle.html

If you haven't already come across it, the latest episode of our Lexis podcast features an interview with Frazer Heritage from Manchester Met on the representation of gender in videogames (among ...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2024/02/language-and-videogaming.html

 It's here! A new *free* resource from the English and Media Centre and University of Essex.  You can find it here . 

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2023/12/new-directions.html

It's Word of the Year season again and 'tis the season to be rizzy, apparently. Here are all the stories that I could find about #WOTY2023 so far. One of the big beasts, the American Dialect Soci...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2023/12/bde-big-dictionary-energy.html

In our New Directions: Language Diversity research and resource pack , we have set up an activity that asks students to research different media articles about MLE. Below you will find the media ...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2023/12/mle-media-links.html

I've not updated the links on here for a while but I'll get round to that soon as there are some really excellent resources available for the A level now and more on the way.  One great resour...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2023/10/useful-links-for-eng-lang-students-and.html

With Twitter (X... lol) going down the pan, I've set up a Bluesky account for @EngLangBlog so you can access that here if you're on that app. It seems to be growing nicely with more and more lin...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2023/10/social-media-links-new-bluesky-account.html

Question 3 on Paper 1 has often been a bit of a low-scorer for students and you can maybe see why. It comes an hour in to the exam, and you’ve still got all your knowledge about child language ...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2023/05/connections-between-texts-on-paper-1.html

When I'm teaching students how to approach text analysis questions (like Paper 1 Questions 1 and 2 and Paper 2 Question 3), I often advise them to take a look at the bigger picture first, before ...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2023/04/whats-it-all-about.html

One of the text extracts that I linked to in this post , was a piece called In Defence of Good Grammar , written by James Innes-Smith for The Critic website, which bills itself as a "monthly maga...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2023/04/tackling-in-defence-of-good-grammar.html

While I'm doing posts about Section B of Paper 2, I'd better mention the kinds of texts that appear here and that you have to analyse and respond to. They're often (but not always) articles from ...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2023/04/analysing-texts-about-language.html

Yesterday, I posted a few links to articles that I thought were pretty good examples of opinion pieces about language. There's always a bit of a caveat with this kind of advice though, because t...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2023/04/specialist-knowledge-for-non-specialist.html

 As you get ready for the exam season this summer, it's a good idea to read lots of opinion pieces to soak up the features of the genre: the style, structure, sub-editorial choices and the ways ...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2023/04/opinion-pieces-for-exam-revision.html

WOTY (Word of the Year) Season is in full swing and the lists from the various dictionaries and organisations who produce them, along with the blogs, the explainers and articles in the press abou...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2022/12/getting-word-out-2022.html

I don't normally blog opinion pieces on here but thought I'd share this one as I was asked to write a few things for the TEFL Workers' Union (here on Twitter and here on Facebook ) on langua...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2022/11/accent-bias-guest-blog-for-tefl-workers.html

As I posted a day or two back, accent attitudes have been back in the news. Following a report from The Sutton Trust , using research from the team behind Accent Bias Britain , various newspapers...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2022/11/accent-attitudes-lessons-in-discourses.html

It's been a while, sorry! Most of the posts I used to add here seemed simpler to do as tweets, linking to news stories, but I might start blogging more regularly again as Twitter seems to be taki...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2022/11/accent-bias-in-media.html

This is a guest blog by Dr. Clara Vaz Bauler is an associate professor of TESOL/Bilingual Education at Adelphi University, New York. Thanks to Clara for writing this and for the ideas shared her...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2021/06/what-opportunities-can-technology.html

The latest guest blog comes from David Chew, a teacher in the East Midlands. Here he looks at how he approaches the NEA language investigation from its earliest ideas and inception through to the...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2021/04/putting-f-in-nea-making-language.html

This is an activity I've been using for revision of Question 3 on Paper 1. The texts are all ones I've used before and some might be recognisable from courses and/or resources I've presented befo...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2021/04/quickfire-comparisons-paper-1-question-3.html

And the guest blogs keep coming...  This one is another from Neil Hutchinson, who teaches at Kirkbie Kendal School in the Lake District (on Twitter as @Hutchinsonnet ) and here he looks at the...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2021/04/many-ways-to-climb-mountain.html

Back in the mists of time, I started this blog for my students at St Francis Xavier Sixth Form College in south London (hence why it's still got SFX in its URL) to support what we were doing in c...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2021/04/teacher-blogs-quick-list.html

If you're a teacher and you've exhausted all the previous papers from AQA and are yourself just a bit exhausted after the... stuff... that's been happening over the last year, I thought I'd try t...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2021/04/rules-regulations-paper-1-exam-style.html

This guest blog is by Anna Browning (on Twitter as @wordphile ) who is a teacher in the East Midlands. She says, 'I've been teaching for over 25 years and have learned so much from colleague...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2021/04/paper-2-question-3-slaying-beast.html

In this new guest blog, Donal Hale takes a look at how he and his students deal with both the content and linguistic register needed for good 'Evaluate the idea...' answers in Paper 2 Section A. ...

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2021/03/paper-2-section-marrying-ao1-and-ao2-in.html