Well, well, well, I thought Lesley looked familiar! Lovely Lesley. She was, as I've just researched, a contestant last July, and went on to lose the game 88 – 72. So a very apt little period now for Channel 4, with them (or at least some of their television crew/cast) exerting the minimum effort possible in delivering to us programmes originally aired just over a year ago, and not continuing the present series of Countdown as we would expect. But in this instance they can be forgiven for putting Lesley back on our screens. Those in charge of Eggheads are also currently spinning the same yarn with programmes from (if I'm not mistaken) last year.

In a similar vein to all of this it is possible for a person or organisation to exert not the minimum effort possible on a task or project, but the maximum amount in making it as inconvenient as possible for people to receive, as is the case with Channel 4's 4oD, on which I recently attempted to watch Monday's (unbeknownst-to-me repeated) episode of Countdown - the first after a two week break - only to discover, upon clicking the Get 4oD on your PC now button on this page, the rude message to the right of this paragraph. It can be found on this 'sorry' page if your computer outstrips the meagre requirements of 4oD, or if you click this link, you can see if yours just makes the cut. But why so specific? If the wonderful BBC iPlayer is available for all, why can Channel 4 not get its act in gear and provide a comparable service? This isn't good form, in my book. If a thing is to be made available, it ought to be available to all. Not just those who happen to fit a particular demographic, or happen to have buckets of money (pictured, left), or happen to have sold their soul to a religion of their choosing. This isn't to say that everything ought to be forced on everybody in an equally aggressive fashion to each, but that it merely be available, for a person free to choose whether to accept/embrace it or not. Consideration must always, I feel, be made to the 'best for all' - not the best outcome for the individual, but that which one may do in order to ensure the best situation for everyone.

A simple example being those who drive fuel-guzzling cars. They may argue for everyone, saying that 'everybody can buy one of these cars, and be able to afford its upkeep were they to work hard for the money and save it wisely; it is a win-win situation for everyone: we all work hard - that is good - we can all buy lovely cars; nobody is excluded from that'. But then it must be remembered that these cars of which we speak are ones of the petrol-guzzling variety, thus the assertion that 'everyone can have one' is simply untrue, for the reason that there is not enough oil in the world for their upkeep. And this thought brings with it the case that, even were a person not interested in buying and maintaining such transportational machines, their lives would be detrimentally impacted upon by the existence and ownership of them in the form of their own petrol prices increasing. Were people to relinquish their selfish self-interest, and fund research into energy sources which will make as little impact on the natural and animal (animals are natural, of course, but I mean basically 'plant and animal' - including human, need I reiterate?) population, and nurture the happiness of all. Is that called 'do-gooding'? Well, fuck you if think so.

Finally, on the subject of Effort, I've recently learnt that I passed my Open University course U211 Exploring the English Language with a disgraceful 'D'. The reason for the 'D' is my poor performance in the exam, for which I achieved a paltry 45%. However, with an average of 74% for the seven assignments I completed throughout the course, would it not be fair to assume that to account for a fair proportion of the final result? Thus I did assume, and had I known the real formula for calculating the final result (pictured, right - from here), I would have exerted myself more fully in the exam, and written as much as I could, rather than spend much time organising my thoughts, and selecting the ones I thought most relevant and conducive to receiving a marvellous mark. The technique obviously failed, but having tried it once and learnt it not to be the best, I can now go into my next course, A210 Approaching Literature, and try my hand at making an improvement.

Word of the Week

Effort

effort /'efət/ n. 1 strenuous physical or mental exertion. 2 a vigorous or determined attempt. 3 Mech. a force exerted. 4 colloq. the result of an attempt; something accomplished (not bad for a first effort).

Definition courtesy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary

Word of the Week

Minimum

minimum /'mɪnɪməm/ n. & adj. (pl. minima /-mə/) —n. the least possible or attainable amount (reduced to a minimum). —adj. that is a minimum. [L, neut. of minimus least]

Definition courtesy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary

Well, this is a real stinker to finish off with, I'm afraid.

For this one we were required to go and find a news article to use as our base material, and then analyse it in terms of the way time is expressed in it. Like with eTMA03, the layout of the article is intrinsic to the content, and to save me from rewriting it in its entirety, I've made a .png image out of my original document which you can view by following the link in Part 2. Also, if you would fancy to read the assignment in its original form (albeit converted from the original .odt document to a .pdf one) you can do so by clicking the lovely icon:

Incidentally, the icons I'm using for these articles are the ones that I use on my own desktop. They are a part of the Dark-Glass icon theme that is freely available (both as in cost and freedom of information) from KDE-Look.org. However, the theme has since been updated (as to be expected in the vibrant and innovative world of open-source software), and I think these very icons are no longer a part of it.

You now have all of my assignments, carefully presented for your reading pleasure. I hope you enjoy this last one, and that you have enjoyed all seven of them in the series. I leave you with the seventh.

Time in News Stories

Part 1. Please see references for the article's url.

Part 2. Please click here to read the article (opens in a new tab).

Part 3.

Time expressions in the Darrell Hair story:

Time expressions in the Harbhajan Singh story:

Time expressions in the England and Wales Cricket Board's Annual General Meeting story:

Part 4.

The first difficulty I encountered with mapping out how time is structured in the story in answer to question 2 was the issue of how the sentences of the article ought to be laid out in my table. Allan Bell asserts that 'each news sentence is usually also its own paragraph' (2007, p. 89), but although this is the case for the example in Figure 3.1 (p. 82), it isn't so for Angus Fraser's article in The Independent. In his article, none of the sentences stand on their own, but come in (mainly) pairs to form paragraphs. Because of this, sentences may begin in the middle of a line – one sentence (S6) in fact existing entirely in the middle of a line, with the next sentence beginning after it on the same line – thus making it difficult to satisfactorily label them in the 'Sentence number' column. To solve the problem I merely edited the original article so that all sentences begin on a new line, with new paragraphs being indicated, as previously, by a preceding blank line.

The second difficulty I encountered was with regard to the story itself. Or, rather, to the fact that there seemed to be three of them, separate and unconnectable. I found that my designated time zero for the first portion of the article (S1 to S7) would be completely irrelevant to the second and final portions (S8-S12 and S13-S18 respectively). With this discrepancy to resolve, I decided that the best solution was to split my analysis into three portions, have three separate time zeros for the three stories, and to structure the time accordingly. In doing this for question 2, it then followed that I did the same for question 3. Another solution may have been simply to keep time zero as the time of the leading event of the leading story, and to structure all of the other events in the article around that – such that, for example, the entire middle portion of the article about Harbhajan Singh's hearing would be in negative time, since it all occurred before the date set for the resumption of Darrell Hair's international umpiring career – but since the two events, and the third, were so disconnected, I felt that such an analysis would be illogical, and that the solution I had devised was the least undesirable.

The third difficulty I had was judging the level of detail required in my analyses. For example, will it suffice in question 2 to assign only one time for the (arguably) two events in S10; and would it be wiser to divide the events in S16 (England hosting the Twenty20 World Cup and playing Australia in the Ashes) into two separate times? A similar question can be asked of the time expressions in question 3. I suppose I resolved these issues by aiming for high detail, but allowed myself to exercise discretion where I deemed the level of detail to be inappropriate.

Part 5.

In the Darrell Hair story the real time chronology of events correlates with the time structure as represented in the story in some parts, but not in others. It doesn't correlate at all in the first paragraph of the story, where we begin at time zero and are then immediately taken back into the past to explain the incidents leading up to the resumption of Darrell Hair's career at time zero, describing first his accusation of Inzamam-ul-Haq, and then the preceding action of which he was accusing the cricketer. We are going steadily back into the past. In the second paragraph, however, the real time chronology of events correlates precisely with the time structure as represented in the story. The events are told in the order in which they happened, with no diversions and no back-story. The paragraph is bringing us from the past events described in the first paragraph, steadily closer to the time of the leading story. The third paragraph then takes us right back into the past, further than we went in the first (although knowledge outside of this story, which the reader may or may not happen to possess, is needed to be aware of this), to give us some background information about Hair's past and his apparent relationship with Asian cricketers. Finally in sentence six the most futural event of the story is mentioned, and then we are brought back into the ongoing near past with the knowledge provided in sentence seven.

The time structure as represented in the Harbhajan Singh story has a slightly more complicated relationship with the real time chronology of events. Whereas the Darrell Hair story is based primarily in negative time (i.e. the time before the events of its time zero), this story depicts a series of very closely occurring events in and around time zero, weaving from negative time, into positive time, with a short excursion into negative time (for 'the two games he played') and finishing in positive time. Information is reiterated and explained in negative time, and outcomes of the main events are explained, naturally, in positive time.

The simplest time structure to explain is that represented in the third story, where two reverse chronological waves can be identified. The first paragraph begins at time zero, as the others, and with the final words of its second sentence alludes gently back to ongoing events that began in the near past (viz. the Indian Premier League). With the second paragraph we are taken to the furthermost future of the entire article, notions of the year 2010, and then a second, larger, wave brings us back through the years until we are right back to the present with the discussions of those attending the annual general meeting. Overall, this story is much more concerned with the future than the previous stories. Indeed, if the three stories are taken as large blocks, and have noted their tendencies to describe past, present or future events, it can be argued that, contrary to Allan Bell's argument that 'news stories ... are seldom if ever told in chronological order', this article by Angus Fraser is told in chronological order, and does tend to look from the past into the future.

6.Notwithstanding my previous observation, Bell's argument is borne out clearly in this article. As my analysis shows, time does not flow in one direction, from the past, through the present, to the future, but 'cycles through events taking us further back in time' (p. 86), explaining and elucidating those events until the entire story is known. I think this beginning in the present and cycling back in time may possibly be a product of the speed with which the news is expected to be communicated. If, for example, a person was an avid reader of the news, but found themselves with very little time to do so, it could be possible for them to read only the opening sentence of a news story, learn about the most recent events of an ongoing story, and their memories of previous news stories will enable them to understand and put these events into context without their having to read the entire story.

However, although Angus Fraser will no doubt be aware of this continuation of news stories and the notion of a story's life cycle, he subverts the reader's ability to simply read the opening sentence and then put the pieces together, as it were, because the article is not only about one event. If the reader were to do as I suggested, (s)he would inevitably miss out on the events of two entire stories.

One possible way to avoid such an occurrence would be to give a quick list of the contents of the article at the beginning before the first story, but this would mean eating in to the journalist's allotted word count, as well as creating more for the reader to read and repeating, albeit in very slight detail, material that will occur later in the article. Overall, I understand that time is of the essence in news English (the short sentences, incidentally, illustrating this equally as well as the rest), and that deadlines, journalistic competition and the general fast pace of modern life make concision and speed absolutely necessary.

References

Bell, A. (2007) 'Text, time and technology in news English' in Goodman, S., Graddol, D. and Lillis, T. (eds) Redesigning English, London, Routledge/Milton Keynes, The Open University

'Hair to make international comeback at Old Trafford' Nexis® UK (must be signed in) http://www.lexisnexis.com/uk/nexis/history/recentdocview.do?listId=190075141&lni=4SD0-9N80-TXJ8-30W5&attachmentId=&attachmentType=&sourceId=8200&attachmentNum=&attachmentSMI=&displayType=&savedLocale=en_GB_ukBusiness&projectId=&returnTo=20_T3665615075&publicationDate=&docTitle=Hair+to+make+international+comeb...&start=1&documentType= (Accessed 3 May 2008)

Why might 'academic' English need to be taught?

Entering into academia involves joining a discourse community in which ideas are shared, arguments are discussed, and knowledge is developed. Within the realm of academia are a large variety of disciplines, each, in the words of the educational researcher Gordon Wells, being 'dependent on its own particular practices ... [and each having] developed its own modes of discourse'. He explains that 'to work in a discipline, therefore, it is necessary to be able to engage in these practices and, in particular, to participate in the discourse of that community' (Wells, 1992, p. 290, cited in Hewings, Lillis and Mayor, 2007, p. 229). In this assignment I will attempt to present such 'modes of discourse' or linguistic features which have been found to exist in academic discourse generally and how these features vary in proportion across various disciplines, reasons for teaching these features, and possible results of teaching people how to understand and create 'academic' English.

Linguist Michael Halliday (1994, cited in Hewings et al. 2007, p. 229) suggested that the creation of a specialised lexis is a common feature of academic disciplines. New words are devised 'for referring to newly discovered or specially defined objects, processes, relationships and so on', so we may find such terms as cerebral atrophy in medicine, debenture in accountancy, and atonality in music. As to the proportion of such specialised lexis across different disciplines, the examples of academic writing on pages 230 and 231 of Learning English (Hewings et al. 2007) provide some clues. Example 1 (from Martlew and Sorsby, 1995, p. 1), which is in the linguistic field of children's literacy development, contains seemingly few specialised lexical items, as does the example from Clare (1995, p. 1) in the field of published literary texts. Hewings et al. comment (p. 231) that 'even if someone is not a 'full' member of the relevant research community, a reader of a book on the English language [will more likely be able to make] sense of an article on some aspect of literacy that for understanding the contents of the Journal of Chemical Thermodynamics', from where the third example is taken (Pikkarainen, quoted in Bhatia, 1993, p. 89). This last example contains a higher proportion of technical terms than the previous two, and I would suppose that without having been taught the meanings of such terms as 'viscosities', 'binary' and 'solvents' the text would be more or less incomprehensible. At best the reader will be unlikely to fully understand the text. The text is further complicated by its use of specialised English morphology (employing numbers and dashes in 'propon-2-ol') and syntax (with its use of plus signs in '+ butan-1-ol'). It can be deduced from the text that these latter two terms are components known as 'aliphatic alcohols', but this is meaningless until it is known what an 'aliphatic alcohol' specifically is. However, features such as this specialised lexis form a large part of many disciplines – particularly sciences – and without the teaching of them, the discipline could barely exist – at least not to a particularly advanced stage – and so these terms are widely taught.

The main difference between the three examples just mentioned is the type of discipline whence they came. Tony Becher divides up academia into the following four broad disciplinary groupings:

'Hard and 'soft' distinguishing between more objective and subjective disciplines respectively; with 'applied' referring to practically orientated fields (another example being computer programming), and 'pure' fields dealing with abstract concepts (such as the study of music, although performance may be regarded as serving more practical purposes). The first two examples from the previous paragraph both come from 'soft' fields, with the third belonging to a 'hard' field, and this may go some way to explaining the differing proportion of specialised lexis found in the texts.

Ken Hyland produced an article describing inter-disciplinary difference with regard to directives, and it is to this I will now turn.

Directives perform the interpersonal functions of engaging the reader, positioning the reader, and they can allow the writer the ability to be succinct and precise. Through his study of a '2.5 million word corpus of texts collected across eight disciplines and comprising three different genres' (Hewings et al. 2007, p. 234), Hyland found that 'the hard knowledge fields not only contained far more directives, but these were also more likely to function as a means of guiding readers through a procedure and to the conclusions of the writer' (Hyland, K. 2002, pp. 230-9, reproduced as Reading A in Hewings et al. 2007, p. 258). These functions of directives seem to me to be quite complex and I am undecided as to whether or not it would be a good idea to teach students how to use them. On the one hand, teaching students about directives may empower them to 'see through' arguments, and to recognise what the author is trying to do; but the other argument is that, in teaching students how to use directives, their usage may become formulaic, and the students will expend so much concentration on such linguistic devices that the substance of their arguments decreases in quality and their works amount to little more than superficial clauses strung together with fancy directives.

This cannot be true of the ideational features discussed towards the beginning of the assignment because knowledge of a meaning-bearing word and displaying that knowledge can only be a sign of cognitive empowerment, but there are other interpersonal features of academic discourse the teaching of which may have similar possible outcomes to directives. Such features include hedges, reporting verbs of various flavours, identity and voice. It would, I imagine, be relatively straightforward to teach a student about hedges and their function, and the different types of hedges that can be created; similarly with the reporting verbs, be they of the factive kind ('Blofeld discovered...') or the more critical ('Agnew presumed...'); but I feel issues of identity and voice would be much more difficult to teach. However, if they could be taught, how beneficial or enchaining would it be for the student?

The question of what is (not just the linguistic features of) academia and what are its purposes is always a pertinent one, but way out of the scope of this assignment. However, I feel it is reasonable to say that the main purpose of academia is to further expand the knowledge of the human race as a whole. With this in mind I feel it would be unwise to risk enchaining students to a set of linguistic features tailored for writing academic texts. Of course, this bleak state of affairs may never materialise, and students tutored in the art of academic writing may turn out to far surpass their forebears in their achievements, but I don't feel that learning to produce academic texts will necessarily enhance a student's ability to reason and form knowledge. Arguments may be made more strongly, but this may have a detrimental effect of convincing a vast amount of people that a flimsy idea is a sound and good concept. But, on the other hand, if everybody is to be taught how to create these academic texts, then it is to be assumed that everyone will be equally equipped to deflect any advances of 'spin' and see straight to the heart of an argument. There is, indeed, the more optimistic view that by being taught these features of academic discourse, students are enabled to reflect on them, assess their worth, and then possibly form their own ideas about how academic discourse ought to written, with perhaps a more informed logic than someone untutored in the subject.

I don't think I've come to a conclusion as to 'why academic English might need to be taught', or indeed whether or not it should be taught, but I hope I've presented both sides of the argument, and demonstrated some knowledge of the problems involved.

(1360 words)

References

Becher, T. (1994) 'The significance of disciplinary difference', Studies in Higher Education, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 151-61.

Bhatia, V.K. (1993) Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings, London, Longman.

Clare, R. (1995) '“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” The theory of authorial revision between quarto and folio texts of King Lear', The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1994) An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd edn), London, Edward Arnold.

Hewings, A., Lillis, T. and Mayor, B. (2007) 'Academic writing in English' in Mercer, N., Swann, J. and Mayor, B. (eds) Learning English, London, Routledge/ The Open University.

Hyland, K. (2002) 'Directives: argument and engagement in academic writing', Applied Linguistics, vol. 23, no.2, pp. 215-39.

Martlew, M. and Sorsby, A. (1995) 'The precursors of writing: graphic representation in preschool children', Learning and Instruction, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1-19.

Wells, G. (1992) 'The centrality of talk in education' in Norman, K. (ed.) Thinking Voices: The Work of the National Oracy Project, London, Hodder & Stoughton.

Aah, I'm very fortunate with this one: there are no unusual presentational issues (as I had with eTMA03) to deal with, and no phonetic symbols needing to be found and copy 'n' pasted in from Wikipedia .

Incidentally, those of you keen Contents watchers will see that, alongside their entries in the Table of Contents, each article is accompanied by the mark I achieved for it.

Characteristic Patterns of Classroom Discourse

Classroom discourse, like all genres of discourse, is built up of a number of elements: from words, register and gestures, to questions, turn-taking and issues of the balance of power. Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) exchanges were first described in 1975 by British linguists Sinclair and Coulthard, and they can be seen to be 'the archetypal form of interaction between a teacher and a pupil'. But Neil Mercer points out that IRF exchanges are not the only way in which discourse is conducted in the classroom, but that 'other kinds of talk involving different patterns of exchanges (for example, in which students ask questions of teachers, or of other students) may happen too' (Mercer, 2007, p. 122). In this assignment I will try to assess whether and to what extent any patterns can be found in the passage in question, and how they may relate to existing patterns which are considered characteristic of classroom discourse.

The first pattern to be found is a very strong and consistent pattern, and it is with respect to turn-taking: Throughout the entire duration of the passage, the role of the speaker switches alternately between a student and the teacher. The only deviation from this pattern occurs between turns 12 and 13, in which the role of the speaker is taken by the teacher in both turns, but this is easily accounted for by the fact that part of the transcript is omitted between these two turns. Of course, in normal service it would be illogical to transcribe one person as having taken two turns consecutively, but it would be possible for two different students to speak one after the other. However, as already insinuated, this doesn't occur in the passage. I think this indicates a certain amount of control over the proceedings by the teacher, with her (or him) acting as a sort of intermediary between the students, their questions and, to a certain extent, the subject.

But this isn't to say that the teacher exerts complete control over the discourse. This opinion is exemplified by the fact that the opening turn of the passage and the first question is asked by a student. This is in contrast to the typical patterns of discourse to be found in the Harikatha style of teaching employed in India, as described by G. D. Jayalakshmi in her article 'One cup of newspaper and one cup of tea' (Mercer, 2007, pp. 143-149). In this style of teaching the balance of power is much more with the teacher, who is the person who speaks for the vast majority of the time, and who barely needs to stop (besides the slight pause following the rising question intonation) to receive a reply from the class. The teacher is very much in control of the context of the discourse, and the students have little opportunity to introduce any original material to the class.

Further to the quantity and duration of turns being more equally distributed in the passage in the Assignment Book, questions are also allowed to be asked equally whether you are a student or the teacher. And the nature of the questions is interesting, because they are not uniformly either open or closed, but a mixture of the two. The first question from the student Manuel is an open one (in that there are a multitude of possible responses, and he doesn't have a preformulated answer in mind) and it is only relatively loosely related to the speaking which has gone before (the teacher reading from a book about hurricanes and tornadoes). Of course, having not heard the reading myself, I cannot be quite certain that Manuel is introducing this business of the penguin of his own accord, and that he isn't responding to a character in the Antarctic from the teacher's reading. However, since later in the transcript the teacher asks Manuel to 'get the Emperor penguin book', I feel reasonably safe in assuming that she is asking for the book on the impetus of Manuel introducing the subject, and that Manuel did so of his own accord. The second question of the passage comes from the teacher, and it is a closed one: it only allows an answer of 'yes' or 'no', and the teacher perhaps has a preferred response in mind. However, she doesn't wait for a response but immediately asks another question, this time an open question, allowing the children the opportunity to practice using their powers of deduction and reasoning: 'What kind of protection could a penguin have [if it goes under water]? The very concerned student Bernardo then answers this question with an open question of his own: '... how would a penguin go underneath the water if there's enemies?' Interestingly, this question could have replaced the preceding turn from the teacher in answer to his fellow student's suggestion that '[the penguins] could go under water', but this would have damaged the turn-taking pattern of alternating student and teacher. With this further piece of evidence, it seems that this pattern may be a convention of this teacher's classroom discourse. Predictably enough the teacher then responds to Bernardo's question, and with a closed question of her own, which is then immediately followed up with an open one. This inclination of the teacher to ask a closed question immediately followed by an open one seems to form a pattern, and she follows this pattern both times she asks a question. More evidence is needed to be absolutely sure, but it seems that this pattern is characteristic of this teacher's teaching method.

One pattern which is decidedly absent is the alleged 'archetypal form of interaction between a teacher and a pupil', IRF exchanges. In such an exchange, the teacher is meant to Initiate the discourse by introducing a particular point usually in the form of a question, then the student is expected to Respond to the point, and finally the teacher is to provide Feedback on that response. But in the passage in question it is predominantly the students who are initiating the discourse, with the teacher responding and then generally asking out a further question. In fact, at the very beginning of the transcript, Manuel begins by asking the question '... if tornadoes go to the Antarctica, what the penguin gonna do?', to which the teacher begins to respond 'Oh, you know what...', but after beginning is interrupted by a second child who responds to Manuel's question with the suggestion that 'They could go under water'. Only then does the teacher manage to provide feedback to this response by turning his response directly into a question (only swapping the first two words, presumably accompanied by a raised pitch on 'could'), and then she initiates another exchange with the question 'What kind of protection could a penguin have?'. This may have led to a regular IRF pattern, but the following turn from Bernardo is not a response to her question but is actually a refutative question to the 'going under water' suggestion. He is in effect delivering feedback to his fellow student. This piece of feedback then in turn receives positive re-enforcement feedback from the teacher, who then picks up on his point about enemies and responds to the class as a whole with the question 'Well, who's his enemies?'. As can be seen, IRF exchanges in their typical form are not present in this passage, but rather the roles of Initiator, Responder and Feedback provider are shared among all participants.

At this point in the transcript we can note the appearance of a familiar aspect of classroom discourse: that of the chorus response, with children generally saying 'The seal'. This is particularly prevalent in the Indian methods of teaching influenced by the Harikatha storytelling traditions, and I personally remember such exchanges occurring in my own days at primary school. Three turns later a very common gesture in classroom discourse is mentioned by the teacher when she says 'Manuel had his hand up'. This last feature hasn't been transcribed by Shuart-Faris and Bloome, so I've had to rely on the teacher mentioning it for me to know that it happened, and I would argue that it is perfectly possible that the raised hand had been a feature elsewhere in this discourse, thus creating a pattern of hands raised followed by initiation or response from a student.

In conclusion, this passage seems fairly atypical of classroom discourse. The IRF exchanges in their typical form are absent, any influences of the Harikatha tradition which might have travelled across the oceans are barely there, and the teacher does not seem to have direct control over the direction of the discourse. However, it does contain patterns all of its own, with the alternating turn-taking, the teacher's inclination to first ask closed questions and then immediately follow them up with open ones, and there are the two common elements of hand raising, and chorus responses.

(1487 words)

References

Mercer, N. (2007) 'English as a classroom language' in N. Mercer, J. Swann and B. Mayor (eds) Learning English, London, Routledge/ The Open University

The Importance of Context in Language Play

Language play can be found in a wide variety of contexts: from extended fictional narrative and public oratory; through song and poetry; to the (generally) shorter forms of newspaper headlines, graffiti, witty utterances, nicknames and, of course, jokes. Within these contexts a wide variety of linguistic features can be played with, which Cook (2002, cited by Beard, 2007, p. 85) separates into three broad areas: Linguistic form, Semantics and Pragmatics. In this assignment I will attempt to expand on Cook's criteria, explaining what each area consists of, and look at examples of how these linguistic features are played with in a variety of contexts, and why contextual knowledge is needed by all involved for the successful comprehension and enjoyment of the play.

I will begin with an example of a semantically focused witty utterance from this week's episode (Monday, 4th February) of the Radio 4 comedy panel game Just a Minute; the game in which players are asked to speak on a given subject for sixty seconds without hesitation, repetition or deviation. But before I provide the intended example, there already, in the rules of Just a Minute, we have an instance of language play. Here we can identify repetition of the bound morpheme '-tion' and its corresponding phoneme /ʃən/, which each fit into Cook's area of Linguistic form, being the area which 'focuses on the look and sound (phonology) of words' (Beard, 2007, p. 85). Furthermore there is a rhythmic repetition throughout the three words: each word begins with two unstressed syllables, then a stressed syllable, and ends on an unstressed syllable – which, according to Stephen Fry (2005, p. 121), is a quaternary foot known as a Third Paeon. These types of repetition, I feel, serve to provide cohesion and to bind the words together, thus serving the pragmatic purpose of making them more memorable. As a final observation on these rules, there are also three of them: the triadic structure, being a 'rhetorical device traditionally associated with public oratory' (Goodman, 2007, p. 215)

This first example of language play is fairly ordinary, I think. It is reasonably unspectacular, there are no incongruities, and it all just seems to fit together rather nicely. My original opening example is quite different, and it introduces the last area of Cook's features of language.

Clement Freud was due to speak on a given subject for sixty seconds; he was given the subject of 'killing time', upon which impetus he proceeded to describe a particular time on a Tuesday when there is generally plenty of killing. He is relying specifically on our contextual knowledge of what it means to 'kill time', and then subverts that knowledge to provide what you call, Netta, a clash of expectation. He is playing with the semantics of the phrase by shifting it from the expected action – 'to kill time' (verb) – to that time of day which he describes (abstract noun); and this shift from the expected serves the pragmatic function of first confusing the listener, then providing a feeling of joy for the listener when (s)he gets the joke, and this mischievous subversion of authority – since the intended topic was quite different from the one he chose to describe – endears him to the listeners, who unite with his against the authoritative definition of the phrase. That is if they understand the context, of course, and are inclined to celebrate rebelling against authority.

These two examples of language play differ greatly, both in the responses they draw from the listener, and in the styles of play which are involved. They also differ in the kinds of detail which are required to describe the play to a third party. As for the first example, I think the context of understanding for it to be enjoyed is narrower than that for the second, and I also feel that the enjoyment to be had from that first example is much less than the second. However, the detail required to describe the first example of language play to a third party is absolute, in that without presenting the words 'hesitation, repetition, deviation' the play is difficult to describe; whereas with the example from Clement Freud the whole of his utterance needn't be replicated exactly, but only giving the gist will suffice for the person receiving the explanation to enjoy the play. Of course, a person's response to a given thing is entirely their own, and I cannot hope (or intend) to account for each individual taste in my analysis, but can only truthfully provide my own reaction to these plays; however, the notion of contextual knowledge depth is fairly objective, I would say, and so I feel safe in deducing, from the evidence of these present examples, that the wider the context of understanding, the greater the enjoyment. Furthermore, it seems that semantic language play is more enjoyable than play on linguistic form. However, more evidence is needed before a firm conclusion can be drawn, so I will now explore some.

This Tuesday's edition (5th February) of the free Manchester newspaper, the Metro, offers two examples. Both of them being headlines relating to rail travel around Europe, they are perhaps more fairly compared, with the principal difference being the areas of language play which are involved. The first headline reads: 'You'll have a rail of a time'. I understand that the person responsible for this headline merely took the stock phrase 'you'll have a whale of a time' and changed that one word 'whale' – or, indeed, just that one consonant /w/ for a /r/ - and made 'rail'. Context is vitally important here for the understanding of this play, because without it – as the case may be with the original phrase, it could be argued – it makes very little sense. Without knowing that to have a whale of a time means to have a fabulous time, the headline may simply mean nothing to the reader; and without have heard the original phrase, no connection can be made. The context of the newspaper is also necessary for the play to make sense. Only when all of these contexts are understood does the play make sense, and it takes on its pragmatic role of associating that original phrase with the new one, and conjuring up for the reader the ideas bound up with having a whale of a time, with the word rail signifying that this grand enjoyment is to be had in a railway carriage. This association of ideas could even be thought of as a collocation.

Apparently simple as that piece of language play may be (banal may not be too coarse a word), the second headline from the Metro is even more so: 'Get your ticket to ride'. There is no play on linguistic form, no semantic play, so might I have lost my mind in citing this as an example of language play? A person unfamiliar with the Beatles may be inclined to think so. But a person familiar with them, and particularly with their song 'Ticket to Ride', will immediately make a connection between that song and this headline. Thus, the headline employs a form of pragmatic play, providing the reader with some pleasure of recognition, creating solidarity with those who understand it, and perhaps conjuring up a feeling of nostalgia for those who lived during the period of the Beatles.

My final example, suitable, perhaps, is one which I don't understand and cannot fully appreciate. It is unrecorded and is a sort of live 'performance' at which I was present, and as I didn't understand it I can only do a general description.

The Ukrainian band in which I play bass had been playing one evening. We had finished and the patrons were variously sitting around drinking, singing and being generally merry, when suddenly Baz Jarega, the father of our accordionist and our singer, got himself centre-stage and proclaimed a long and elaborate speech in what sounded to me like Ukrainian. Of course, I didn't understand a word of it, but everyone else was howling with laughter. When he did finish, and the general murmur resumed, I turned to my friend and asked him what it was all about. It turns out that he didn't know, and neither did anyone else! Apparently Baz had been talking complete gibberish, stringing lots of long and complicated words together, and perhaps creating some of his own, using the characteristic /t͡ʃnɪ/ and /skɪ/ sounds. But I, having virtually no contextual knowledge – although I did understand it must have been funny, judging by everyone's reaction – assumed it to be perfectly genuine Ukrainian. Thus, the importance of context in this example cannot be underestimated.

I hope in this assignment I have managed to demonstrate the importance of context in understand language play, and throughout the course of it I have been able to reformulate my idea of what language play consists of. I began assuming that all language play must be funny, or at least provoke a smile, but some of the examples demonstrate that humour is not required, and that the most important thing is context.

(1515 words)

References

Beard, A. (2007) 'Language play in English' in J. Maybin, N. Mercer and A. Hewings (eds) Using English, London, Routledge/ The Open University

Fry, S. (2005) The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, London, Hutchinson

Goodman, S. (2007) 'Market forces speak English' in J. Maybin, N. Mercer and A. Hewings (eds) Using English, London, Routledge/ The Open University

An extraordinarily interesting assignment, this one, for it required us to find and transcribe a piece of unrehearsed speech from either a television or radio programme. I opted for the radio programme, Just a Minute, and selected a one-and-a-half minute section of the programme, to use for this assignment.

The audio excerpt which I used I have included in the relevant place (that is, Part 2), and there I have left instructions on how to proceed if you would like to listen to the excerpt while reading my transcription. The transcription itself requires very specific dimensions in terms of its width, so, feeling unable/unwilling to completely rewrite it for the purposes of this blog, I've created a .png image out of the original .odt document, which, naturally, keeps said dimensions, and which will have to be viewed separately. I've also uploaded the entire document in .pdf format, which can be viewed by clicking the following icon:

I hope that all makes sense, and that you enjoy reading this interesting assignment.

Linguistic Definitions and Transcription Techniques

Part 1

• face-threatening act noun if face is the term used for people's public self-image (Maybin, 2007), then a face-threatening act is a speech act which does something to threaten the integrity of that self-image. Janet Maybin gives the following as an example: 'saying there seems to have been a bit of an accident here rather than how the hell could you have been so stupid!' (p. 10). Another example could occur in a situation where one person, John, poses a question to Rebecca and Alan, Rebecca can be seen to be trying her hardest to answer the question, but Alan undermines her and answers with the face-threatening, 'We don't know'. Face-threatening acts can be avoided be using hedging expressions such as I think perhaps, sort of or possibly.
• collocation noun nominalisation of the verb to collocate, meaning to put together. In linguistic terms refers to two or more words which are commonly found in conjunction with each other. In Reading A of Chapter 2 of the course book Norman Fairclough presents collocations he found in a study of '53 speeches of Tony Blair's between 1997 and 1999' (p. 73). He found that 'the most frequent collocations are 'New Labour' ... and 'New Deal''. Other examples could be 'laboratory experiment' or, in computing, 'Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS)'. One possible effect of collocations is to spread the meanings of each word in the collocation to the others, so that one word may be used and the meanings of the other(s) will be associated with it.
• nominalisation noun the act of turning one syntactic form, e.g. a verb, into another, e.g. a noun. In the course book Mike Baynham and Janet Maybin highlight the replacement of the verb invest in Extract 1 by a related noun investment in Extract 2 from earlier in the chapter (p. 125). Nominalisation could also occur from a verb to an adjective, as in like and likeable, or from an adjective to a noun, as in lonely and loneliness. Nominalisation from verb to noun often occurs in formal written texts (indeed, it is said to be 'particularly characteristic' of the genre (p. 125)), and has the effect of making the text more lexically dense, i.e. there are a higher proportion of lexical items (meaning-bearing words) to grammatical items (connective words).
• marketisation noun a type of border crossing in which techniques of 'sales language' are used in informative texts to make them more persuasive. Such techniques include making the text more informal – use of contractions (won't or you'll), the active voice (we surveyed one hundred people) or by addressing the reader directly – using more than one semiotic mode in one text (words and images, or words and music), or using triadic structures (i.e. presenting a proposition in three parts) (Maybin, 2007, p. 215). An example of these techniques is given in a page from a Department of Health leaflet (p. 219), in which luscious images and enticing language work together to convince the reader that its message is beneficial. Other such persuasive techniques can be found in television news and weather programmes, in which attractive visuals and 'authoritative' music are used to present a professional, and therefore trustworthy, appearance. However, some viewers or readers may simply want the bare facts, and these slick visuals serve only as distractions, and thus despoil the trustworthiness of the information.

Part 2

(If you would please to click on the icon to open the image in a new tab, and then, once loaded, to come back to this page, click play, and then go back to the opened tab to read the transcription. Thank you.)

Part 3

I think the first decision which had to be made, once I'd chosen my portion of speech, was whether to employ a standard or a column transcript layout. I decided on the latter, judging it to be more suitable for recording a group of people, with many interruptions, turns and overlaps. A fine example of these elements occurs from lines 55-62, and I feel this particular passage would not be as successfully recordable had I chosen to use a standard transcript layout. However, this very passage illustrates one primary flaw of the column transcript layout: whereas in a standard transcript the speakers need not be defined in advance, but can simply appear as they speak, column transcripts depend upon each speaker being defined with their own column, otherwise the system may become unstable and conflicts may occur. Chris Neill is a case in point, here. He speaks only once during the entire conversation, so to save space I decided not to give him his own column. However, if his one utterance had coincided directly with utterances from each of the other speakers, I would have been in trouble, because there would have been nowhere to record it. It was only good fortune on my part that Josie Lawrence wasn't speaking at the time, which saved the system from falling apart.

After deciding which layout I wanted to use, I had to establish which features of speech I wanted to record. Speed and Pitch were two elements I considered, but rejected them both on grounds of practicality. Instead I tried to concentrate on moods (with urgency) and timings; and the use of the comments column, bracketed times and line divisions I found very useful to accomplish this. Moods could be conveyed in the comments column for single utterances, but there are also two occasions when the mood has extended beyond one utterance, across the boundaries of an interruption, and which I have signified by using red text. I found this a more expedient method than either underlining all the utterances to which the comment applies, or by using 'open and close tags' in the column (e.g. with drama, start and with drama, end). My method kept the comments column as clean as possible, and enabled me to comment on Nicholas's utterance (line 26), without having to worry about Josie's ongoing drama. With regards line divisions, my policy was that when the state of the utterance changed (from solo to interruption, or back again) the line was divided, bearing in mind that the audience's reactions constituted utterances.

The extract is from Monday 7th January's episode of the Radio 4 comedy panel game Just a Minute, a game in which avoiding common features of speech – hesitation, repetition and deviation – earns points, and so which I thought would make a curious and interesting subject for a transcription. However, only two words of the extract are uttered within the confines of the game's rules (Josie's 'I remember' on lines 119-120), almost the entirety being regular spontaneous speech, and a great many features of typical speech can be found. Personal forms of address are used, such as Nicholas's darlings in lines 12 and 15. At this point he is authoritatively upholding the 'law' (no hesitation), but this form of address works to soften the impact, and save Josie's face. This softening is also a type of hedging. Furthermore, it creates a sense of solidarity, so he is seen to be with the panellists, as opposed to authoritatively against them. An alternative (and possibly more realistic, in this instance) explanation is that Nicholas is simply an affectionate person, and naturally addresses people as 'darling'.

There are also a series of interruptions around this passage (lines 12-26), in which Nicholas is interrupted, and immediately quietens to allow his interrupter to continue. This act of Nicholas's works to fulfil his negative face needs – his desire not to impose himself on others. A series of false starts then occur in Nicholas's solo from lines 28-34. He begins by reiterating the complaints made against Josie, but then he stops himself and goes on to explain what he usually does in the game. In this way he is saving Josie's face again, and is instead offering her positive advice on how to continue the game.

There are so many features in just the beginning of this extract, as there are in the whole of it, and as there were in the entire episode, but I feel I must finish with another example, my favourite, from near the beginning of the transcript. There are a couple of echoes in lines 12 and 13: Nicholas says /dɑ/ at the same time as Paul says /ɑ/, and then just as Paul says /maɪ/ Josie says /aɪ/. These rhyming echoes may have occurred entirely by chance, throwaway sounds at the spur of the moment, but I feel it would be nice to think of them as the hidden keys to these people's relationships, as very strong indications of the deep solidarity that these people have between them.

(2054 words)

References

J. Maybin, N. Mercer and A. Hewings (eds) Using English, London, Routledge/ The Open University

Received Pronunciation

Question

'RP was an accent which simultaneously raised hackles and overawed.'
(Jack Aitken, DVD1, An English accent)

Discuss the above statement, with reference to the development of RP over time.

Since its beginnings in the eighteenth century the notion of a standardised accent seems to have done just what Jack Aitken describes: Dr. Samuel Johnson, in the Preface to his A Dictionary of the English Language of 1755, declared that, 'Sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restrains; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength'; whereas the title page of Thomas Sheridan's dictionary of 1780 would deliver an entirely contrary opinion, reading: A Complete Dictionary of the English Language, both with regard to Sound and Meaning. One main Object of which is, to Establish a Plain and Permanent Standard of Pronunciation (Mugglestone, 2007, pp. 154-155). However, according to David Crystal (2004), Received Pronunciation, 'the non-regional educated British accent of the twentieth century, ... did not exist at the end of the eighteenth century,' but it could be said to have started by the 1830s, when 'writers were advising people to speak like Londoners' (p. 468). Thus, I will begin at this point in history, and attempt to present a balanced discussion with an equal amount of evidence in support of both Johnson's and Sheridan's schools of thought, describing how Received Pronunciation and people's reactions to it have developed over time.

I think an idea worth investigation is the notion of how people's professions and interests influence their perception of Received Pronunciation, but perhaps first a definition of RP, courtesy of the phonetician Alexander Ellis from 1869, may be required to clarify the term. He says that, 'In the present day we may ... recognise a received pronunciation all over the country ... It may be especially considered as the educated pronunciation of the metropolis, of the court, the pulpit and the bar ... (Crystal, 2004, p. 468). Ellis is not at all prescriptivist in this definition, but rather, as we may expect of a phonetician, whose interests are linguistically, and not socially, motivated, circumspect in his approach. It may even be fair to say that neither were his hackles raised nor was he overawed by this 'Received' type of pronunciation, but that he wanted impartially to analyse and describe the then current trends in phonology. His reaction to it, in other words, was neutral. However, besides the 'Received' type of pronunciation – which word it was he who implemented it as a technical term – Ellis identified five other kinds. The six, in the order presented by David Crystal (2004, p. 468), were: Received, Correct, Natural (Untamed), Peasant, Vulgar (Illiterate), and Dialect. I think by modern standards, this categorisation may be seen as somewhat dubious. But Ellis's method of categorisation isn't important at present; rather, the results of this categorisation may shed some interesting light on his reactions to the various accents which he identified. Assuming he employed the same order as that which Crystal presents, Ellis seems to have had a fairly elitist attitude to accents, particularly with regard to the notion of RP being the epitome of type: he perhaps subscribed to the 'inherent value hypothesis'. On the other hand, he may not, and was merely reflecting the general consensus of the time.

Occupations are obviously not homogeneous masses of identically thinking people, but if Alexander Ellis is at all representative of phoneticians – who, by their nature, it could be argued, are descriptivist, rather than prescriptivist – then we will have to look at another occupation, to find if that will influence the occupied into either of Johnson's or Sheridan's schools of thought. To take as an example the occupation of 'instructing manual author' or 'etiquette teacher'.

Lady Agnes Grove (Crystal, 2004) was one such person, and in her etiquette guide of 1907 she wrote, 'Nothing ... is more irritating than the sedulous pronunciation of mid-verbal “h's” or the sounding of the “t” in often' (p. 469). I think I understand that these pronunciations were features of RP, and that she was railing against them. But at the same time she was subscribing – not surprisingly, given the nature of her occupation – to ideas of prescriptivism, and the notion of a preferred speech. Thus, it is fair to say that she fits perfectly Jack Aitken's description of simultaneously having her hackles raised and being overawed. Like I say, this situation is not surprising, given her occupation.

But perhaps an author of fiction might have a different perspective on RP. Fiction is, after all, the domain of the boundless imagination, and ought to be impervious to the shackles of convention, such as an accent like RP is wont to impose. Indeed, Charles Dickens, as Crystal (2004) illustrates, puts dialect (and, so, it is to be assumed, accent) into the mouths of his characters, and Crystal observes that 'dialect is more often put into the mouths of characters who are honest, genuine, sincere, and down-to-earth' (pp. 497-498). This is a much more positive reaction than Grove's complaints over “h's” and “t's”.

Thus we have two authors working in different genres, each apparently subscribing to the opposite school of thought from the other: Dickens in Johnson's; Grove in Sheridan's. Then in the twentieth century the BBC was created, and assumed the mantel, I believe, of a sort of 'public educator'. RP was adopted as its accent of choice, and Lord Reith, its founder, explained this decision by stating that 'Since the earliest days of broadcasting the B.B.C. has recognised a great responsibility towards the problems of spoken English' (Crystal, 2004, p. 470). But nowhere in this passage can I find an explanation of what this problem is: it seems to be a complete assertion, taken for granted. Nevertheless, RP, as it has been since its beginning, is held up as a bastion of educated speaking, and any other accent is considered inferior by default. Then when Wilfred Pickles arrived to read the news during the Second World War there was outrage, with complaints from listeners saying 'they felt that they couldn't believe the information that they were being given,' since it was being read in a Northern accent (Mugglestone, 2007, p. 166). The BBC obviously held such an influence over its audience, that if they hadn't adopted RP as their own spoken accent, they expected it as their 'heard accent'.

The stage, I would presume, holds a comparable influence over its audience, and attitudes to performance may not be too dissimilar to those held for broadcasting on the BBC. Particularly in such theatre as Shakespeare, feelings about conventions may be stronger that in other theatre: in effect doing for theatre what the BBC does for broadcasting (or it may be more logical to think of it the other way around). However, if attitudes to Shakespeare have been similar to those to the BBC, those attitudes are changing in the present day. In 'An English accent' on the U211 DVD-video, Barrie Rutter, the actor in Northern Broadside, declares, 'I've never really been able to lost my accent,' implying that such a loss may at one time have been desirable. But he then goes on to describe how he 'find[s] no rhythm in /lɑːf/ or /bɑːθ/ or /grɑːs/' - the RP method of pronunciation – and says that 'the Northern languages, from about Nottingham upwards, including the whole of Scotland, at their best, in terms of heightened language for the stage, have short vowels and good, hard, concrete consonants, and it's the consonants that give it the toughness and the vitality and, for me, the real excitement, rhythmic excitement.' All notions of a Received Pronunciation being the standard to which all should aspire are absent in this speech, and with the multitude of accents now to be found on the BBC it seems that the days of Received Pronunciation as the singularly viable accent in which responsible broadcasting ought to be conducted are over.

My personal feeling is that RP has been a blip on the linguistic landscape of English. I understand that an accent common to all – not to say that RP is or ever has been such – will enable highly efficient communication between all of its speakers, but that would be to destroy the rich variety of naturally developed accents that exist (or formally existed) throughout the land. And this, I feel, would have a further consequence, which is currently present in language due to the standardisation of English throughout the world: that is that the speakers of this standardised accent will have no need to exercise wit or judgement to decipher an accent with which they are unfamiliar, because no such accent will be spoken. The case is now that there is little necessity for an English-speaker to learn a second language, because a large proportion of the Earth's population speak English anyway. This lack of necessity, I feel, can breed laziness. So in the interests of mental health and our faculties of understanding, I would say that the use of prescribed accents should be positively discouraged.

(1494 words)

References

'An English accent' U211 DVD-video

Crystal, D. (2004) The Stories of English, London, Penguin

Mugglestone, L. (2007) 'Accent as social symbol' in D. Graddol, D. Leither, J. Swann, M. Rhys and J. Gillen (eds) Changing English, London, Routledge/The Open University, pp. 153-188.