The Observer of 5^th March reported that the Information Commissioner’s Office (the privacy watchdog) had instigated an inquiry into how Cambridge Analytica had used voters’ personal date to influence the referendum.

The Guardian of 22^nd April reported that the Electoral Commission has launched an  investigation into the undeclared help given to the pro-Brexit body Leave.EU by the data company Cambridge Analytica.

Further, the Observer of 12^th March published an open letter from Tim Berners-Lee putting forward proposals for changing “the mathematical heart” of the web to prevent the undermining of democracy by the use of data harvesting and fake news.

Since linguistic analysis must have played a part in the programme to influence voters, I hope linguists will contribute to the defeat of the right-wing conspirators whose activities have led to the election of Trump and the Brexit vote.

.

This extra layer of language enables educated people to consider the world in terms of interacting and ever-changing variables. It is indispensable, for instance, in conceptualising the water cycle by giving words to such processes as evaporation, rising, condensation, precipitation. People without abstract language are trapped in the literal concrete descriptions of their everyday experience – it’s going to rain tomorrow.

The scholars and teachers who worked on Breakthrough to Learning were interested primarily in the application of this new knowledge about language to improving the educational achievement of young people. Some of us were also aware of the political importance of enabling the majority of the people in a democracy to make informed and considered choices. This demands abstract language – such as democracy, accountability, economic downturn etc. rather than paying more money to Europe or fake news.

Our vague unhappiness and bemusement about the use of computers exploded into an all too lucid fright on 26^th February this year with the appearance of Carole Cadwalladr’s article in the Observer (26//02/2017):

WHO IS THE

SECRETIVE AMERICAN

BILLIONAIRE USING

“COGNITIVE WARFARE”

TO TAKE DOWN THE MAINSTREAM

MEDIA?

The answer is Robert Mercer, an extreme rightwing hedge fund billionaire, who funded the Trump and Brexit campaigns.

Cadwalladr shows how a group of interlinked extreme rightwing politicians, billionaires and thinktanks are using the unregulated power of Facebook and Twitter to influence elections, including the American Presidential election and the Brexit referendum. Most scary is their computer experts’ access to “big data”, enormous amounts of information about themselves which people unsuspectingly make available online. This enables the computer whizzes employed by the extreme rightwing to target their weak spots and appeal to the emotions of voters unprotected by the rational abstract language which educated people have access to.

The academics contributing to this new consortium are not only computer experts. You can bet that linguists have also been heavily involved. “Cognitive linguistics” has relevance not only to education, it seems, but also to politics.

Cadwalladr’s article exposes why the present political world feels so strange and frightening compared with even a few years ago. It was an educational tragedy that Breakthrough to Learning was not taken up by the educational establishment, when its claims to improve performance were validated in 1991. The failure to extend the power of abstract language to the whole population has resulted in the potential catastrophe of fascism using technology to usher in a new Dark Age.

1.It appears as part of the curriculum followed at Matthew Moss High School. This can be accessed on Youtube. Particularly interesting is the site Innovation Unit, showing that the school is among the ten most innovative schools in the world.

It notes that the school has achieved a 28 point increase in the Best 8 Value Added measures since 2013. It is gratifying that BtL is playing a part in this.

The Head’s blogs on Ofstead make very good reading.

2.I received the email below:

Catharine Driver
catharine.driver@literacytrust.org

Message:
Dear Mary,
I have been an admirer and user of your work for years. I am now
working for the National Literacy Trust and am in a position to
publicize some of your resources more widely. In the first instance,
could I use some of the Self Access Knowledge about Language course? I
want to produce an easy grammar self -audit for Secondary teachers (
whose grammar knowledge is even worse than Primary these days!) and
then refer them to your course if they want to do more work on this.
This would be published on line as part of our Literacy CPD offer. It
will only be accessible from our Network (Here is a link to our
website: http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/)
thanks in advance.

Sent from (ip address): 185.74.232.98 (185.74.232.98)
Date/Time: February 4, 2016 12:53 pm

We’re now approaching the subject from another angle – that of child language acquisition. The timing could not be better, as one of us has a one-year-old grandson, who is ready to move into speech. His first word is /ka:/ for “cat”. My friend is technologically advanced and has taken some delightful video clips of Isaac for us to relate to the literature. We are all soppy about babies, so it is a huge pleasure to have this data to study. What is wonderful is to see Isaac’s total concentration and awareness as he tunes into the language around him and tries to become part of the speaking community.

We are using Tomasello’s Constructing a Language as our textbook, and we’re hoping to put some of his frameworks over data from Isaac – for example, rate of expansion of vocabulary over time and class of words understood and used.

We’ll keep you posted!

You can download a draft from this site. The published article will be briefer and more coherent.

You can order it from www.teachingtimes.com

 The new Head (former Deputy) happily recognizes the centrality of BtL to the learning ethos of the school. He allocated a whole day’s in-service training to making the eighty odd staff of the school aware of the remarkable success of the course in the English Department in 2012-13. Hopefully, they would begin to explore how BtL could help them in the teaching of their own subjects. This was the aim of the team entrusted with the task of implementing the course throughout the school. I was delighted that they invited me to join them in the planning and execution of the day. They took up my suggestion that the teachers experience the teaching methods of BtL – that is, by working in pairs through pre-packaged materials. However, instead of working through BtL itself, they would work through the first two sections of the Language of Ideas, the interactive computer programme which teaches the major insights of BtL to adult learners.

The Language of Ideas has been used successfully, especially by Access courses, as BCU’s Widening Participation programme, but it has not been used (as far as I know) for teacher-training. I was relieved to find that it was perfect for the purpose. The staff were sent off to the three computer rooms in this wonderfully equipped 21^st century school and worked happily through the two sections, concrete/abstract in the morning and general/particular in the afternoon. After each session (with suitable breaks) they returned to the hall and sat at tables in faculties to discuss what they had learned and how they could apply some of the insights in their own teaching. They wrote up their ideas on sugar paper and then spent the last ten minutes of each session walking round and noting the ideas of the other faculties.

The BtL team took photoes of the sugar papers and these ideas will form the starting-point of the work they plan to develop throughout the school during the current year.

One way in which I hope to contribute to the development of learning in the school is to continue the work I have begun with some Faculties in becoming aware of the structure of knowledge in their subjects through the linguistic analysis of GCSE papers.

My friends and I have chosen a new book to work through and it has proved a winner. It is The Practice of Critical Discourse Analysis by Meriel and Tom Bloor.  I was recommended to it by an MA student in Applied Linguistics and it is excellent. Briefly, it makes the reader aware of how all the attitudes and beliefs about ourselves and others  that we take for granted are not natural but socially constructed largely, though not entirely, by language.Interestingly, I have by chance been reading a quite different book that gives an excellent example of what this means. The book is Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane. He describes how it is only in the last two hundred years that people in Western Europe have taken on board the idea that mountains are sublime places where ramblers and climbers can experience the spiritual side of life. Before that mountains were nasty dangerous areas to be avoided. Writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge and Ruskin were responsible for popularizing the mountains – the Lake District and the Alps – developed the tourist industries that threaten to wear them away to accommodate the dreamers looking for enlightenment.

We were born into a culture that takes the splendour of the natural world for granted, so this worship of the mountains seems natural to us. We have to step back and analyse critically the discourse or language which has given us this view of the world and realize that it is not in the least natural but culturally determined.

How BtL feeds into Science teaching at MMHS

(based on an analysis of the language of an exam paper:

GCSE June 2013 Science A SCA4P/PU1.2)

 I have used the frameworks taught in Book 3 of BtL (Part 2 of F/T). For the purposes of this discussion General/Particular is the same as Abstract/Concrete.(1) GENERAL/PARTICULAR = ABSTRACT/CONCRETE

 Science and abstract language

 Real science is always driven by a theory. Theories are made possible by the capacity of language to generate abstract words.

Concrete words perceived by the senses

Abstract words perceived by the mind

Teachers’ Notes: The rate at which an object transfers energy by heating depends on surface area and volume.

An understanding of abstract words is what BtL teaches systematically. (Book 2 BtL, Part 2 FT).

No amount of interesting problems to be solved by science can in the end conceal the fact that science is by its very nature based entirely on abstract ideas.  This is the great intellectual leap that secondary school pupils have to make if they are to benefit from formal education. There is a maturational factor here: Piaget refers to this as the stage of formal operations, coinciding with puberty, and young people do not all arrive at it at the same time.

Other semiotic systems

As well as using “natural language”, scientists also use maths and graphics to make their meanings. The case studies in this exam paper use:

• diagrams (Case Study 4)
• tables (Case Studies 1,3,4) (Book 2, chapters 13 and 25, FT chapters 7 and 23)
• graphs (Case study 2) (Book 2, chapter 9, FT chapter 16)

The scientific method

The essence of the scientific method is to test the abstract theory against what happens in the real (concrete) world. This is nicely shown by the mixture of abstract and concrete words in the exam paper:

Case Study 1

Some students took some beakers of different sizes. Each beaker had a different diameter. They put the same volume of boiling water in each beaker and measured the temperature drop after 10 minutes.

Case Study 2

A manufacturer of paper cups wanted to find out which size of cup would keep tea hotter for longer. Scientists at the company tested 5 different sizes of cup. They put the same volume of tea at 80 degrees C into each cup and measured the temperature drop after 10 minutes.

In our discussion in Birmingham the science teacher told us about a straightforward exam question on photosynthesis, which the students failed to recognise because the example given was unfamiliar. I am not enough of a physicist to give good examples from heat transfer, but here is an example from the last  exam paper I  analysed (SCA2FP F): the first question was essentially about the adaptation  of species to their environment.  The question used as an example the Arctic hare (with picture). Any one of the millions of species on the planet could have been given as an example. I wonder if it is helpful of the examiners to give the picture of the hare, because that draws the examinee’s attention to the hare and away from the essential part of the question the abstract question of the adaptation of species to their environment.

To try to make explicit what is going on in Science learning and teaching, I applied to two exam papers the discourse model (Michael Hoey’s) that is taught in Book 3 of BtL (Part 2 of the Fasttrack). It proved very powerful. Hoey offers three discourse structures which make sense of how academic (and other) discourse is constructed:

1. problem / solution     2. general / particular      3. compare / contrastThe third is crucial in the conduct of any science experiment. Here is a section of the Science paper with the comparative words underlined::

Case Study 1   Some students took some beakers of different sizes. Each beaker had a different diameter. They put the same volume of boiling water in each beaker and measured the temperature drop after 10 minutes.

Case Study 2   A manufacturer of paper cups wanted to find out which size of cup would keep tea hotter for longer. Scientists at the company tested 5 different sizes of cup. They put the same volume of tea at 80 degrees C into each cup and measured the temperature drop after 10 minutes.

Case Study 3   Some students took a number of beakers of different volumes. They filled each one to within 1cm of the top with hot water. They recorded the temperature of the water at the start and 10 minutes later.

Case Study 4   A company that makes glass flasks wants to find the best shape for keeping liquids hot for as long as possible.  Scientists at the company tested the five different shapes shown below. Each flask has the same volume but has a different surface area of glass. They filled each flask with boiling water, put in a stopper, and measured the temperature drop after thirty minutes.

In both of the exam papers I analysed, information was often given and demanded in the form of tables (and graphs) – much easier to read than continuous prose.