GCSE reading comprehension (French)

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I’ve been working on a problem raised with me by the Head of Modern Languages at MMHS. He is using the Michel Thomas teaching programme, which has transformed the take-up and the success of Modern Languages learning in the school.

The more advanced part of the GCSE reading exam consists of passages in French with True/False answers in English, thus ensuring that reading comprehension is not confused with writing skills. The teacher had been disappointed that his pupils had been unable to guess unknown words from (a) the context and (b) the fact that the words are cognate with English. He gave as an example climatisation, which means air-conditioning, which they could not guess (a) from the context of amenities in a hotel and (b) its relation with English climate/acclimatization. Continue reading →

BtL and Science (conclusion)

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Book 3 of BtL (and Part 2 of the Fasttrack) teach the discourse structures described by Michael Hoey in his 1983 book On the Surfact of Discourse. Earlier blogs have applied two of these discourse structures – Compare/ Contrast and General/ Particular (= Abstract /Concrete) to a GCSE paper in Science.

Hoey’s third structure (first in his book) is Problem/Solution. This has an important place in scientific thinking:

 PROBLEM/SOLUTION

 This structure comes into Science through considering the application of scientific knowledge to practical problems. This demands concrete not abstract language. Continue reading →

BtL and science (continued)

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This is a continuation of last week’s blog giving the results of an application of the discourse structures in BtL to a Science  GCSE exam paper:

Variables

The crucial idea tested in this exam is the concept of variables.

The work on abstract language in BtL culminates in teaching the concept of variables (from Book 2, chapters 14 and 22; FT, chapters 18 and 19). Continue reading →

BtL and Science at MMHS(continued)

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The following is the first part of some work I did with the Science Department at MMHS:

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. Continue reading →

Btl and Science at MMHS

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I have been busy for several weeks in following up a discussion that two of the  teachers at MMHS have embarked on: namely,  to explore how subject teachers can make a link between the work the learners do in BtL and their own specialist teaching. Two teachers – Science and Modern Languages – came down to Birmingham for the day to discuss this with me. I had already been working with one of the Science teachers, as I was concerned that the way BtL models the writing up of experiments is not what is required by at least one of the exam papers.

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 / contrast Continue reading →

Language and Gender 5

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My friends and I have been reading two papers in Language and Gender*:

Deborah Tannen: Talk in the Intimate Relationship: His and Hers and Senta Troemel-Ploetz: Selling the Apolitical

 The first describes the differing expectations of men and women in informal conversation, illustrating the subject with samples of conversational analysis. The second is a ferocious critique of Tannen’s merely descriptive approach, on the grounds that it fails to politicize the subject. It does not join the feminist battle to gain equality by changing men’s behaviour. Continue reading →

Language and Gender 4

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I watched Kevin Costner’s1990 film Dancing with Wolves on DVD recently. Afterwards I looked up something about the film on Wikipedia and found an interesting comment on the language used in the film.

The film is unusual in that much of the dialogue is conducted in Lakota, a Native American language, with subtitles in English. One of the Native Americans viewing the film commented:

“The odd thing about making that movie is that they had a woman teaching the actors the Lakota language, but Lakota has a male-gendered language and a female-gendered language. Some of the Indians and Kevin Costner were speaking in the feminine way. When I went to see it with a bunch of Lakota guys, we were laughing.”

I had never heard of languages which have separate dialects for men and women, and they are indeed very rare. In one of the papers in the book my friends and I have been reading and discussing* there is an example of such a language surviving in Northern Australia as recently as 1998.

According to the description in this paper each lexical item has a different prefix according to the gender of the speaker. For example wukuthu means short. Men add no prefix but women put the prefix nya in front. Yirdi means he-bring, but men speak of na-yirdi and women of niwa-yirdi.

Unsurprisingly, the elders have to be strict in demanding that children learn to conform to these dialects and other tribes are reluctant to learn Yanyuwa because they make mistakes and get laughed at.

 

 

*John Bradley: Yanyuwa ‘Men speak one way, women another’, Aboriginal Linguistics 1 (1998), in Language and Gender ed. Jennifer Coates

TED talks

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A number of people have been urging me to Google TED talks for 12-minute lectures.

I’ve at last done this and a world of new thinking has opened up. I’ve heard talks by Sugata Mitra, Ken Robinson and John McWhorter. Not least of the gifts of the lecturers is that they are often very funny. The antique rubbish that passes for discussion on public education at present in this country is cleared away and a sense of reality takes its place.

I treat myself to one a day and suggest anyone reading this does the same.

 

 

Analysis of Science GCSE paper

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During the snowy weather, cooped up in the flat, I had a happy time applying the linguistic insights of BtL to a GCSE exam paper in Science.  I went through questions and answers highlighting in green the frequent occurrences of the passive, nominalizations in yellow and I added special technical words that are not part of non-scientific vocabulary in pink (e.g. ethane, ethanol, fermentation) – there were a lot of these and it is an obvious feature of scientific language. Continue reading →

Language and Gender 3

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Daniel L. Maltz and Ruth A. Barker: A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication (in Language and Gender ed. Jennifer Coates)

This paper surveys work by scholars in a number of fields whose findings and frameworks can be used to throw light on problems in cross-sex informal conversations. The model is first taken from the approach to difficulties in cross-ethnic communication.

Sociologists have shown that, even though children in America (and UK) go to mixed sex schools, it is customary for girls to play with girls and boys with boys. Each sex therefore grows up with separate views on the purpose of conversation – girls (as we saw in my last blog) for creating supportive relationships and boys for control and problem solving. The authors refer to fascinating research into the differences between girls’ games and boys’ games. Continue reading →