Towards an A-level in Linguistics

This project was initially set up as a working group of the Subject Centre in Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies.

(last changed 27 August 2009; relocated October 2015 – please tell me if links don’t work)

Contacts

• Convenor of the working group: Graeme Trousdale
• Offers of help, and comments on modules: Dick Hudson

Some key documents

• The background to the project and the agreed overall structure of the proposed A-level course.
• Descriptions of the four modules.
• An article about the proposed course written for English teachers.

Pilot units

• 2008-9: A term’s lessons by Gabrielle Jones preparing students at Leyton Sixth Form College for the OCR Extended Project.
• 2009: A term’s lessons by Babette Newsome as work towards the Advanced Extension Award in English
  • Scheme of work
  • Worksheet on writing systems
  • Worksheet on language change
• 2008: A lesson by Kim Ballard to an AS English language group.
• 2008: A series of lunchtime talks piloted by Lynda Griffin
  • Powerpoints and handouts for 7 lessons
• [no date] Unit 1. Phonology: sounds and letters
  • A powerpoint presentation of this unit (by Graeme Trousdale) for use with a group of gifted and talented students.

Some relevant links

• The UK Linguistics Olympiad for school children.
• Some statistical trends in UK language education (including L1 English as well as foreign languages)
• A course of powerpoints for 12 lessons about accent and dialect, trialled with year 10 pupils, by Emma Moore, a sociolinguist at Sheffield University.
• An excellent collection of material used in USA schools (K-12) for teaching linguistics

The educational context

‘A-level‘ means ‘Advanced Level’. Typically, relatively ‘academic’ students in England and Wales spend their last two years at school, Years 12 and 13, taking three A-level courses. (Some take one or even two more, some take fewer.) Consequently our proposed course would occupy about a third of the teaching over two years. But several other possibilities exist:

• AS (half an A-level)
• an individual Extended Project (mentioned above)
• a part of the Cambridge Pre-U exam
• GCSE (General Certificate of Education), for Year 11