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
- 2008: A lesson by Kim Ballard to an AS English language group.
- 2008: A series of lunchtime talks piloted by Lynda Griffin
- [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