A fight worth fighting?

In his Fight For English book, which David Crystal will be drawing on for his talk at the conference, he makes a convincing argument for the language being in a healthy state, naturally evolving to suit the needs of its users. It's interesting to see that he's not the only one who feels like this.

"Language is fine - it's thriving" is the conclusion of Martha Gill in this short article for The New Statesman magazine. She explains that "grammar is as naturally robust as DNA and it's actually the kids who are preserving it" and relates the development of English to Creole forms of the language.

It's a brief and focused article, so a good style model for the kind of thing we're after in our Write For English competition.

Last few days to get entries in

With the conference rapidly approaching, this is just a reminder that you can still get an entry for the Write For English competition in if you want.

Send your entries to this address by Friday 1st February and remember to include your name, school/college and contact details in the email. Put "Write For English entry" in the subject line of your email.

Speaking about the spoken

With only a month to go before the conference, we'll be focusing in the next few posts on some of the speakers and their fields of expertise.

Ron Carter is one of the leading lights in Linguistics in the UK and has had a huge role in influencing how the English language is studied in schools and colleges. Spoken language is one of his main fields and he has written extensively on it as well as being involved in various initiatives to promote its study in schools.

Well before Spoken Language Study appeared on the GCSE specifications, Carter played a big role in the production of  Introducing the Grammar of Talk which took genuine spoken data, in the form of transcripts and corpus data, as a focus of investigation and learning.

In his talk - which will be essential listening for AS and A2 level English Language students and teachers of whatever specification - Carter will be looking at the ways in which spoken language is structured and uses, but also at the new technologies, such as email and text messaging, that now blur the line between spoken and written modes.

There's a good interview with him here, as featured in the English Subject Centre's magazine Wordplay, where many of his interests beyond spoken language are explored, and he's written here about the use of corpora (organised sets of language data collected for study), something that should be of interest to anyone who's thinking of studying Language or Linguistics at university.