Accent & Dialect - Introductory Wider Reading

Accent and Dialect is one of the topics that could appear in Paper 2 in your A Level exam, in either Section A - Diversity and Change or Section B - Language Discourses. As we will not be dedicating  a lot of time to this topic, it's important that you undertake wider reading independently, and have some case studies/theory/articles ready to go for a discursive essay if you decide to answer this question. I've added lots of links below for this topic; they're all really excellent and relevant for your work on this theory-based exam paper.


As you have done (and should be continuing to do!) with Language and Gender, read these links and summarise them on your blogs:

• What's happening to regional accents and dialects? Some interesting articles based on the work of David Britain and others involved in the English Dialect app. Here's one from 'The i' about the findings of the survey, another one from the Telegraph on the same topic and another from The Guardian offering an opinion piece on 'dialect levelling'.
• Attitudes to accents  - if you listen to this Thinking Allowed episode from about 14 minutes in, you get a good discussion between Paul Kerswill and Alec Berrata about attitudes to regional accent and dialect in the teaching profession and more widely.
• " You don't sound like a professor" - a recent article on prejudices about regional accents and the class assumptions made about them. And here's one on a similar theme about northern accents (mistakenly) signalling social class and why that might be.
• Here's Susie Dent on UK accents as "spoken birthmarks"
• And here's a really excellent edition of Word of Mouth called Accents Will Happen which is full of good stuff about how accent and dialect are part of our identities as user of language. Interesting in terms of code-switching, performance and identity, which are all top-band theories and concepts.

You will need to read, listen to and summarise ALL of these, and if you do you will have an excellent basis for a discursive essay on Accent & Dialect. However, you don't have to do them all today.

Writing a Discursive Essay

Morning all,

Hopefully now you have a better insight into what is required of you when being asked to write a discursive essay. Essentially, you need to use the data provided or even just the question as a springboard, and then bring in relevant ideas from your wider reading to inform the rest of your response.

Keep looking back over the exemplar essay we read on Monday. Although this is a perfectly fine response and would achieve a C/B borderline, we have done enough reading and studying both in and out of class to make some great improvements on this essay.

For those of you who don't have a copy or have forgotten to bring it, follow this link to the PPT used on Monday.

Today I want you to continue to draft this essay; we made a great start on Monday so this shouldn't be difficult. Remember:

• Cherry pick the best bits from the exemplar response to adapt and use in your own answer. 
• Read the examiners comments at the side and at the end of the response and think about the advice they are giving.
• USE THE DATA! Don't neglect the source materials you have infront of you; make sure you analyse it as this is great way to open up the discussion.
• Talk about theory and don't be afraid to dispute it
• Make sure that any claim you make has some kind of evidence to support it
• Be tentative in making points/anaylsis, for example, "It could be suggested..."/"Linguists have argued"/"This could imply..." etc.
• Bring in ideas from the 'Women in the Boardroom' article, and any other wider reading you have done (see articles below)
• Remember - this is a language essay so you'll still need to include linguistics.

This is a great opportunity to develop your writing skills so make sure you are using PEE throughout. If you have any questions or are stuck on anything, please follow this link to the Padlet page I've set up for this lesson and post your question (you can do it anonymously) so others can benefit from the feedback.

Enjoy!