A year 11 student writes (apropos Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'):
Hi sir,
I am stuck on two questions on the homework and was wondering if you could help me please. The questons are: 1) Stanza One. Identify examples of hyperbole or exaggeration. what is the effect? 2) Stanza Two. Identify the extended metaphor used to describe the terrifying future the persona predicts, if they delay. Thank you
And Mr Heald replies:
Q1: hyperbole or exaggeration refers to language or ideas that might be considered 'over the top'. Think about the amount of time he says he's going to spend admiring his mistress, for example. Why do you think he does this? Q2: An extended metaphor means is one that continues through a series of lines in the poem. Think of the words: 'deserts' 'marble vault' 'worms' 'dust' 'ashes' grave' on the one hand, and 'beauty' 'song' 'virginity' quaint honour' 'lust' and 'embrace' on the other. I hope that gives you something to think about. Let me know if that doesn't unblock your difficulty.
To which the student responds:
Hi sir
Thanks for the help. It helped with the questions a lot.
This coming week I would like you to start becoming familiar with some of the language & gender concepts for ENGB1. Can you therefore please use Period 5 tomorrow (Monday) and associated homework time to read and make notes on the following web page from the late, great Andrew Moore:
While that page is still an excellent introduction to this topic aimed at A-Level students, it offers a single perspective of the topic and was written by one man (you may like to consider how relevant that fact is, if at all) several years ago so does not take the most recent work in this area into account. Moreover, some of the links included either no longer work or are to sites that are no longer updated. Consequently I would like you to supplement your preliminary reading with some more current sources.
Read it and compare it with the Andrew Moore article. Which concepts / theorists etc are given more, or less attention in each article, for example?
For some more current discussion of language and gender issues aimed specifically at A-level students, search for relevant posts on englishlangsfx.blogspot.com. Like this:
That lot should keep you busy for a while. As you are doing it, any interesting findings, questions, links, points for debate, or any other evidence of engagement with the issues will stand you in very good stead when I come to decide ATL grades and write your reports and so on, so get busy @McAuleyEnglish or facebook.com/mraheald or mrheald.posterous.com (which shouldn't be blocked in school), or on Edmodo if you're too shy to go public.
Mr Poole kindly shared the website wordcount.org with me today. It proclaims itself to be "an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words." The data set it uses draws on the British National Corpus.
It's just a bit of fun, really. Try searching for names, for example, and seewhere they rank and what words are ranked alongside for some interesting juxtapositions (McAuley underdogs, for example at 50188 and 5018).
You might like to think about what issues this raises about the very definition of the word 'word', and the extent to which any corpus can be said to be representative of the English language as a whole.
Here is a link to a post from last year on setting up Google Docs. There have been one or two changes since then but I think it still works pretty much as described.
Unless asked otherwise, please share any homework tasks with me via Google Docs. If you have any problems with it, please let me know and I'll see if I can help you to get it sorted.
This has been all over the bits of the internet frequented by us language geeks recently, but I've been a bit remiss in remembering to share stuff with you, so apologies if you got here before me and this is old news: Also available for your iPod / iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/the-history-english-in-ten/id446081667
Beechfield Youth Orchestra performed the whole of Brahms' 2nd Symphony last night - the culmination of a year-long project. It was astonishingly good, and a real testament not only to the hard work and dedication of the youngsters involved (including, I'm proud to say, my firstborn!) but also to the value of Doncaster Music Service and the William Appleby Music Centre.
Well done to *all* involved, especially the substantial contingent from McAuley, and most especially to those Year 13's for whom that was the last performance before leaving for pastures new.
Several major British Newspapers, and many online news sites have been carrying a story about Rio Ferdinand coming bottom of a 'study' of the language use of footballers on Twitter.
The Mirror carried the story, boldly claiming that "RIO Ferdinand has the least sophisticated vocabulary of all footballers on Twitter", without giving any indication of the source of the study. The Metro, perhaps sensing that it wasn't much of a story chose to up the ante by covering Ferdinand's response to the 'shock' news.The Mail refers to the 'analysis' and 'research', claiming (or admitting?) that it is 'semi-scientific' (whatever that means), and tells us that "The Google search engine tool, which divides language used on web addresses into three categories of 'basic', 'intermediate' and 'advanced' categories, was used by clickliverpool.comto scan the pages of UK's most followed Premier League players." Oddly, the clickliverpool.com website makes no claim to harbour the mastermind behind this groundbreaking study, and their article is dated the day after the Mail piece.
Webpronews.com carried the only illumination I have seen on the research methodology used to generate the 'findings' that were reported across the globe. It appears to have used a technique considerably less valid than almost every example of A-level English Language investigation I have been moderating over the past few weeks.
Nevertheless, there is a potentially useful lesson for A-level students who are just now beginning to look at the ENGB4 'Investigating Language' unit. With a bit more effort than whoever concocted this non-story was prepared to put in, you could easily use tools like the Google reading level search filter and other corpus analysis tools to generate truly meaningful data that could be used as part of your language investigation coursework.
Interested in everything.