Talks
Politeness and impoliteness in interaction: Innovations and applications
Professor Jonathan Culpeper, Director of Studies, MA English Language by Distance.
This talk looks at the social dynamics of interaction, specifically how language is used to trigger polite or impolite attitudes. I begin with a brief survey of how approaches to politeness have developed, and touch on some applications of politeness (including to cross-cultural communication). I then turn to impoliteness. I discuss phenomena such as insults, innuendo, sarcasm and banter. In the final part of the talk, I will tackle some myths about impoliteness, including the idea that the British are becoming more impolite.
View the PowerPoint slides (PDF) for this talk.
Making grammar come alive by making the most of multimedia
Dr. Willem Hollmann, Director of Studies, BA English Language and Linguistics.
Grammar is often perceived as a hard and abstract area of study. In this session I aim to illustrate some ways in which we can make it less abstract. In so doing, we, as teachers, won’t necessarily make it any easier, but we can help students become more engaged and motivated. It is of course well known that there is a link between motivation and performance, which applies to comparatively hard subjects just as well as it does to easier ones. In other words, by engaging students more, we should be – and indeed are, as my evidence shows – able to help them obtain a better grasp of grammar. Two main ways to make grammar less abstract are (1) by discussing the cognitive reality of grammatical terms and concepts such as nouns and verbs, subjects and objects, etc., and (2) by using real-life data to illustrate the various terms and concepts that are being discussed. In this talk I will focus on (2). Specifically, I will go through a small sample of multimedia clips (taken from films, radio shows, and pop songs) which I have successfully used to make grammatical concepts come alive, in the hope that these may stimulate similar ideas and initiatives among conference participants.
Corpora and language teaching
Dr. Costas Gabrielatos, Senior Research Associate, University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language (UCREL).
This talk addresses the roles which can be taken by corpora and corpus-based research in teaching language. It will compare traditional approaches to teaching about language, drawing on intuition, rules and exceptions, and a prescriptive approach, with the approach which can be taken by drawing on corpus based research: identifying patterns and probabilities in attested language use, from a descriptive rather than a prescriptive perspective. It will explore ways in which corpora can be drawn on in pedagogical materials and used in the classroom.
View the PowerPoint slides (PDF) for this talk.
A revolutionary multimodal communications technology: the Edwardian Picture Postcard
Dr. Julia Gillen, Senior Lecturer in Digital Literacies.
The Edwardian postcard offers a fascinating arena for studying everyday writing a century ago during a communications revolution. When the picture postcard was introduced as an extremely accessible, cheap and colourful object it was taken up by the newly universally educated population with phenomenal enthusiasm. With several deliveries a day, people experienced it as close to synchronous – they could send quick written messages back and forth in a day in a way that was not possible again until today's digital revolution. The postcard attracted media attention rather like texting today: some commentators deplored the informality of card writing, use of abbreviations and slang. Julia Gillen will introduce her research with the cards including the project's use of Twitter. Most of the session will be a workshop giving teachers the opportunities to study and discuss examples.
View the PowerPoint slides (PPT) for this talk.
"Why bother doing Stylistics?: Why Stylistics matters in English Teaching"
Professor Mick Short, Professor of English Language and Literature, Departmental Admissions Co-ordinator.
This talk will address reasons why Stylistics is helpful for students at school and university. It will draw on examples from a tabloid newspaper and a range of literary genres, discussing the extracts in detail and demonstrating how stylistic analysis can explain both what is going on in the texts and how we react to them.