Question 1:
In about 150 words, write a letter to a parent in your community telling them what choices you would advise them to make regarding the language education of their daughter/son (say, from the age of 3 to the age of 20). Explain to the parent why you are advocating each choice.
Question 2:
Consider a stigmatised variety (accent, dialect or language) in your own sociolinguistic situation and, taking account of Smitherman and Cunningham, say what can be done to challenge such stigmatisation.
Whatever variety you chose to consider, you will have noted on p210 the three solutions that Smitherman and Cunningham propose to resolve the stigmatisation of ebonics and you will have applied those three solutions to your own situation.
Question 3:
Taking into account what Hornberger writes in reading 5.3 about “language as resource”, briefly state what micro-interventionist approaches you might advise the Insulan government to adopt in order to achieve use of the Taoni language by Insulans.
a. You should take account of both bilingualism and biliteracy.
b. You should note the examples that Hornberger takes from the New Zealand, the Native ?American and the Puno contexts.
c. You should take account of Hornberger?s statement that efforts to revitalise a language ?„…are not about bringing the language back, but rather about bringing it forward…?
Question 4:
Read the following passage and comment upon the linguistic features used by the author to further their views.
Dear Sir,
Immigration into OUR island
Britain is a small overcrowded country with no spare space for any population expansion. So immigration should be ended NOW. No more freeloaders should be allowed into our beautiful island. They take our jobs; they are given free handouts and they repay us by swamping our health services and stealing our houses.
They whine that they come to our homeland because they have suffered in their own. But how many are here just to live off the backs of ordinary, hardworking Englishmen? Gangs of so- called “refugees” roam our streets, howling and yelling for “asylum”. Asylum from what? Some of them may have met war in their own countries. But when we were fighting a war here, did we leave? No: we stayed and fought.
Many of the bogus “asylum seekers” flooding into this island are cheats and criminals. I know that from experience: my aunt lived in a peaceful part of the city – peaceful, that is, until a family of gypsies were given (free!) the four-bedroom house next door to hers and £230 per month spending money! Mobs of uncivilised gypsy youths came round to visit and in the end my aunt had to move house because this lazy family and their friends were too noisy and filthy to endure any longer.
Yours faithfully,
A patriotic Englishman
Your comments will have taken into account at least the following features:
- the syntactical choices made by the author;
- the lexical choices made by the author (especially examples of dysphemism);
- examples of unsupported generalisation.
Question 5:
Fairclough in reading 1.5 (page 62) says: ?… a political speech … in Parliament entails a different use of language from that of a … television interview.?
Examine the extracts in the boxes below and list what you think are the most significant differences between them, in approximately 150 words.
Question 6:
a. Record a mixed-sex group of colleagues engaging in informal conversation, either in their L1 or in a shared L2.
b. Transcribe (in an English translation and in normal orthography) a portion of the tape that you judge exemplifies features of EITHER similarity OR difference between the sexes.
c. Comment upon those features.
Question 7:
Having read reading 3.3, read through the sample of conversational storytelling on pages 149 to 152 and identify the participant roles using Ochs and Taylor’s framework.
Question 8:
a. Devise a typical transcript that could arise from the following set of instructions to call- centre staff:
Use the standard greeting (“Good morning/afternoon/evening. … speaking. Can I take your reference number, please?”)
- Be polite and professional
- Use listening noises
- Ask questions – don?t demand information!
- Use the customer?s name
- Summarise the call
- Thank the customer for calling and end the call with “Goodbye”
b. Comment on the function of each of the utterances made by the member of staff.
c. If you were teaching English to students on a Business Studies course, what advice would you give them if they became supervisors in a call centre using English as its medium?
All the features mentioned in the list above are commented on in the texts for this unit, so you will produce an invented transcript which starts like this:
MS = member of staff C = customer
MS:Good afternoon. Helen speaking. Can I take your reference number, please?
C: 345782/A?MS (keys the reference number into her computer): Mr John Smith, 166 Wingrove Road, Newcastle??C: That?s right.?MS: How can I help you, Mr Smith/John?
Now you devise the rest of the transaction.