Reading

21. Now what sort of English course would you like and what shape should this course be? Do you expect the same as the article below suggests? Study the language of the article to subsequently engage in this kind of conversations.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/07/russell-brand-a-level-english-language-evolves

Language evolves – get over it

After the Guardian article by Laura Barton, 7 May 2014

English is an island language; a language built by the words washed up on our shores from other lands, other times. It is, as one 14th century monk observed, irregular, contrary, crooked as our teeth. It does not behave.

And so it was rather satisfying to read about its latest mischief this week: the OCR exam board¹ has drawn up a new syllabus for an English language and literature A-level that will include the study of a 2008 testimony on drug use and examples of Twitter feed. There was alarm, outrage, feathers spat; a senior source at the Department for Education labelled the whole thing "rubbish."

Of course the OCR syllabus will also draw on more traditional texts – the works of Charlotte Brontë, George Orwell and William Shakespeare are there, as are the classics of poetry alongside more contemporary works.

Many years ago, when I was choosing my A-levels, I decided to study English language and English literature as separate subjects. They were very different courses, and as much as I had a love for poetry and plays and novels, I also had a love for the words themselves – for where they came from and how they worked. While we spent literature classes discussing Othello and the poetry of Emily Dickinson, in English language lessons we took apart the words themselves, played with phonetics, syntax, morphology. We learned about the evolution of our language, the history of its regulation, printing, pronunciation. We studied adverts, magazines, newspapers. We listened to radio jingles, documentaries, plays. We looked at speeches, children's literature and romance novels. And I remember the excitement of those classes, the thrill of understanding the force of words.

Teaching young people English is about teaching them the power of language, its functions, its rhetorical devices, all of the ways and settings in which it can be used.

And so these new texts on the OCR syllabus do not remotely startle me. Though I sat my A-levels long before the dawn of Twitter, I'm sure we studied their equivalents as examples of contemporary language.

Were I teaching that syllabus I would welcome the collision of registers, I would gladly cite Twitter feed for its irreverence and informal wit, its ability to conjure intimacy even when speaking to a large audience, and its display of all the new rhetorical devices that have evolved out of a 140 character limit.

And what is interesting about the chosen OCR text is that the testimony to the parliamentary committee on drugs allows us to see a flamboyant language use in a more formal setting – how that language shifts, yes, but also how formal language need not be boiled dry and juiceless.

One of the most vital things I learned from my English language A-level came from the linguist Professor Jean Aitchison, who cautioned against ever holding on to the "crumbling castle" view of the English language – that it was a once-fine structure now in the process of decay.

She encouraged people not to think of language as bricks and mortar, a monument to be preserved, but as something in the course of its own evolution. It is in this spirit that the OCR syllabus is set – a spirit I hope all English A-level students come to share: that our language is a muscular, pulsing thing, wild, and alive and forever striving for expression.