Lauren Waring's English Language Blog

Allow me to womansplain the problem with gendered language The Guardian This article writes about how words such as "girlboss" and "manspreading" have gone from making an important point to reinforcing the differences between men and women. The article includes comments from linguist Dale Spender and words that have been created and added to the dictionary such as the Swedish word "snippa" . Women Get Interrupted More—Even By Other Women The New Republic This article writes about recent research done by Adrienne Hancock, a researcher at the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at George Washington University, and Benjamin Rubin, a Master's student, which investigates conversation between 20 male and female volunteers and analyse their speaking patterns and interruptions. Text speak designed to keep parents in the dark: English language is changing so fast there are words majority do not understand The Daily Mail This article writes ab...

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Neulip & Speten-Hansen (2013) James Neuliep and Kendall Speten-Hansen hypothesised that there would be significant negative correlations between ethnocentrism and the way speakers with non-native accents are socially perceived. To test this, they recruited 93 male and female undergraduate students and randomly assigned 46 of them to an experimental group and 47 to a control group. All participants were native speakers of English. In the experiment, participants in both groups completed a Generalized Ethnocentrism scale test to see how ethnocentric they were. Then, both groups watched a video of the same male speaker talking for 12 minutes about a non-controversial topic – the benefits of exercise. The videos were identical in every way except for the accent of the speaker. In the film viewed by the experimental group, the speaker had a non-native accent, and in order to try and reduce stereotypical judgments, this accent was left ambiguous, with no detectable regiona...

Howard Giles Researched a range of situations and speakers focusing on perceptions of and attitudes to accents. ‘Matched-guise’ technique = Giles often asked participants to listen to the same speaker using a range of different accents and then pass judgement on each one. 1973 – British teenagers presented with the same speech arguing against the death penalty, in different accents. They were more likely to value the argument and the content if the speaker used a more prestigious accent. 1975 – perception of RP and the Birmingham accent by two groups of 17 year olds. Same speaker spoke about psychology: once in RP and once in the Birmingham accent. The teenagers rated the RP speaker higher in terms of competence and intelligence Possible criticisms of this technique: Listeners could realise that the various speakers are all the same person Dolisteners express their true feelings or what they think they should say Encourages stereotyp...

Elements of an opinion article Controversial headlines Colloquial Statistics (sound credible) First person Link to news story Higher order lexical choices (unequivocally) Anaphora Minor sentenes for impact (not so)

Rating the accent 1. RP Trustworthy:3 Educated?:8 Friendliness:4 2.Somerset Trustworthy:9 Educated?:5 Friendliness:10 3.Birmingham Trustworthy:5 Educated?:4 Friendliness:4 4.Newcastle Trustworthy:6 Educated?:6 Friendliness:8