Beth's English Language blog

Wider reading https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/may/18/why-do-people-interrupt-it-depends-on-whom-youre-talking-to Katherine Hilton “What people perceive as an interruption varies systematically across different speakers and speech acts,” said Hilton, who is also a Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center . “Listeners’ own conversational styles influence whether they interpret simultaneous, overlapping talk as interruptive or cooperative. We all have different opinions about how a good conversation is supposed to go.” Hilton found that American English speakers have different conversational styles. She identified two distinct groups: high- and low-intensity speakers. High-intensity speakers are generally uncomfortable with moments of silence in conversation and consider talking at the same time a sign of engagement. Low-intensity speakers find simultaneous chatter to be rude and prefer people speak one at a time in conversatio...

http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/ https://www.theguardian.com/profile/michaelrosen http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qtnz Micheal Rosen- Word Of Mouth http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05077ks This episode of Word of Mouth is about Micheal Rosen and Professor Tanya Byron discussing how parents using language to talk to their children. They explore how the way parents talk to children, how its evolving and how this effects child language in the long term. The Linguist Dr. Laura Wright is introduced and she says that it looks as though we are moving towards a more casual and informal language. She also explains how she feels as though we feel  unauthorative when making commands through speech and discusses how this idea relates to a 'friend-parent' relationship to children rather than a 'parent parent' relationship. -'No' unhelpful principal.  Michael Rosen- 'positive reinforcement' in language to encourage children rather than put them down. Say...

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1996_reith1.pdf http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gx2dt http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9137930/Meaning-of-literally-shrinking-away.html http://users.ox.ac.uk/~aitchiso/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gmvwx http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1996_reith1.pdf Sample from Jean Aitchinson Is our language sick? You might think so, judging from complaints in newspapers: “The standard of speech and pronunciation in England has declined so much . . . that one is almost ashamed to let foreigners hear it.” “The language the world is crying out to learn is diseased in its own country.” “We are plagued with idiots on radio and television who speak English like the dregs of humanity, to the detriment of our children.” But why? At a time when English is a major world language, is it really in need of hospital treatment? A wide web of worries; a cobweb o...