Wider Reading for A2

Jon Reed (2014) How social media is changing language. Available: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014/06/social-media-changing-language/. Last accessed 9/4/2015.  Short blog posts detailing how social media has affected the language, topics discussed include the introduction of new words/meanings as well as the rapid rise in the usage of emoticons and acronyms.

James Broadbidge (2003) An investigation into differences between Women’s and Men’s Speech. Available: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/college-artslaw/cels/essays/sociolinguistics/jamesbroadbridgesociolinguisticsaninvestigationintodifferencesbetweenwomensandmensspeech.pdf . Last accessed 9/4/2015. Detailed investigation into how women’s speech differs to men’s, includes a brief history of language and gender, methodology analysis and a conclusion. The investigation involved recording a conversation between two men and women working for the same school. The analysis was broken down into four parts; conversational dominance, swearing and vulgar language, verbosity and assertive and tentative speech styles, each section revealed the findings of the author as well as whether those findings conformed to any theories.

Bjorn Carey (2013) Talking directly to toddlers strengthens their language skills, Stanford Research shows. Available: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/october/fernald-vocab-development-101513.html.  Last accessed 9/5/2015. A report on a study carried out by Stanford psychologists; the study involved analysing interactions between 19 month old children and those in their home environment.  The psychologists concluded that the children who had more direct conversations with adults had a larger vocabulary by 24 months and could process instructions/ words quicker.

Dr.Robert Beard (2010) Bad Grammar or Language Change? Available: http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/bad_grammar.html.  Last accessed 9/6/2015. A short article detailing how English speakers are misusing plurals, Dr.Beard explores whether the reason behind this could just be attributed to the fact that the language is evolving and therefore plurals are becoming redundant.

Author unknown (date unknown) 4.1 Child Language Acquisition Theory. Available: https://aggslanguage.wordpress.com/chomsky/ . Last accessed 9/6/2015. A blog post describing four different CLA theories from Chomsky, Crystal, Piaget, and Aitchison. Each section contained a transcript in support of the theory.