Our Academic Experience sessions are designed to deliver specific subject insight to your students from our range of academics. Sessions can be offered remotely; we use Microsoft Teams but are happy to offer on whichever platform is suitable to your students place of learning.
Offered by our academics there are four sessions to choose from which we feel support students researching or considering this subject area.
Text message authorship in forensic investigations
How distinctive can a text message be? This workshop explores linguistic diversity in computer-mediated conversations. It compares the multiple ways in which real people expressed the same brief message, using exactly the same words. It demonstrates the complexity of spellings and punctuation that allow us to identify a very specific messaging style for each person. This kind of analysis is used in missing persons or murder investigations, for example, or any case where the somebody might have impersonated another via their phone.
Type of Activity: Classroom based talk (virtual or in-person)
Relevant Subjects: English Language, English Language and Literature, English Literature, Criminology, Sociology, Law
Suitable Audience: Key Stage 5
Learning to write, and learning to write again: A study of errors
Errors can teach us much about language production. When a child uses unconventional spelling, that spelling reflects the choices that they made. Psycholinguists use errors to understand the way we all make choices when we produce language. Speech and Language specialists use the errors their clients make to understand which part(s) of the speech and language process is not working as expected.
This workshop compares a writing sample from a person who is re-learning to write after losing that ability to a writing sample from a person who is learning to write for the first time. It will consider phonetic errors, spelling, and letter formation. An exploration of 'what' kind of errors are made and 'why' gives us insight into 'how' children and adults manage an incomplete language ability."
Type of Activity: Interactive talk (virtual or in-person) and text analysis activity.
Relevant Subjects: English Language, English Language and Literature, Psychology.
Suitable Audience: Key Stage 5
Deixis in recipes: Time travel through textual analysis
Recipes are a meeting point, a learning experience across the barrier of time. Two parties need to work together in common understanding in order to produce the final result. This understanding is built through shared cultural references, anticipated knowledge or experience in the techniques of production (utensils, ingredients, preparation methods, measurements). A textual analysis of the deictic markers, the signals that anchor our speakers in a time, place, relationship to each other, will allow us readers to become time travellers. The more distance in time or culture there is between instructor and student, the more important become the clarity and independence of the instructions.
This workshop will use the principles of deixis, transactional and interactional language for a guided analysis into the contexts of the recipes. The recipes used and can be from any historical period, going back as far as Old English, or modern examples.
Type of Activity: Interactive talk (virtual or in-person) and text analysis activity.
Relevant Subjects: English Language, English Language and Literature, History.
Suitable Audience: Key Stage 5
To my Valentine - Paston Letter
The session will look at the earliest surviving valentine's letter, and can focus on language development or the development of the genre through comparison and contrast. Letters by women in the 15th century were often dictated to a scribe and therefore mix spoken and written features, something that the students will, of course, also encounter in many modern forms of text.
The text is also in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift and the progression towards a more standardized English. The uncanny familiarity of some sounds and language sections in line with the weirdness of a historical language otherwise offers a good springboard to discuss the modern drive towards diversification of linguistic varieties in published arenas today.
Type of Activity: Interactive talk (virtual or in-person) and guided translation analysis activity.
Relevant Subjects: English Language, English Language and Literature, History.
Suitable Audience: Key Stage 5