CSI:SFX

Friday February 13th will be the date for the first part of our QIA English Language programme this year. The conference entitled CSI:SFX will feature lectures on forensic linguistics, the spread and development of English around the world, and two lectures on different aspects of London English.

The lecturers are:
Mark Abley, author of The Prodigal Tongue
Ben Rampton, King's College University
Sue Fox, QMU
Krzysztof Kredens, Centre for Forensic Linguistics, Aston University

There are limited tickets available for students and teachers, as we are hosting the conference in a relatively small venue and have 40 of our own A2 students, so we can probably accommodate 10 students and 2 teachers per college or school, up to a maximum of 4 institutions. Please contact me at d.clayton at sfx.ac.uk if you'd like more details.

2009 workshop dates

We're pleased to be able to confirm that, thanks to more funding from the QIA Beacon Colleges fund, we'll be running teacher workshops again in 2009. We'll also be organising a student conference and workshops with linguists; more details will follow before the end of term.

The dates of the teacher workshops will be Weds 17th and Thursday 18th June 2009 at St Francis Xavier College. We're expecting the Wednesday to be quite similar in style to last year, with top linguists offering up to date subject knowledge and presentations of recent research, while the Thursday is planned as a more hands-on day with the emphasis on using digital technologies such as audio, video, VLEs and digital corpora.

Resources from presentations

The powerpoints and handouts from the June workshops can now be downloaded from here. Sorry for the delay, but I tried not to do any work over the summer for a change and my plan worked too well.

We're hoping to do something similar, perhaps on a smaller scale, next year, so watch this space for more details.

They think it's all over...

...but it's just the start. Or sort of. While the week of workshops and presentations is over - and a big thank you to everyone who has taken part in it - the idea is to keep the spirit of the week alive.

So, the plan is to put all the resources and presentations from the presenters online and available to everyone who attended, and then to share ideas and resources through this blog. More soon...

Three days down, one to go...

We're 3 days into the programme of workshops and presentations, and so far it's been great. Then I would say that...

I hope that everyone who has come so far has found it useful and interesting. We'll be creating a resources site to share materials from each day's presentations and workshops to make sure there's a longer term benefit for everyone.

Tomorrow we have Jason Jones on teaching accent and dialect, David Hyatt on critical discourse analysis, Deborah Cameron on male and female conversation, and Tony Thorne on youth slang. After that, we'll be celebrating the end of the workshops at the pub round the corner!

Thanks to everyone who has attended, presented and workshopped (is that a word?).

See you next week

Well lots of people have signed up and I think we've got the organisation of the week covered, so we're looking forward to seeing you next week.

There will be a stall with discounted copies of the English and Media Centre's Language Works pack - a really excellent resource for AS Language as well as GCSE - as well as back issues of emagazine and copies of speaker Kerry Maxwell's latest book Brave New Words.

If you're still unsure of any details or would like to confirm your booking, please contact me via the email address on the flyer.

Final date for booking places

The final date for booking a place is Friday 23rd May. Please contact me via the email addresses on the booking forms to reserve your place!

Gentle reminder

We still have places for all of the workshops and will be taking bookings for a while, but if you want to be sure of getting a place on the workshop of your choice, please get your booking in soon!

A contact email is given on the pdf flyer.

For a more detailed running order check here

Final Line-up now out

Click on this link to download the pdf flyer for the full line-up and details of how to book.