New episode coming soon - an interview with Daria Bahtina about generational slang, online language and identity.

🤐 bsky.app/profile/karl...

EMC CPD Face-to-Face: New Approaches to Anthology Teaching for AL Language & Literature Hear new insights and ideas for teaching anthologies and the range of texts within A Level English Language and Literature with this face-to-face course. Book by: 8am on 14th May buff.ly/cyaG4wN

SUMMER WEBINAR PACKAGE 2026 With our great-value summer webinar package, you and your whole department can attend all the summer term webinars, view them on demand, and receive useful resources linked to each one. Available now on our website: buff.ly/EwXD4PI

EMC CPD Face-to-Face: Language Change and Discourses Explore contemporary language change - new words, new meanings & new methods - on this in-person EMC course. Book by: 8am on 1st May buff.ly/OaVviS2

Brunch, jeggings and cybrarians - in The Word Hoard, Simon Horobin looks at blendings

Put this about LLMs and Generative AI in my NEA report for A Level Eng Lang last year and I will continue to tap the sign...

I know this is a very obvious thing to say but books are good. I've just sat down to read a book about language and I've already noted down about 5 ideas, had my comfortable preconceptions jogged and come up with several more questions. Read a book.

Are they? Really? Excellent, I say! eu.clarionledger.com/story/news/2...

This one is worth a read. I did wonder about this year's ago when SwiftKey started marketing itself as using your own language data as a kind of mini-corpus for your predictions 🤔

New one just out - great for Global Englishes, Language Diversity and a bit on Discourses at the end.

Second paragraph calls the New York accent a "twang". Never heard that one before. That was a hint about how good this piece was going to be. The study didn't find the accent was dying. It asked people about accents they *think* are on the wane. New York's was 12th on a list of 15.

We've just recorded a new episode and it's a second one that's been driven by student interest, this time by Oli, an A Level student in Dubai. We'll be talking to Sarah Hopkyns of St Andrews and UCL about English (and Arabic) in the Gulf, multilingualism, translanguaging & much more. Coming soon!

We've got some really good Eng Lang and Lang Lit courses for the summer term, including ones on Language Change, Language Investigations, Teaching the Anthology in Lang Lit, and Starting to Teach Eng Lang (in both Leeds and London).

Super happy to see our paper (w/ @riannawalcott.bsky.social) in Journal of Sociolinguistics: "‘Gen Z Language? Y'all Mean AAVE’: The Appropriation of African American Vernacular English as ‘TikTok Language’ 🧵 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We have a new event (the first of its kind) coming up in April. It's an online revision conference for AQA A Level Eng Lang Paper 2 and it will feature three excellent guest speakers, along with top tips to approach questions about change & diversity. www.englishandmedia.co.uk/conferences/...

Episode 82 is up. It features an interview with Dr Rianna Walcott of University of Maryland and BCaT Lab about her PhD thesis on Black Twitter, plus discussion of identity online and off, Black feminist theory and its influence and lots more... spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/8jHX15k0k1b

Episode 82 is coming soon and it's an interview with Rianna Walcott of BCAT www.bcatlab.org about Black Twitter, language, community & identity online and lots more.

As part of our ongoing work with the Nottingham Stylistics Toolkit team (aka @jessnorledge.bsky.social & @stockwell.bsky.social), we are running this @engmediacentre.bsky.social course in London in May. It's all about anthology teaching for A Level Lang Lit: www.englishandmedia.co.uk/courses/51e5...

We've got this @engmediacentre.bsky.social sky.social course coming up early next term and it should be a good one because it features @christianilbury.bsky.social stianilbury.bsky.social as co-presenter! www.englishandmedia.co.uk/courses/cfe8...

In case anyone missed them before the half-term break, here's a couple of blogs I wrote for @engmediacentre.bsky.social about curriculum change for secondary English. This one is about language in general in KS3&4: www.englishandmedia.co.uk/blog/the-fut...

A slightly different angle to accent prejudice: when you don't sound X 'enough'. BBC News - 'You don't sound Welsh' - people question my identity because of my accent www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

theconversation.com/amanda-seyfr... A really good piece here from Danielle Turton on recreation of historical accents and why the choices of accents and features matter, especially when they're 'regional' rather than RP.

Was great to be part of another Lexis episode, this time talking about the language around neurodiversity. We cover topics like the difference between saying "autistic person" and "person with autism," why we no longer say "high-functioning autism" and why all this matters anyway. Check it out!

Reposting this for the Monday morning crowd. New episode of Lexis published yesterday. bsky.app/profile/lexi...

Here we go! Episode 81 is now up and it's one where we hand over the interviewing to two A Level English Language students, Freya and Miles. They interview @jessaiston.bsky.social about the language of and around neurodiversity. open.spotify.com/episode/6XCX...

The Pentagon says it’s ‘lethalitymaxxing’. Why has ‘incel’ slang crossed into the mainstream?

We've got a new episode coming very soon and it's a really special one that has been kicked off and then carried out by two A level Eng Lang students. It's all about the language of & about neurodiversity, especially autism, and it features an interview with @jessaiston.bsky.social Coming soon!

I don't want to suggest that everything is just fodder for the analysis machine. People's lives, hopes and futures are affected by wars like these but if we want to understand how we're being told about these events and how they're being framed, we have the tools and we can teach them.

It seems like a good day to gather front pages and apply some critical discourse analysis. Agency springs to mind...

This can't have been easy to write, but who better to do it than a linguist with Tourette’s? A really excellent piece. theconversation.com/im-a-linguis...

I've been meaning to listen to/watch this @404media.co interview for a week or two; I have now and it's fascinating. youtu.be/lNKOqp-rZL8?...

emagazine articles on English Language are carefully curated, to be both challenging & accessible to A Level students, cover the exam specification topics, offer fresh ideas & research & introduce them to linguists, research & up-to-date thinking. www.englishandmedia.co.uk/emc-magazine...

A depressing picture of coarsening and dehumanising rhetoric. www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-...

Very interesting attempt to trace back the early evolution of a “system of conventional signs” (proto-writing system) 🧪✍️ www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Strikes me as the kind of intro activity that would be helpful for A level English Language (and one that I've seen used in some form or other before): bsky.app/profile/coli...

A personal reflection on accent, class & identity from a student at Oxford. www.oxfordstudent.com/2026/02/20/t...

Quite a lot of different things in here to ponder, dissect and discuss with A-level English Language classes. Features input from @tonythorne007.bsky.social & @christianilbury.bsky.social www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02...

Next Monday (23 Feb), I am one of the speakers at this @engmediacentre.bsky.social sixth form conference: www.englishandmedia.co.uk/conferences/... I'm looking forward to bringing #criticaldiscourseanalysis to schools!

The government should review those chosen to draft the new national curriculum because the list has a ‘deeply concerning lack of diversity’, according to an open letter with nearly 100 signatories

Here's a sneak peek at what's inside the latest issue of MediaMagazine, out now for web subscribers! Physical copies will arrive in schools later this month. englishandmedia.co.uk/emc-magazines/

I'm not saying Dent is necessarily wrong here and her points are way more balanced than the headline suggests, but... www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

New episode - number 80!

Interesting thread here on the language used to represent/misrepresent migration and migrants. bsky.app/profile/sund...

New abbreviation just dropped. bsky.app/profile/kate...

Yesterday we posted a series of blogs outlining the direction we would like curriculum reform to go in and airing some of our concerns about where it might go. Here's an additional blog focusing on assessment www.englishandmedia.co.uk/blog/curricu...

A brilliant series of think pieces about English curriculum reform. Now is the time to reinvigorate English in the ways outlined here which reflect the spirit of the CAR.

We have published some @engmediacentre.bsky.social linked think pieces on the new curriculum here: www.englishandmedia.co.uk/blog/emc-thi...

Our latest update to the very well-received @engmediacentre.bsky.social New Directions pack is now available! Written by Amanda Cole of University of Cambridge & me, it features 5 new summaries and Q&As, along with an updated glossary. Download it here: www.englishandmedia.co.uk/publications...

One for young people's language these days... www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/c...