York CPD Workshop 2020

Posted on 27 July 2020

LLS host a new CPD webinar for English Language A-Level teachers

On Friday 10 July 2020, the Department of Language and Linguistic Science hosted a free webinar ‘York CPD 2020’ for English Language A-Level teachers, part of The York English Language Toolkit’s workshop series. Organised by Sam Hellmuth and Claire Childs, the event saw a staggering 600+ registrations for the pre-workshop with over 300 joining the live webinar in the afternoon, demonstrating huge popularity among English Language A level teachers.

The York CPD 2020 workshop featured presentations by teaching and research staff in the LLS department on the following research case studies:

Language diversity and change: Claire Childs on grammatical change in the use of ‘never’
Language in the workplace: Paul Drew on language as action in courtroom questioning
Language acquisition: Tamar Keren-Portnoy on differences in US/UK Infant-Directed Speech
Language attitudes: Dom Watt on results from the Accent Bias in Britain project

As part of the event, these four ‘nano’ lectures were followed by a Q&A session with the researchers and a ‘putting it into practice’ session with Dan Clayton of EngLangBlog. Heather Turner (PhD Candidate in LLS) worked as a Research Assistant on the project, producing materials of exceptional quality and quantity, and helped to run the Q&A alongside Jill Lavender of Fulford School (Member of the Department’s External Advisory Board) who also contributed a new index for the case studies on the Toolkit website.

"Fantastic in content and design, attractive for both teachers & students. Embarrassed to say I hadn’t discovered it before now. The index is hugely helpful. Thank you for supporting 6th form teachers & students with this first class resource!" - Virtually East Norfolk ENglish via Twitter (CPD participant)

"Looking forward to incorporating some extra resources into my law lesson in occupational language next year for #ALevelEnglishLanguage thanks to #YorkLanguageToolkit CPD yesterday, looking more into recognising discourse patterns" - Hayley Draper via Twitter (CPD participant)

"All brilliant - some of the best CPD I've had. As a teacher it's hard to keep up with research, so this sort of collaboration with academics is great - with some really useful translation to the course." - James Watson, English Teacher, via Twitter (participant)

“The Department of Language and Linguistic Science has organised several CPD events for English Language A Level teachers in the past, but they have always been face-to-face. The covid-19 outbreak challenged us to move to an online format and we were delighted to reach a much bigger audience this way.” - Dr Claire Childs, Dept. Language and Linguistic Science, University of York

Materials relating to the workshop including the full webinar recording are available here: https://englishlanguagetoolkit.york.ac.uk/workshops/cpd2020

The CPD work was funded by the York Impact Accelerator Fund (2019-20) (‘Re-framing linguistic research to enhance secondary education: Consolidation’, PI: Claire Childs; Co-Is: Sam Hellmuth and Carmen Llamas).