LINGUISTICS SPECIALIST GROUP MEETING 
15 May 2006
1.	Present: Doug Arnold (DA), Patricia Ashby (PA), Kate Beeching (KB), Billy Clark (BC), Alison Dickens (AD), Geoff Hall (GH), Dick Hudson (DH), Lynne Murphy (LM), David Newton (DN), Jean Peccei (JP), Paul Rowlett (PR Chair) 
Apologies: Ben Rampton, David Hornsby, Florence Myles
The Chair formally welcomed: Doug Arnold (who may be joining the Group) and Geoff Hall who is replacing Paul Meara
2.	Minutes from last meeting
	The minutes were accepted as accurate 
3.	Matters arising 
PA – Phonetics event 2007. PA has been asked by the Phonetics Teaching and Learning Group which runs a biennial conference to approach the SC to collaborate on a two-day conf. John Maidment and Michael Ashby are the contacts for this and it will be run from UCL. PA suggested that the SC day could comprise a Teach-in or Description of practice forum. This could be run as a parallel session or as a 2-3 hour session for everyone. It may be possible to locate some of the event at Westminster which has new tech centre but as there are no semester or Easter breaks room booking could be a problem. Action: AD to meet with PA and rest of team
AD has contacted Ron Carter who would like a SC sponsored session for 2007 BAAL conference.
Meetings next year will be in November, March and June (not April as stated on previous minutes). Fridays are the preferred day. Action: AD to book rooms
Web hits: AD presented web stats for hits on the SC website. Currently this cannot be broken down by item by month (the programmer working on this was called off the project following a fire at Southampton). The stats give monthly hits on the whole website which include numbers of visitors and numbers of bookmarks made, the latter shows a distinct increase recently. The stats for individual resources are cumulative and can’t yet be broken down. They do show that there are several Linguistics resources and articles that are in the top ten hits. DN commented that the SC uses Analogue which can record more sophisticated information about hits such as where people have linked from. The Group requested information on hits that are from UK and from elsewhere. It would also be helpful to know where visitors have linked from. DH suggested that it would also be useful to see the stats in a global context, e.g. do the number of hits etc mirror other usage of the web? We could seek information on average hits for other sites of similar size. 
Action: AD to pursue gathering of additional data
The meeting noted that the stats were very encouraging
4. 	Good Practice Guide 
It was confirmed that BC is no longer sub-editor for Linguistics as the SC has disbanded the Editorial Board and is now managing the process itself with support from the Specialist Groups (to suggest contributers and reviewers). 
a) Articles commissioned. AD reported that she has the following commissions in progress:
•	Lynne Murphy – Lexical semantics
•	Nicola Woods – Discourse Analysis
•	Mark Sebba – Pidgins and Creoles (provisional – now confirmed)
•	Nigel Fabb - Stylistics
She also approached Peter Patrick for a Sociolinguistics overview but is still waiting for a reply.
PA advised Westminster can do pidgin and creole if Mark Sebba can’t.
It was noted that there is already an article on Discourse Analysis and something on Sociolinguistics. AD suggested that these were probably very short articles and non pedagogic. Action: AD to check GPG articles on discourse and sociolinguistics
It was agreed that all articles should be firmly pedagogic as there are plenty of other sources of descriptions of the fields of Linguistics. AD has made this clear in her commissioning letters. 
DH enquired if there were other sources of support for the teaching of Linguistics. JP and GH pointed out that the Routledge: English Language introductions series has a  website for teaching ideas. This should be linked to from the SC website. Action AD (JP has sent some links and contacted Routledge to find out which links we should use as some are broken)
           b) Further possible commissions
It was agreed that more of the small articles need expanding and to have more pedagogic content. Action: AD to pick out articles that need expanding 
DA suggested that a view from Germany, Holland etc. would be very helpful as Linguistics is a bigger subject in these countries (the basis of all teacher education in language teaching). However it is probably differently taught as groups are much bigger. Action: AD to investigate possible contributors, e.g  Humboldt (who presented at a SC/CILT event – DN to supply contact), Marburg (which has an online Linguistics course).
Other sources of contributors from overseas could be found via the Linguist list or the LAGB conference
c) Blog or comments box for the website. AD reported that there are several options for this:
1. To set up a Blog that is linked to from the website (blogs will not be attached to specific articles so readers/authors may not be aware that an article has been blogged)
2. Set up an Amazon-style comments facility. This will take considerable programming and would have to be moderated to ensure that authors are not insulted
3. The current database has an unused comments box for the web guide that would be quite simple to display. A link to a web form for comments can be put on each page of the GPG and comments will be moderated by the web editor and by AD before being posted.
The Group opted for option 3. Action: AD
DH commented that the SC should notify authors that a comment has been made on their article. Action: AD
d) Sharing teaching ideas. It was proposed that a new type of article be added to the GPG which details how individuals have gone about constructing a curriculum. The Lancaster website contains such information e.g. Mick Short’s website. We could find out who has free learning material on their websites that SC can link to. Action: AD to send a request to association lists. 
It was also suggested that a link to the SC could be added on wikipedia. Action: AD to check to see if there is an article on teaching linguistics on this. If not this Group could start one [note there is no article on the teaching of Linguistics on Wikipedia]. 
DH raised the question of whether the GPG is unique. If so this should be mentioned in the publicity. Action: AD to investigate and alter the publicity as appropriate.
5.	Events  
John Field has offered to run an event on teaching language skills – likely to be at Cambridge in November. Action: AD to confirm date and venue with JF
Paul Kerswill has agreed to run an event on sociolinguistics at Lancaster in the autumn. Action: AD/PR to confirm date and venue [16th November has been suggested]
Phonetics 07 (see item 3)
Commissioning workshops. This would take the form of an expert workshop commissioned by the SC for individual departments. The Group felt cautious about individual academics giving an overview on teaching practice in the field (or in a sub-field). Rather it was felt that such workshops could be on more generic themes, e.g. Use of corpus resources across the curriculum, Field Linguistics, SPSS, IPA certificate exam, Translation technologies (Andy Rothwell has already offered to re-run the Teaching Translation event and PR would be interested in hosting such an event in Salford). 
It was suggested that a seminar could be run to put together ideas before offering out the workshop as people do share ideas about their teaching through SCs, external examiners, conferences. It might be better to gather a number of people to invent the workshop together. It might be shaped by pre-questions from potential participants. 
The question was raised as to whether the money offered by the SC (about £500 per workshop) covers the effort. AD suggested that she could use the Workshops to Go fund to commission workshops on particular themes (currently the fund is open to all but Linguistics people don’t apply). These carry funding of £1000 which covers development of materials and two regional workshops 
Other themes suggested were assessment, teaching large groups (Oxford Brookes, Manchester have expertise in this), recruitment – how to sell linguistics.
Action: AD to launch a call for bids
Writing http://www.thinkingwriting.qmul.ac.uk/
The Royal Literary Fund project (http://www.rlf.org.uk/fellowshipscheme/research.cfm) published a report on student writing following their initiative to put working writers in universities to help students write. The general conclusion was that students are ill-equipped for academic writing.
The Group felt that it would also help for HE teachers to be more familiar with the ‘A’ level curriculum and for there to be better links between university and school. QCA talk about school level literacy but not about university students with literacy problems. For Linguistics this might be discipline-specific e.g. linguistic argumentation – structuring a linguistic argument. Thus for this Group an issue might be how to write for a particular discipline as well as grammar issues. It was questioned whether people who have a mainly literary background can teach writing across the board.
A language across sectors event was suggested. This would bring together the HE sector and the school sector over the teaching of language. A new approach to GCSE is being planned that incorporates the main ideas of Tomlinson e.g. minimum functional literacy – punctuation etc. Disability issues to be included. 
Another avenue that could be explored is using expertise from EAP for native speakers of English.
This subject has expertise in the area of literacy that can be offered out to colleagues. It was also noted that there is a marked difference between the US model (of compulsory writing courses) and the UK study skills or EAP approach. LM argued that it is possible to incorporate general writing tasks into courses which she has done at Sussex.
It was felt that an article for the GPG could be commissioned on application of EAP to general academic skills
The Group felt that an event bringing together all parties in this: literacy advisors, EAP staff, QCA, school, linguistics as a forum for getting people together. Action: AD to apply for funding from HEA. 
WDHE (writing development in higher education) has just run a conference on this theme http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/index.cfm?wpid=4285 . This was run by the Applied Languages and Literacies Research Unit. 
6.        English Language transition update
AD updated the group on the project which has been awarded to Dr Angela Goddard and Adrian Beard of York St John University College. The project was initially going to concentrate on HEIs and schools in the North-East but following a meeting between AD and colleagues from English Subject Centre it was agreed that a better spread of HEIs would be achieved by a UK-wide approach. The project will be interviewing 6th formers, 6th form teachers, beginning Y2 university students and university teachers. An updated plan will be circulated shortly.
7.	BAAL/LAGB events
PR updated on the event being organised. It has been decided that the session should showcase innovative teaching. Presenters so far:
•	Caroline Heycock – Using Harry Potter for syntactic analysis
•	Christine Hildebrand – World atlas of language structures – linguistics typology
•	At the meeting BC agreed to present on data gathering projects
The line-up is now complete for this session which will be held between 2-4pm on Thursday 31st August
AD has sent a message to Ron Carter (Chair of BAAL) offering a similar session for the BAAL conference. RC has replied requesting a session for BAAL 2007 6 – 8 September in Edinburgh
Action: All (to discuss possibilities)
8.	Updates on CLIE, A level SIG etc
CLIE – The minutes of these meetings are available online. DH will provide the link to the CLIE website which can be linked to from the SC website. AD to email DH for the link
A level SIG– BC reported that this group is now drafting one of the modules on a week by week basis. The Group wants to set up an email list for comments. AD suggested a Jiscmail list but needs to check that posts to the list are archived. Action: AD
9. 	AOB and date of next meeting
Interface with linguistics event – Westminster. PA is organising an event on how linguistics interfaces with everyday life. Keynote speakers: David Crystal and Macolm Coulthard. The event is about to go on the web so a link will be provided for the SC website. AD agreed to circulate to as wide a group as possible (180 free places are available). Action: AD/PA [done]
The Group agreed that it would be best to hold 2006/7 meetings on Fridays. Next meeting to be held in November. Action: AD to organise [proposed date 27th October 2006]
DH requested that Specialist Group to be referred to as SAG so as not to confuse it with the Strategy Group.