Linguistics Specialist Group Meeting 
Monday 15th May 2006
Update

The group met for the final time this academic year on 15th May 2006. Two new members of the group were welcomed: Doug Arnold and Geoff Hall. This brings the total membership of the group to 14. Key items discussed at this meeting were:
1.	Events
2.	The LLAS Good Practice Guide www.llas.ac.uk/gpg
3.	English Language transition study
4.	Collaboration with BAAL/LAGB
5.	A level Linguistics

The main outcomes of the discussion were as follows:
1.	Events will be run in the areas of Sociolinguistics (Lancaster tbc), Teaching Language Skills (Cambridge or London tbc), Teaching Phonetics (in collaboration with the Phonetics Teaching and Learning Conference, London tbc). The Group also discussed the possibility of running an event across disciplines on the subject of student writing skills. It was agreed that additional funding could be sought for this from the Higher Education Academy. 
2.	It was agreed that the Linguistics articles in the Good Practice Guide needed to be more pedagogic (rather than descriptive) in nature. This will be emphasised in future commissions. Recent commissions are for Discourse Analysis, Lexical Semantics, Literary Stylistics and Pidgins & Creoles. It will soon be possible for readers of GPG articles to add comments to articles via an online form on the Subject Centre website. It was further suggested that a new kind of article be added which would enable colleagues to share teaching ideas, e.g. short pieces describing course content and curriculum. It was felt that this would be useful for colleagues needing to construct new/different curricula possibly in areas that are outside of their normal teaching/research.
3.	A study funded by the English Subject Centre into the transition from English Language A level to university study of English Language and/or Linguistics is now underway at York St John University College. The outcomes of this project will be published in the new year.
4.	The Linguistics Group has been asked to facilitate a pedagogy session at the LAGB conference in Newcastle in September. The session will showcase innovative teaching. Speakers have been confirmed and will include Caroline Heycock (Edinburgh), Christine Hildebrand (Manchester) and Billy Clark (Middlesex). The Subject Centre has offered to organise a similar session at the BAAL 2007 conference and this has been accepted.
5.	The A Level Linguistics SIG that is supported by the Subject Centre is continuing to develop its ideas for an A level in Linguistics. Currently they are preparing one of the modules in detail (on a week by week basis). A jiscmail list to enable comments on this has been set up by the Subject Centre.

Full minutes of this meeting can be found at: www.llas.ac.uk/linguistics
Events will be listed on the Subject Centre website as the dates are confirmed www.llas.ac.uk/events