About
Welcome to Teach Real English!
Our materials are primarily for teachers and students of A-level English Language, but are of course open to anyone with an interest in language. All of our content is free of charge. We aim to add new material periodically, so do check the website regularly.
The materials cover a range of themes in the A-level English Language curriculum, including Spoken English, Language Change, Language and Gender, Discourse and Attitudes, Language and the Media, and Child Language Acquisition.
We aim to:
- help teachers of English Language keep up with cutting-edge research
- give teachers access to authentic research materials for use in teaching
- give students ideas for independent projects
- inform the wider public about how language varies and changes in society
Teaching Units are based on recent research by staff at Queen Mary University of London. Our department was top-ranked in the UK for research in the last two national assessments (RAE 2008 and REF 2014). We package this top-ranked research for use by teachers, students, and the wider public.
Each Teaching Unit includes a package of materials on a given topic (including background social or historical information, discussion points for class, transcripts or extracts of real language use, and audio recordings). Teaching Units include cross-referenced links to articles in the Linguistics Research Digest and in the media.
The website also provides Language Investigations that teachers can give their students to guide them in conducting independent projects.
The Linguistics Research Digest provides teachers and students with up-to-date reports on the latest research papers on language issues in an engaging, jargon-free way. Articles that are specifically relevant to GCSE and A-Level English Language teaching are cross-referenced with relevant Teaching Units.
The Glossary offers teachers an analytic overview of grammatical features of spoken language, with cross-referenced links to relevant Teaching Units.
The website was set up by Devyani Sharma and Ynda Jas, and is maintained by Christian Ilbury. We are grateful to the Centre for Public Engagement at Queen Mary University of London for their support of this work. Some earlier materials developed by Jenny Cheshire and Sue Fox (Spoken English Language Teaching Resources) are also incorporated into this website under the theme of ‘Spoken London English’.
