Teaching units
Spoken London English
Language and gender
Discourses and attitudes
Language and the media
Language change
Language diversity
The Teaching Units provided here are specifically designed to offer secondary school teachers of English language up-to-date examples of English language use and associated analytic themes. They draw primarily on recent research conducted by leading sociolinguists at Queen Mary University of London, a linguistics department that was top-ranked in the last two national research assessments (RAE2008, REF2014). Where relevant, the Teaching Units cite wider recent research in the field.
Almost all of the Teaching Units provide original raw data from these research studies for teachers to use free of charge. Most Teaching Units also include links to relevant Linguistics Research Digest summaries of research articles. The Teaching Units under Spoken London English were available through an earlier resource established by Jenny Cheshire and Sue Fox and are incorporated within the larger database on this site.
The Teaching Units are grouped into themes that match the thematic specifications of the AQA and other qualification boards. We will periodically add new Teaching Units to this database. Do complete our survey if you have any feedback for us!