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The focus for my school based inquiry was to examine the most common misconceptions that are held by pupils when learning about Time and to explore how teachers seek to address them in their teaching (see appendix 1e for sub questions). The research thread emerged from the alliance topic ‘to investigate ways to develop deep conceptual understanding and handle misconceptions within a particular mathematical topic’. It was anticipated that Time would be a suitable mathematical realm to research due to the variety of misconceptions that are commonly attached to the objective (LittleStreams, 2015). Time appears as a statutory objective in the Primary National Curriculum under the mathematical program of study of measure (DoE, 2013), it is evident in every year group with increasing degree of complexity until year 6 (appendix 1a); by which point pupils are expected to know and be able to use all skills relating to the concept. The present description is based on a 34 interview corpus of data carried out in an inner city Nottingham school, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom between December 2015 and March 2016. The informants included in the study represent teachers, Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) and Teaching Assistants (TAs). The data collected comprise of 22 questionnaires and 12 interviews. The motive for this arrangement will become clear when the methodology is discussed. The analysis was undertaken in order to understand what teachers consider to be the key issues embedded within the teaching of Time, what the observed most common misconceptions are; and how teacher’s perceptions of these and practices in response to these can implicate on future teaching.

Deeply embedded in the current education system is assessment. Within education, assessment is used to track and predict pupil achievement and can be defined as a means by which pupil learning is measured (Ronan, 2015). The delivery of teaching and learning within schools is often predetermined by what is assessed, with pupils actively being taught how to achieve the success criteria (appendix 7a). Recognised as a key professional competency of teachers (GTCNI, 2011) and the 6th quality in the Teachers’ Standards (DfE, 2011), assessment can be outlined as ‘the systematic collection, interpretation and use of information to give a deeper appreciation of what pupils know and understand, their skills and personal capabilities, and what their learning experiences enable them to do’ (CCEA, 2013: 4). The aims of the current essay are to venture further into the role of assessment in teaching and learning, paying particular attention to how formative and summative forms of assessment contribute to the discipline; and what impact these have at the classroom and the school level for both teachers and learners. The paper will examine my own experiences of using formative and summative assessment in the classroom, looking specifically at the summative processes I am aware of, before evaluating the purpose of Independent Thinking Time (ITT) and Talk Partners (TP); and how formative assessment can take place within these. In addition to this, the essay will also explore the role of Closing the Gaps (CTGs) in marking, and how questioning can assess conceptual understanding. These will be evaluated against the Teachers’ Standards. The essay will endeavour to foreground some potential challenges with formative and summative assessment (including what I have learned about assessment), before identifying some areas for future development and the strategies to facilitate these.

It has been argued that depending on gender language is used in different ways in society, and the fact that language is surveyed differently leads to the thesis that men and women have ‘differentiated communicative competence’ (Coates, 2004). A distinct pronunciation variant that is widely used and ‘has recently been noted as spreading through non-standard accents in England’ (cf. Trudgill, 1988: 43), is that of th-fronting. The form th- fronting has become more and more integrated into the speech patterns of many speakers across the United Kingdom although it has ‘not ‘officially’ entered RP yet’ (Altendorf, 1999: 5). This study focused on whether or not gender is associated with variation in the usage of th-fronting in the urban and multicultural locality of Nottingham, United Kingdom. The analysis was undertaken in order to assess how urban youth culture in Nottingham utilizes and applies the form th-fronting in everyday dialogue such as day-to-day conversations, and whether their mode of expression varies according to gender. The study aimed to gain an insight into the relationship between spoken language and identity, and to recognise whether the social backgrounds/ cultural practices people have influence their use of ethnically and age-coded variables. From the results, it was established that th-fronting does vary according to gender and that increased formality does limit the amount of th-fronting used.

As with anything written or spoken the language that is used is always from somebody’s viewpoint (Wood-Wallace, 2011: 2) and due to the fact that there are a multitude of different lexical items and syntactical structures for the speaker to choose from, the recipient of communication not only has to understand the literal meaning of the string of words and sentences composed by the speaker or writer but also what the intention of the communicative piece is (Grice, 1989: 86; Huang, 2009: 118). For example ‘It’s hot in here’ could pragmatically mean ‘open the window’, or ‘I’m hungry’ could equally mean ‘I don’t want to go to bed yet’ (Peccei, 1999: 3). Speech is never ‘value free’, it is an encoded piece of communication that in turn is decoded and understood by the recipient. This decoding of sentence meaning, word structure and the lexicon has been studied for a number of years by many linguists (Atlas, 2005: 37, Blunter, 1998: 115; 2004: 488, Grice, 1975: 117; 1989: 86, McCawley, 1978: 245), with a separate branch of lexical pragmatics emerging in the 1990s (Huang, 1998: 1; 2009: 118). The aims of the current essay are to venture further in the semantic-pragmatic field to look more specifically within the realms of entailment and implicature; with the intent of explaining the differences between both entailed and implicated utterances. Equally, the essay will also look into the relationship between semantic and pragmatic utterances and attempt to draw similarities in how entailment and implicature relate to these distinctions. The text will look into how speakers encode and decode language and how context plays a big part in this. Finally, the essay will look at Grice’s Maxims and the Cooperative Principle and attempt to discuss features of conversational implicature with reference to these.

Whilst differences in British English accents can be traditionally evidenced through variances in pronunciation, syntax and lexical choices, justification for these preferences are more complicated and contentious (Cheshire et al, 1989; 1999; Kerswill, 2002). Over the past 40 or so years sociolinguists have systematically observed accents throughout the British isles, and have attempted to document and provide explanations for regional differences and distinct varieties. The present study examined the speculation by Wells (1982a, b) that the happY vowel in use in working-class Nottingham differs from the rest of the United Kingdom and can be realised as approaching [ɛ] of the DRESS lexical set instead of the more common KIT [ɪ] or FLEECE [i]. In addition to documenting the variable, the subsequent study also looked into whether there is a relationship between usage of the innovation and age, gender or formality. From the results, it was established that the happY vowel in use in a working-class native Nottingham accent can be realised approaching [ɛ] of the DRESS lexical set and that even though all speakers have a high usage of the variant the form is formality driven; as well as being both age and gender-specific.

"There have been many debates and disputes within linguistics, as well as within wider fields, attempting to explain how language is used, stored and accessed. This study examined the various proposed models that attempt to offer an
explanation of the storage and retrieval of lexical items within the brain. The study set out to investigate if through
semantic and phonological cueing, whether a target word is replaced by mistake with an error word. An examination of the errors produced would then provide evidence as to whether these two notions (phonology and semantics)
interrelate, as produced errors may be in some way related either phonologically, semantically or both; to the target lexeme that the brain is attempting to access.
The two models used within this study both have opposing ideas of language storage and retrieval.  These two models are the Serial Model (Levelt, 1983; Garrett, 1975) and the Interactive Model (Dell, 1986). This research has been carried out in order to test how language is stored in the brain, to examine which model is most accurate in its predictions of language storage and lexical retrieval, and to explain how and why errors are produced."

This report is a reflection upon the experiences of taking part in the preparation and presentation of a multidisciplinary research proposal on the topic of dissent. It is a summative write-up on how my group (group C1) worked together to propose ‘The poppy uproar: a cross-cultural analysis of the poppy and its relationship with national identity’. In addition to providing a definition of key terms such as multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary; this report will also explain how the group understood, approached and analysed the topic of dissent through a multicultural and multidisciplinary perspective, as well as commenting on group synergies, dynamics and strengths and weaknesses to the approach.

Everybody has an accent (Stockwell, 2003) and these can be determined by social class, geographical location and other social variables (Wells, 1982). Many previous studies have presumed that people are relatively accurate at recognising local accents, though further examination is needed in order to analyse how accurate participants are in deciding where speakers originate. Our research examined language variation and perception around the East-Midlands. There has been no regional survey of the dialects of the East Midlands since the ‘Survey of English Dialects’ in the 1950s. More recent localised studies that present an overview of regional speech in the UK either lack up-to-date research from the East Midlands or ignore the area completely. Despite this lack of empirical evidence, anecdotally it appears that speech in the East Midlands remains extremely distinctive and locals insist there is considerable variation between speech in the major urban centres of Nottingham, Leicester and Derby.

Language is always constructed and communicated through the point of view of the producer; and since research is recorded through language (whether that be in written form or orally) it is therefore also composed from the researcher’s position. For this reason research is never value free, it always speaks on behalf of certain ideas, values, beliefs and interpretations whist silencing others. The researcher decides what is and what is not included in the documentation of the research undertaken, and hence holds a certain positionality toward the study. Since the late 1980s positionality within research has been particularly paralyzing for all who arrive at a research conclusion (Nagar and Geiger, 2007), though Marcus (1992) argues that ‘reflexive identification’ is one response to the problem. Reflexivity within research allows the author to consider what impact their positionality has on the research process, and how the research conclusion is somewhat contributed to and constructed through the researcher being part of the research process. This essay will examine how a researcher’s position can contribute to and shape the research outcome within the field of linguistic research. It aims to establish whether the risks associated within positionality can be counter-balanced through reflexive identification; and if reflexivity is an effective strategy to tackle positionality. The question will be addressed through reviewing and analyzing a number of linguistic projects to reveal how a researcher’s position might shape the process and outcomes of their research. It will then address if and how reflexivity can be a sufficient protection against the risks of positionality, and examine whether reflexivity itself is an aid or obstruction within research. Finally, the essay will endeavor to distinguish whether there is a real difference between being ‘reflexive’ and being ‘reflective’ within linguistic research and attempt to justify this in relation to specific linguistic research cases.

The focus for my sequence of lessons was algebra, which was taught to year six children over a period of 3 days. The aims of the current critical commentary are to justify the thinking behind my plans (appendix B, C) by explaining the theoretical concepts in education literature that they were built on. It is impossible to give a comprehensive overview of all of the theories and pedagogies used throughout the sequence within the word constraints of this assignment (appendix D); so the current essay will focus on the following areas: how learning was scaffolded over the sequence using the Spiral Curriculum (including how the strategy of variation was incorporated to focus learning), how misconceptions were used as a teaching tool, and how higher order questions were employed to assess conceptual understanding. The commentary will give a comprehensive breakdown of how decisions were formulated and implemented before analysing how the teaching went (including whether the theories implemented were effective), how successful the sequence was, what pupils learnt and what I learnt. Finally the essay will endeavour to enumerate some potential developments within my sequence, including what I would have done differently and how I can incorporate what I have learnt into my future plans and practice.

This study focused on two of the most common lexical items in the English language, the conjunction ‘because’ and the verb ‘going’. It was an analysis of ten heterosexual boys aged between fourteen and nineteen and their usage, clippings and pronunciation of the chosen words. The analysis was carried out in order to asses how urban youth culture in St Ann’s utilize and apply the lexical items in everyday dialogue such as verbal conversations via face to face interactions, telephone calls and text messaging. The aims of the project were to understand whether language and age is altered by where people hold their identities, to recognise whether the lifestyles people have influences the formality of their linguistic repertoire and lexis, and to distinguish whether the participation in certain social groups changes the constructions people use.