emagazine Language Conference in the North 2025
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Date - 24 Feb 2025 (UK)
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Availability -
Places available
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Price - £22.5 per student
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Location - The King's School, Macclesfield
The conference will begin at 10.30am and finish by 3.30pm. The timings for the day will follow soon.
With talks on the linguistics of pop lyrics, police interviews, an introduction to critical discourse approaches and lots on accent and dialect, our 3rd Macclesfield conference at The King's School is going to be a great day for all A Level English language students.
Speakers:
- Jessica Aiston (Queen Mary University of London)
- Jasmine Andersson (journalist and author)
- Rob Drummond (Manchester Metropolitan University)
- Paul Flanagan (University of Chester)
- James Tompkinson (University of York).
Talks:
Jessica Aiston: What is (and what isn't) critical discourse analysis?
What can the language we use tell us about the society we live in? Why might linguists also take an interest in issues of power and discrimination? And what kind of analytical tools can we use to study these topics? In this talk, Jessica Aiston will provide an introductory overview of what ‘critical discourse analysis’ is and what the approach can offer for A Level English Language investigations.
Jasmine Andersson: Speak louder: the fight against accent discrimination
The UK has a complicated relationship with accents. While it has the largest number of regional accents in any English-speaking country, they are often considered with shame, derision and snobbery. This talk will explore the UK's rich history of regional accent and dialect, and how accent discrimination has become a proxy for further class and race-based discrimination. This talk will also explore how we can fight back to ensure that people feel empowered to speak in their regional accent with pride.
Rob Drummond: Manchester Voices – The quest continues
Manchester Voices is a large-scale sociolinguistics project exploring the accents, dialects and identities of people in Greater Manchester. This talk will explore some of the most recent findings that have emerged in the ongoing analysis of data, while providing some insights into the methods we use to investigate regional accent differences and the link between how we speak and who we are.
Paul Flanagan: Language style in pop lyrics
This talk considers pop songs as texts for linguistic study, shedding light on how to understand them in terms of genre, register and style. In particular, this talk focuses on how to analyse the performed language of pop songs from a theoretical and methodological perspective, with some insight on how to identify links between a singer's performance, the construction of their own identity, and how these things are influenced by audience, attitude and the genre and content of the songs being performed.
James Tompkinson: Language as evidence: Forensic linguistics and the analysis of police interview discourse
Almost every aspect of our legal system involves language. Evidence is gathered using language, laws are written and codified through language, transcripts of police interviews and courtroom proceedings are produced as official records, and sometimes speech and language itself can be a crucial source of evidence. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the field of forensic linguistics, focussing particularly on the analysis of police interviews. I will explain how language analysis can be useful for research on police interviews, and also explore some of the myths and misconceptions that exist about forensic language analysis among the general public.
Getting to the Conference
- The Conference is being held at The King's School, Macclesfield.
- A site map with key locations referred to below can be downloaded here.
- Directions to the school are available here.
- Please enter at the west entrance (2) to the school grounds.
Minibuses and cars
- Please park in the Infant and Junior car park (3) – the first one you come to.
Coaches
- Coaches can park and stay in the coach layby directly in front of the main school building, at the top of the ‘boulevard’ (5).
- Additional parking for coaches is available on some gravel by the Infant & Junior car park (in between 3 and 5).
- There is additional coach parking at Derby Fields (6). Please note that there is a separate road entrance to this area, further east along the main road towards Macclesfield.
Arrangements on the Day
The Conference is being held at The King's School, Macclesfield.
A site map with key locations referred to below can be downloaded here.
Registration
Registration will open at 9.45am and we ask you to be in your seats for 10.15am so we can begin promptly at 10.30am.
Please enter either at the main reception or through the doors to the refectory (right underneath the number 4 on the map).
Teachers Accompanying Students
We expect all students to be accompanied by a teacher. There should be a minimum of 1 teacher per 20 students.
We request that teachers meet their students in advance, register as a group and sit with their groups of students. Teachers are responsible for ensuring that their own students maintain acceptable standards of behaviour in the auditorium and around the school
Lunch and Refreshments
There is space for students to eat lunch in the refectory.
Dan Clayton
Dan Clayton is an education consultant at the EMC and specialises in English Language work at A Level and language education across the secondary curriculum. He has been a teacher of A Level English for over 20 years, senior examiner and moderator for different awarding bodies and is author/editor of many books for A Level English Language, including ones for Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press & Routledge, as well as publications for the EMC and NATE. Dan has worked closely with many universities to help develop links between A level and HE, worked as a research fellow at UCL and runs the EngLangBlog site and @EngLangBlog Bluesky account, as well as being part of the Lexis Podcast team. He has also taught Media and Film Studies and is Associate Editor of emagazine and MediaMagazine.
Rob Drummond
Rob Drummond is Professor of Sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University, regularly appears in the media to talk about language issues and is a contributor to many EMC events and publications. His latest book, You’re All Talk: Why we are what we speak, was published in October 2023.
Jessica Aiston
Jessica Aiston is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary University of London. In her research, she uses approaches from critical discourse studies to analyse data from social media, especially in relation to issues of language, gender, and neurodiversity. She gained her PhD from Lancaster University in 2023, where her thesis investigated sexist language on Reddit.
Paul Flanagan
Dr Paul Flanagan is Senior Lecturer in English Language at the University of Chester, where he has worked since 2015. His research interests include language typology and the language of popular culture, specifically the language of pop music and multimodal approaches to telecinematic discourse.
James Tompkinson
James Tompkinson is a Lecturer in Sociolinguistics in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. His research mainly explores how people infer information from speakers' voices, particularly in areas which are relevant to forensic linguistics and sociolinguistics. James' published work includes the analysis of perceptions of police interviewees from audio recordings and written transcripts, exploration of the relative contributions of voices and faces in person perception, assessments of whether non-linguists can accurately assess different aspects of speakers' voices, and how people infer traits such as threat and intent-to-harm from speakers’ voices.
Jasmine Andersson
Jasmine Andersson is a senior news reporter at Yahoo News UK and an accent specialist. She is writing a book on the history of accent discrimination in the UK. Her work on accent discrimination has been featured on BBC Radio 4, the i newspaper, Refinery29 and others.
Prices
- The fee is £22.50 per student, with one free teacher place as follows: 1-9 students = 1 free teacher place; 10-19 students = 2 free teacher places and so on.
- You will be automatically allocated the correct number of teacher places and will need to provide details for each teacher attending. (You can change the teachers attending, if necessary, when you tell us final numbers on 4th February.)
- For additional teachers, or teachers attending without students, for their own interest or CPD, the charge is £50 each.
How to book
Book online and choose to pay by invoice.
- We are unable to take provisional bookings or reserve places.
- Conference places will be allocated on a first come first served basis.
- There is a limit of 60 places per organisation.
- Please see our updated cancellation policy.
- To book this conference you must be signed into a UK Educator Admin (purchasing) or UK Trust/Academy – Head Office (purchasing). Trust/MAT head offices ordering for more than one school, will need to place separate orders for each school.
- Click 'Book now’ (right-hand column).
- Add the number of student places you need. Free teacher places will be allocated automatically.
- Confirm you have read and agree to the updated terms & conditions.
- 'Places exceeded' message? Reasons for this message are:
- You are trying to order more than 60 places (including free teacher places)
- Due to the number of places in other customers’ baskets, there are currently insufficient places available to fulfil this order.
- 'Places exceeded' message? Reasons for this message are:
- You will be asked to add the names and contact details of the teachers attending – if you don't know these details yet, just copy/paste the details of the lead teacher.
- Please make sure you add the attendee details immediately and checkout within 24 minutes. Otherwise the booking will expire and you will have to begin the process again.
- Click submit and then Go to basket.
- Checkout.
- Once you have booked your place, you will see a screen indicating your order has been successful. You may want to make a note of your order number. The person making the booking and all the teachers attending will also receive an automatic acknowledgement of your booking.
- Please do not make final travel arrangements until you have paid your deposit invoice.
Deposit
- A 20% non-refundable deposit will be applied to all places booked. If you cancel a place you will lose the 20% deposit paid. You will not be able to use the 20% deposit paid on cancelled places towards the final invoice.
- if paying by invoice you will receive a non-refundable deposit invoice of 20% of the booking value, to be paid by credit card within 7 days of receipt. Failure to pay this invoice will result in the cancellation of the booking.
- If paying by credit card, 20% of the total value of the booking is non-refundable.
Cancellations and Amendments
- The 20% deposit on places booked is non-refundable. Please note: you will not be able to use the 20% deposit paid on cancelled places towards the final invoice.
- You can make amendments to your booking until the final numbers deadline – 5pm on 4th February 2025. You will lose the 20% deposit paid on places cancelled by this deadline.
- If you paid the full fee by card, you will receive an 80% refund on places cancelled by the final numbers deadline.
- Schools who choose invoice payment will be invoiced for the balance of the total fee (80%) on confirmed places. Please note: you will not be able to use the 20% deposit paid on cancelled places towards this final invoice.
- After this date you will be charged 100% of the ticket price, regardless of the numbers of students you bring to the conference.
- We will email on 29th January to remind you to confirm your final numbers.
- If paying by invoice, the invoice for the balance of your conference booking will be sent the day after the conference takes place and will come from [email protected]
Please note: We will be unable to make refunds in the case of weather, transport difficulties or circumstances beyond our control. Should EMC need to cancel the conference, a full refund will be on offer. (However, personal arrangements including travel, accommodation or hospitality relating to the conference which have been arranged by you or your institution are at your own risk and not refundable by us.)
Waiting list
- We are no longer operating a waiting list for student conferences.
- If places become available, we will re-open the bookings on the website. We will publicise this via social media and our general mailing list.