Language and Gender Talk

On 3 February, Professor Helen Saunston, Professor of English Language and Linguistics at St John University came to share her expertise with our English Language students about Language and Gender.

Subject leader for English, Miss Teece arranged the talk with her former lecturer having completed her studies in English Language and Linguistics at York St John, before qualifying as a teacher.

Around 60 students attended the talk with Professor Saunston. This gave them the opportunity to gain further information on topics they are assessed on in their A Level English Language curriculum: Language and Gender and Language and Sexuality.

“I really enjoyed the lecture because the ideas and theories the Professor mentioned will be good to use in essays and they also improved my knowledge of an interesting and socially relevant topic. Also, the experience of taking notes in a university-style lecture was good preparation for the next few years.”
Daniel Sykes, year 13 student.

“Professor Sauntson was one of my lecturers at University whilst studying English Language and Linguistics and really furthered my passion for studying the subject. The lecture yesterday was incredibly interesting and highlighted how there are still significant gendered differences within the English language even in our present-day society. The students enjoyed getting involved and researching different multimodal gender stereotyped texts and identifying the bias in language towards women using corpus data.”
Miss Teece, Subject Leader for English.