On the 6th of December, English Language A-Level students from across the country gathered at the Friends House in London for a conference held annually by ‘emagazine’, which is run by the English and Media Centre. The conference consisted of five key speakers, the first of which was Dr. Tamar Keren-Portnoy.

Hailing from the University of York, Keren-Portnoy spoke on child language development - more specifically, the idea that babbling is one of the most important components in teaching infants and toddlers to speak. In order to encourage it - especially in children with developmental delays - she and her students have developed ‘Babble Play’, which has shown promising results. 

 

The next speaker was Dr. Lucy Jones, who explored the social roles that people perform, and how the language used by both corporations and individuals helps to promote and reinforce both heteronormativity and cisnormativity - a topic particularly important to explore in today’s rapidly evolving society. 

 

After a short break, the group reconvened for a talk by Dr. Rob Drummond. He laid out his ten key language rules, which consisted of ideas such as ‘language standards are arbitrary’ and that ‘criticisms about the way that someone speaks are always about more than just the language itself’. In 2023, Drummond published his second novel ‘You’re All Talk: Why We are what We Speak’, which explores these themes in greater detail with further context. 

 

Lunch followed, after which Dr. Deborah Cameron spoke on the rise of misogyny in the modern day. This focused on how exploration of the trajectory of nationalism in Britain can be used to suggest that the biggest way in which misogyny is perpetuated in today’s society is not through the work of individual extremists such as Andrew Tate, but rather through mundane everyday language choices. This could be from gift cards that joke about wife-hating to the stereotype that ‘boys will boys’. This talk was the favourite of Croydon High School student, Rebecca, who said that the talk ‘put the rise of misogyny in a new light for [her]’ and had made her ‘look more carefully about the media that [she] consumed’. 

 

The final talk was conducted by Sonia Morán Panero, who was born in Spain and studied at the University of Salamanca. She began by pointing out that, historically, English’s rules and general structure has only been allowed to be influenced by its ‘inner circle’. This was exclusively those who speak English natively: anyone else who attempted to adjust it was labelled incorrect. However, due to English’s recently increasing popularity as a ‘lingua franca’ - a shared language used between speakers who have different native languages - Morán Panero argued that those in the expanding ‘outer circle’ should have the right to adapt English in a way that is more accessible or appropriate for them. 

 

After her talk, Morán Panero was met with the same applause that her contemporaries were, and Rebecca commented that overall, the 2023 ‘emagazine’ English Language conference had offered ‘skills that would be great to apply to [her] A-Level course’. The enthusiasm of the room’s applause suggests that this feeling was reflected in the other attendees.