Linguistics at School: The UK Linguistics Olympiad



Linguistics at School: The UK Linguistics Olympiad

Richard Hudson and Neil Sheldon

Abstract

The UK Linguistics Olympiad, like similar olympiads that have been offered in other countries since the first took place in Moscow in 1965, is an annual competition in which school children test their ability to sort out the underlying patterns and rules in linguistic data. The UK olympiad has only existed since 2010 but by 2012 it already had 2,000 competitors aged between 12 and 18. Its success shows how enthusiastic children can be about studying language structure. Linguistics olympiads help schools to promote languages (especially among boys) and to interest all children in language structure; in the UK, this is particularly important in state schools.

1. What is a linguistics olympiad?

As its title suggests, a linguistics olympiad (LO) is a competition which ranks competitors in terms of how good they are at thinking like linguists, but since the competitors are all school-children, LOs are primarily a means of promoting linguistics at school level. Professional practitioners of linguistics would rightly object to any suggestion that they themselves might be ranked competitively, but at school level it is both possible and extremely productive. The aim of this article is to explain in more detail how LOs work, with the UK olympiad as an example, and to explore the reasons for their success.

The LO movement follows the path which has already been established for mathematics and some of the physical sciences, and which is embodied at the international level by a dozen international competitions ranging from the International Mathematical Olympiad to the International Astronomy Olympiad. For some subjects, the competition tests the mental skills and knowledge found in the corresponding school subject, but some subjects, including linguistics, are not taught at school so the olympiads cannot assume any ‘technical’ knowledge. In the case of linguistics, this principle rules out not only questions on the grand issues that divide us at a research level, but also technical notations and tricks of analysis such as syntactic trees or the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these exclusions are important, they actually leave a vast amount of relatively concrete but challenging material which is perfect for a school-level competition.

The best way to explain LOs is through examples, such as the 2012 paper for the Foundation Level of the UK LO. (The notion of ‘levels’ will be explained in the next section.) This paper can be found on the UKLO website, together with the individual questions (which are published with their solutions and, in some cases, with a commentary). In every question, the starting point is a collection of raw data, typically (though not necessarily) from a very unfamiliar language. The tasks require students to go beyond these raw data by working out the underlying patterns and then performing some kind of test of their understanding. We start with Question 1, on Yolmo.

In this case, the test is to translate in both directions by translating individual words or phrases from Yolmo to English, and whole sentences in the other direction. This question is meant to be at the easy end of the scale of difficulty, but it requires careful analytical skills which some children have and others lack. One of its challenges is the use of diacritics and special characters, which takes monoglot English speakers well outside their comfort zone.

Question 2 is about a much less ‘exotic’ language, Danish, but requires a fairly sophisticated semantic analysis in which competitors realize that Danish counts some numbers on the base of twenty rather than ten, and names some numbers as ‘halfway’ to the next twenty-based number. For example, they have to analyze syvoghalvtreds (meaning 57) as ’7 plus halfway to 3 x 20’. Once again the task for competitors is to go beyond the basic data by translating in both directions.

Question 3 has two variants, one of which is Welsh. Since some schools are in Welsh-speaking areas, or teach Welsh, teachers can choose Dutch instead. The Welsh problem is based on a bilingual leaflet about libraries, while the Dutch one presents a list of verbs with their past participles. Both problems are considerably more difficult than the first two because they call for an analysis of general rules, namely one case of soft mutation in Welsh, and several morphophonological rules in Dutch.

Question 5 is about Haitian, and concerns the choice of forms for ‘the’. The challenge for competitors is, first, to realise that the choice of forms in the singular is based on phonology alone (not, say, gender), and secondly to work out the fairly complex phonological conditioning rules. For a child who knows no phonetics or phonology, this is a real challenge.

The last question is about the inflectional morphology of Esperanto. This requires a very sophisticated semantic analysis in which a ‘past-present-future’ contrast applies both to the deictic time and to a secondary time, each realized at a different place in the verb’s morphology. Another complication is that these tense contrasts combine with a voice contrast between active and passive. Like many of the harder questions, this favours language-literate students who have some experience of thinking about tense and voice; but in principle it can be solved from scratch by good pattern-spotters who can think independently. As mentioned earlier, the LO only tests analytical thinking skills, so it only presupposes the knowledge of language that may be expected of any school child; but in the UK, the fact is that some schools teach a lot more grammar than others do, so children who know about grammar are at an advantage.

The problems can be very much harder than this. For one thing, as the difficulty increases, more emphasis is put on providing not only correct answers, but also a correct and clear formulation of the underlying rules; and for another, the solutions become increasingly hard to find. For instance, the hardest question in the 2012 UK competition was undoubtedly the one about the script called Phags-pa created on the orders of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan as exemplified in a two-page extract of a poem. This was accompanied by a transcription of the same poem, which is less helpful than might at first be assumed because the poem in Phags-pa script is just part of the transcribed poem. Worse still, it’s not at all clear how the lines and rows of the two versions match up. Very few of even the brightest of the UK competitors found their way into this problem.

These examples illustrate the main characteristics of a linguistics olympiad, as a test of competitors’ ability to think analytically about raw linguistic data-sets. Both the data and the tasks will remind any linguistics lecturer of homework problems they set for their students, so there is no doubt that they involve linguistics; but the crucial difference is that the competitors are not university students, but school children.

2. The UK Linguistics Olympiad

The UK LO is by no means unique, being one of about two dozen national olympiads in linguistics, and the next section will put it in context both historically and geographically. Like every other national olympiad its peculiarities reflect those of the country. The relevant facts about the UK are that it is a relatively small but prosperous country with an extremely diverse school system and weak state funding for non-curriculum events such as olympiads. As we shall see, all these characteristics are relevant to the LO. However, although the UK olympiad cannot be described as a ‘typical’ national olympiad, the concrete details about our organisation may be more helpful than more abstract generalisations that might apply across all olympiads.

We would like to focus on five distinctive characteristics of the UK LO:

● its recent creation and rapid growth

● the dominance of fee-paying schools

● the wide age-range of competitors

● the use of students to mark scripts

● the use of sponsors rather than state funding.

The UK is a relative newcomer to the LO scene, having only officially started in 2010 after a trial run in 2009 as guests of the All-Ireland Linguistics Olympiad, which was a very helpful introduction. We also benefited greatly from the existence of a well-established and recognised Committee for Linguistics in Education, which represents two professional associations for academic linguistics as well as a large number of other associations with an interest in language education. This committee was able to constitute a sub-committee to run UKLO (the UK Linguistics Olympiad), so our committee has an official status which is helpful in dealing with potential sponsors (an important part of our activity). Over the years, the committee has grown and now has twenty members, each with a specialised role. This large committee is important because almost all the members have full-time jobs so they can only give limited time to UKLO. The committee is very diverse in terms of occupation (university or school), age (recent graduate to retired), and expertise (in finance, publicity, organisation, IT or simply education).

One of the distinctive characteristics of UKLO is our very rapid growth. In our first year (2010) we had 562 competitors – a number which surprised us – but this rose to 1165 in 2011 and to 1912 in 2012. Clearly the competition is meeting a need, but we have also been able to use a number of existing professional networks to advertise it and to build a list of school-teachers who have expressed an interest in the LO, and who act as our links to schools that provide our competitors. The main value of this list is to provide a channel for emails through which we can not only announce organisational details, but also invite feedback from teachers; indeed, it is through this list that we have recruited some of our committee members.

What kind of teachers do we attract? The largest single category consists of foreign-language teachers in state-funded schools, and there is no doubt that we have benefited from the fact that such teachers are well networked, thanks to an effective professional association and a government-funded network, both of which have been supportive of the LO. However, we have also benefited from the equally effective networking for foreign-language teachers in fee-paying schools, as well as a large email list for teachers of the ‘Advanced’ paper (taken in the last two years before university) in English Language. In addition to teachers of foreign languages and English Language, we have recruited smaller numbers of teachers from classics, mathematics and a handful of other subjects.

The 300 schools that these teachers represent are equally varied, ranging from large and distinguished fee-paying (‘public’) schools such as Manchester Grammar School and Eton College to state-funded inner-city comprehensive schools and sixth-form colleges. The split between fee-paying and state-funded schools is significant in a number of ways. On the one hand, we could be concerned about the dominance of fee-paying schools at every level in the competition: competitors from fee-paying schools outnumber those from state funded schools three to one, even though fee-paying schools educate only 7% of all pupils. On the other hand, the pattern we see is broadly replicated in other science olympiads. It does appear that teachers in fee-paying schools are allowed, or encouraged, to range beyond the confines of the curriculum, while teachers in state-funded schools have less freedom, not least because of the pressures of ‘league tables’ (on which schools compete with each other). Also, fee-paying schools have more than their share of the most able pupils -- the ones most likely to be interested in and successful at linguistics problems. Moreover, we certainly would not have expanded as fast as we have done without the enthusiasm of fee-paying schools, and without their concrete support both in terms of time and money. The fact is that fee-paying schools are very significant players in the UK’s educational scene, and are highly relevant to the LO in the UK.

Another peculiarity of our LO is the broad age-range that we cater for, thanks to an early decision to offer the competition at different levels of difficulty. The two levels that we offered in the first two years expanded in 2012 to three levels: Foundation, Intermediate and Advanced. Any school student may be entered at any level, but we recommend Foundation level for Key Stage 3 (that is, Years 7-9, i.e. age 12 to 14), Intermediate for Key Stage 4 (Years 10 and 11) and Advanced for Key Stage 5 (Years 12 and 13, the last years before university). Our youngest groups of competitors are in Year 7, which is the first year of secondary education – i.e. age 11-12; and in 2012 we had 93 competitors in this age group. Many of these competitors work in groups rather than singly, and according to our statistics they only achieve quite modest scores, but this isn’t important. What matters is that (according to their teachers) they enjoy the challenge and are keen for more, so if these youngsters take part in the LO every year until they leave school (in Year 13), they will have experienced the full olympiad seven times, not to mention any training they receive in between.

Competitors at different levels sit different papers, but the questions overlap considerably. From a pool of nine questions (counting the Welsh/Dutch alternatives as a single question), each paper contains five: questions 1-5 for the Foundation paper, 3-7 for Intermediate and 5-9 for Advanced. This means that competitors at lower levels get a taste of the next level up, and, of course, the overlap reduces the number of questions needed – an important consideration. Another benefit for us is that we can leave schools to mark all their own scripts (with detailed guidance on marking) for the Foundation and Intermediate levels, leaving just the Advanced papers for us to mark centrally – as we have to because this level selects the national winners, the sixteen competitors who will be invited to attend a residential weekend where we combine some training with a further test to select the team of four to represent the UK at the International Linguistics Olympiad.

Marking is a serious issue for us because the scripts are handwritten so they have to be marked by human volunteers. The marking operation has to be financially cost-free so all our markers are volunteeers. Some of our markers are individual academics, but many are students who take part in events called ‘markathons’, where a member of staff recruits volunteers for an afternoon’s supervised marking, typically fueled by pizzas funded by the department. This activity is not merely an effective way of marking large numbers of scripts; it also has the important benefit of involving university students and teachers in the olympiad, thereby generating a great deal of enthusiasm which may pay off in the future.

The final issue is funding. Like the markers, the committee are all volunteers, but we do have some significant expenses which we can’t avoid. The first is the residential weekend for sixteen competitors, which is hosted by a university but heavily subsidized by UKLO; and the second is the UK team’s visit to the International Linguistics Olympiad. These recurrent expenses amount to about £5,000 per year. Since one of our main aims is to recruit state schools, and especially those in poor areas, we make no charge at all to schools or competitors, so we have to raise funds elsewhere. Given the way that the UK funds its education system, we cannot apply to central government so we have to rely on sponsors. Fortunately, this has not been a serious problem as we have found generous sponsors both in the academic world – three professional associations for linguistics and the British Academy – and among the schools. We have been greatly encouraged by the level of generosity and enthusiasm shown by these bodies.

To summarise, then, UKLO’s olympiad builds on the UK’s peculiarities – its very competitive fee-paying schools, its relatively small size (which allows a residential weekend for all competitors), and the enthusiasm and generosity of both schools and academics. However, we have not mentioned one other important fact: that our language is English. This fact has proved crucial for solving one of the biggest challenges of the LO, which is providing suitably testing problems. We return to this issue in the next section.

3. History and geography

As we emphasised in the previous section, the UK LO is a relatively new addition to an international movement which provided the ideas and infrastructure on which we have built. In fact, we are approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the movement since the first LO was organised in 1965 in Moscow by a small group of academic linguists and mathematicians who saw how linguistic data provided patterns which were comparable in complexity and subtlety to those which were already used in the Mathematics Olympiad. This project clearly suited at least some of the local schools because it rapidly became established before generating a similar competition based in St Petersburg and then spreading to Bulgaria and a number of other countries in Eastern Europe. In Western Europe, only the Netherlands adopted the idea; and although an olympiad was introduced in 1998 in Oregon (USA), it stopped after a few years and the US LO was only launched in 2007.

By the early 2000s there were enough national LOs to allow an international competition, so the first International Linguistics Olympiad (usually abbreviated, surprisingly, to IOL) was held in 2003. It was held in Bulgaria, and attracted teams from six countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Netherlands, and Russia. Since then the IOL has expanded both numerically and geographically, so when the 2011 competition was held in the USA there were competitors from 19 countries. The UK is looking forward to hosting the 2013 LO in Manchester.

The international history of the LO movement reveals considerable variation from country to country. As far as aims are concerned, the main variation is in the balance between language and mathematics. In some countries, linguistics is closely related to mathematics, and it is worth remembering that the first LO in 1965 was guided by a distinguished mathematician. This mathematical component often surfaces as a concern for computational analyses such as the ordering of rules, and a general orientation towards the formal skills that encourage the IT world to offer sponsorship. In these countries the competition’s name may include the word computational, as in the USA’s title North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad. In other countries, including the UK, the emphasis is much more strongly on language structure, so we always choose problems that illustrate some general structural characteristic of language rather than more abstract formal patterning. This choice is driven by our general aim, which is to encourage interest in language and its structure. It may be relevant that none of our sponsors are computer firms.

One international development which has proved particularly important for the UK has been ELCLO, the English Language Computational Linguistics Olympiad, which is based in the USA and organised by an American academic (with a background in Bulgaria), Dragomir Radev. This is a consortium of LOs in English-speaking countries who share problems with each other. As of 2012, the countries concerned are the USA, Canada, Australia, Ireland and the UK. Although we in the UK contribute some problems, most of the problems that we use were created by other members of ELCLO, which makes an enormous difference to our national competition. Without ELCLO, it would probably have been impossible to start a competition at all, let alone to provide the high level of stimulation and challenge that we think we offer.

4. Benefits for schools

Before focussing on linguistics, it may be worth considering why UK schools do olympiads, or any sort of academic competitions, at all. In most subjects, school students are not short of opportunities to test out their abilities through the public examination system. In fact, it is often said that school students in the UK are over-tested; public examinations, plus the league tables and value-added measures that go with them, are seen to dominate the last 4 or 5 years of secondary schooling, and some would take the view that domination by examinations is at the expense of real education. So why take on more examinations in the form of olympiads and the like?

The answer has to be that academic competitions can provide different challenges from public examinations -- different in that they are not so bound up with carefully specified syllabuses, and different in that they can be more testing. Three decades of rising grades in the UK means that the public examinations in most subjects simply do not stretch the most able. Academic competitions at a national level can provide this stretch; and at an international level they allow the very brightest school students to measure themselves against their peers from around the world.

In linguistics, of course, part of this reasoning does not hold: linguistics is not a school subject, though it appears, minimally, within some English Language specifications. Furthermore, in the UK there is little formal teaching about language and most UK school students know very few linguistics concepts or terminology such as ‘relative clause’ or ‘finite’; even basic notions such as ‘syllable’ and ‘preposition’ may be unfamiliar. So though the UK LO does provide a challenge for the most able, it is doing much more than that: it is providing a framework, a rationale, a reward for beginning to engage with linguistics as a discipline. Moreover, the structure that the UK LO has evolved (in a very short time) gives scope for the young and completely inexperienced in the Foundation paper, allows progress in the Intermediate level, and makes demands on the most able in the Higher level and then in Round 2.

Though there is no linguistics tradition in UK schools, the success of the UK LO derives in large measure from the enthusiasm of teachers. There are clearly many teachers who see languages generally as exciting, and the study of language as an inherently interesting phenomenon. In particular there are many modern foreign language teachers whose interests go beyond the particular language(s) they teach -- and who manage to convey this to their students. Among the many positive comments received by UKLO, words used most frequently are ‘fun’ and ‘enjoyment’. Perhaps it is the very fact that linguistics olympiad problems are so very different from what students ordinarily experience in school that makes them so appealing.

These benefits to schools are evident from the feedback that UKLO gets. More speculative are the following thoughts.

● Linguistics, as the scientific study of language, may cross the gender divide, encouraging boys to take more interest in languages and girls to take more interest in science.

● Some familiarity with linguistics, even at an elementary level, may help with recruitment of students to study languages. (The UK has a long-standing problem in this area.)

● Knowing some linguistics may enhance students’ learning of particular languages.

● Some knowledge of linguistics may contribute to students’ appreciation of social and cultural diversity.

These and other issues are being investigated during 2012 in a small project funded by the British Academy and the report will eventually be made available on the UKLO website.

5. Benefits for linguistics

Why should academic linguists support the LO movement? Indeed, why do so many UK linguists already support UKLO so generously and enthusiastically? We can identify two main reasons for this enthusiasm, one more important than the other, which we illustrate in relation to UKLO, though analogous arguments probably apply in other countries.

The less important reason is that the LO provides an excellent opportunity for recruiting students of linguistics. What children do in an LO is pure linguistics, exactly the kind of activity that many linguists build into their first-year teaching; so a 12-year old who struggles with the problems that we presented in section 1 not only knows that linguistics exists, but even knows quite accurately what ‘doing linguistics’ is like. Moreover, if that 12-year old comes back for more the following year (as many do), then the understanding of linguistics will deepen to the point where linguistics will eventually be included in the list of subjects that that pupil will consider studying at university. At present, Linguistics is rather a small subject in UK universities; for instance, in 2011 Linguistics graduates numbered only 980 (Ian Cushing, personal communication), so even at their present level, without the increases that we expect, the UKLO figures could make a significant difference to applications for degrees in linguistics.

More important, however, is the bridge building that UKLO allows. Historically, linguistics has been a strictly academic, university-based, subject, with virtually no presence at school level and only a very uncertain presence outside the world of education. Universities (and their government funders) are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this kind of isolation, and promote ‘outreach’ activities to bridge the gap. UKLO is a perfect example of outreach by academics to schools. Not only did the initiative come from academic linguists, but the activity on offer requires the expertise that academics have; and not only do schools enjoy the service being offered, but (as explained in the previous section) it could help them to achieve goals that are important for them.

The bridge that UKLO builds is fundamentally important for both linguistics and schools. It reminds both sides that education urgently needs linguistics: our ideas (such as descriptivism and variation), our models (such as the IPA) and our descriptions (such as the grammar or phonological structure of English) (Hudson 2004). But if schools are potential ‘consumers’ of our research, this is important not only for them but also for the linguistics departments that could provide the research, because at present very few orientate any of their research towards schools. There are vast areas of research that are almost virgin territory, ranging from the development of language during the school years to the effects of accent variation on phonics-based teaching of basic literacy. Having potential consumers for research is important not only for personal satisfaction but also in the search for research funding and in the measurement of ‘impact’.

A bridge between linguistics and schools could have even more profound consequences. In linguistics it could mean that undergraduates know a great deal more about language, about languages and even about linguistics than they do at present. And in schools, a successful LO movement would raise a fundamental question: If linguistics is so popular with both teachers and students, how come it isn’t on the curriculum? The Olympiad will have established the academic credentials of linguistics as a subject with relevance, educational benefits and student appeal. So why not teach it in school? The main objection will clearly be the shortage of teachers with a background in linguistics, so now is the time for more linguistics graduates to train as school teachers. But even if it starts from small beginnings, it is easy to imagine a bright future for school-level linguistics.

References

Hudson, Richard. 2004. "Why education needs linguistics (and vice versa)". Journal of Linguistics 40: 105-130.

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