The UK Linguistics Olympiad LAGB AGM, September 2016

UKLO and the LAGB £ £ £ £ £ Budget: UK = £7.5K USA = $50K LAGB BAAL PhilSoc EC CLiE Br. Ac. £ £ £ £ UKLO ISMLA £

UKLO – what is it? UK Linguistics Olympiad since 2010 Based on the Moscow Linguistics Olympiad since 1955 Part of the International Linguistics Olympiad movement IOL since 2003 Part of the English Language Computational Linguistics Olympiad a consortium for creating problems USA, Canada, Australia, Ireland, UK, New Zealand

A typical UKLO problem: Nhanda syntax

UKLO successes Nearly 3,000 enthusiastic school-children some linguistics clubs Over 500 enthusiastic teachers 6 gold medals in three years about 50 volunteer markers (LAGB) and several ‘markathons’

But we’re worried Non-participation: Most of the 500 teachers don’t enter any competitors State schools: especially in state schools Solution: more support for teachers: classroom material based on UKLO problems workshops for teachers UK teams: Other major players in the International Olympiad send two teams (of four) to every competition but we can only afford this if flights are cheap. Solution: money from independent schools

What classroom material? Starters: five-minute warm-up exercises e.g. from paradigm to word-form e.g. from forms to rule need not be relevant to English or FL Longer puzzles e.g. case in Old English relevant to German And it all needs to be accessible in a good database.

How to produce it? Ask volunteers Crowd-sourcing our committee team produce a lot of problems for ELCLO but we need far more problems than they can produce Crowd-sourcing promising, but untried we need clear models to start with Commission work for payment but we need a team of commissioners and judges and we need money for commissioning

So what we need is: money: volunteers: to commission classroom material to commission a database volunteers: to manage the material and the database to give 1-2 hours per week to take responsibility for the project to run workshops for local teachers

The vision Final thought In the 1920s, English was a small subject with low status. If they could do it, we can too. A nation that knows about linguistics has had a taste of doing linguistics is interested in language structure is interested in foreign languages Schools that recognise linguistics as the Maths of language-based subjects e.g. at A-level apply linguistics in teaching UKLO is the best opportunity for 50 years