1. The UK Linguistics Olympiad
LAGB AGM, September 2016

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

3. 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

4. A typical UKLO problem: Nhanda syntax

5. 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’

6. 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

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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