FACULTY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE June 2012

GENRES IN ENGLISH ΚΕΙΜΕΝΙΚΑ ΕΙΔΗ

INSTRUCTIONS

You have 3 hours to complete all three parts of this exam. On your answer sheets you need to write your Name (in
Greek), ID number, Core session instructor’s name, and Number of submitted assignments (if any).
Sections: A-E (A. TZANNE), Z-Λ (Ε. IFANTIDOU), M-Πα (A. TZANNE), Πε-Ω (B. MITSIKOPOULOU)

PART A: READING (30 points)

Read the text below and complete the tasks that follow

(1) Postgraduate research students are increasingly being used as ‘slave labour’ to cut teaching costs at
universities across the UK, a London conference heard yesterday. They warned teaching conditions were
getting dramatically worse as academic cuts bite and universities are under mounting pressure to cut costs.

(2) PhD students – occupying the precarious first rung on the academic career ladder – are the most
vulnerable group amongst teaching staff, working on short-term contracts and increasingly pressured into
working for free. Ever more aspiring academics are being used as cheap substitutes for more experienced but
expensive senior lecturers. Academics warned that undergraduate students being asked to pay a total of £27,000
in tuition fees for their degrees are becoming more vociferous about being taught by junior academic staff. In
one incident a heated dispute arose between students and PhD teaching staff over the marking of essays.

(3) Another PhD student recounted how he was required to supervise 13 undergraduate dissertations
involving hours of daily unpaid work. And as a result of dwindling student numbers and funding cuts, a number
of former polytechnics have already announced there will be no paid teaching places for PhD students at all in
the coming year.

(4) The claims were made as young academics from across the country gathered in London to launch a
campaign aimed at improving working conditions for PhD students teaching at British universities.

(5) Jenny Thatcher, a 27-year-old PhD student in Migration Studies teaching at the University of East
London, where PhD students are hired as hourly paid lecturers, said: “We have become main face of academia,
but we don’t get any office space, decent pay or job security. And if you consider that undergraduate students
are now paying 27,000 for their degrees, that is a cause for great concern, as we are unable to provide proper
support.” “The situation also benefits those research students privileged enough to be able to work for free, and
it disadvantages women, as many women tend to work part time because of domestic responsibilities and are
often not in a position to work for free.”

(6) Kerem Nisancioglu, 28, a postgraduate research student at the University of Sussex, said: “Generally,
we are given short-term contracts, are paid at hourly rates that are in no way commensurate with the actual
workload, nor are they equivalent to the same work carried out by faculty. It feels like our work is not being
valued.”

(7) Robin Burrett, of the National Union of Students and a PhD student at the London School of
Economics, told the conference called to launch a campaign to improve working conditions for postgrad
teaching staff, that: “PhD students engaged in teaching work are in a vulnerable position, as the institution they
work for is the same institution that will give them a mark at the end of their studies. “Universities faced with
funding cuts are increasingly in competition with other universities, departments with departments and
individual academics with other academics, and PhD students are bearing the brunt of the need to cut costs.”

TASK 1 (8 points)
In no more than 8 words, provide a headline for this news report.

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TASK 2 (6 points)
Insert the following paragraph into the above news report by indicating the number of the paragraph
after which you are going to place it. Justify your decision by briefly (in 50 words) explaining how the
inserted paragraph and the one before it form a cohesive and coherent text.

The conference called for the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) and the National Union of Students
(NUS) to launch an inquiry into the conditions PhD students face. Recent research carried out by UCU
estimated that over 77,000 academic teaching staff are presently working on hourly paid contracts.

TASK 3 (4 points)
Identify the words / phrases in the text which mean

(a) be painful (paragraphs 1-4)

(b) rising(paragraphs 1-4)
(c) unstable (paragraphs 1-4)
(d) a rod or bar forming a step of a ladder (paragraphs 1-4)
(e) clamorous, marked by noisy and vehement outcry (paragraphs 1-4)
(f) gradually decreasing until little remains (paragraphs 3-7)
(g) proportionate (paragraphs 3-7)
(h) the main force or shock of a blow, attack (paragraphs 3-7)

TASK 4 (12 points)

In about 80 words, outline the reasons why the quality and standards of undergraduate studies in UK are
falling. Collect your information from various paragraphs and paraphrase.

PART B: LANGUAGE AWARENESS (30 points)

Read the two editorials below which discuss opportunities for social mobility in UK and decide whether the
author adopts a positive or a negative stance towards such opportunities. In no more that 100 words per article,
justify your answers by drawing on the linguistic and pragmatic devices employed in each text. For your analysis
you should focus on 4 (2 for each editorial) of the following linguistic and pragmatic areas of concern:

1. Naming devices
2. Lexical cohesion / Semantic field
3. Theme
4. Modifiers and descriptions assigning specific attributes or qualities
5. Transitivity and Agency: actional processes (transactives – non-transactives), relational
processes
6. Modality
7. Presuppositions and implicatures
8. Metaphors, background knowledge and intertextuality
9. Structure (information forefronted in opening/closing parts vs. backgrounded elsewhere)

TEXT A
The Guardian, Wednesday 30 May 2012

For all today’s talk of social mobility, David Cameron has ducked every chance to make the social ladder
easier to climb.

It is a phrase that sounds like it would not resonate anywhere outside a sociology department, and it is seldom
heard down the Dog and Duck. But over the last decade "social mobility" has steadily become an
indispensable part of the lexicon for politicians of every stripe.

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Interest was triggered when research found that fewer Gen Xers* than baby boomers* had advanced on their
parents’ position. That was about the 1970s and 80s. But somehow it tapped a nerve of anxiety about whether
all New Labour’s social schemes were really extending the ladder of opportunity. The answer is still that it is
too early to tell, but that has not stopped demands for more mobility becoming the British political equivalent
of the American dream.
Two years on from an election where Messrs Brown, Clegg and Cameron all banged the same drum, it is time
to ask whether it was all empty noise. In David Cameron’s case, this harsh verdict cannot be avoided. He
started out at the top of the tree, is comfortable there, and shows no imaginative grasp of the connection
between what comes up and what goes down in class terms. In an expanding economy (and wouldn’t that be
nice?) there need not be a social setback for every social advance, but equal opportunities will not be had
while the elite retains a stranglehold on top jobs that the PM has no interest in breaking.
*Generation X is the generation following the post–World War II baby boomers, especially people born in the United
States and Canada from the early 1960s to the late 1970s.

TEXT B
The Telegraph, Saturday 2 June 2012

Now Ed Miliband* has weighed into the discussion about social mobility. It is always a pleasure to hear
what someone who was brought up in Hampstead and babysat by professors thinks about “the assumptions
behind social mobility”. According to Miliband, in a speech he gave yesterday, there is too much focus on
creating the conditions to allow smart, ambitious working-class people to get ahead, and not enough focus on
ensuring that inequality is not “handed down generation to generation, like the colour of our hair”. It
sounds radical, but in truth Miliband is implicitly demonising, or at least problematising, the exercise of
individual initiative to move on in life, since this leaves untouched the structural underpinnings of inequality.
He is, in effect, playing off “grasping” members of the working classes against less fortunate members of the
working classes, as if the social mobility of the former is somehow responsible for the social predicament of
the latter.

* Samuel Miliband is a British Labour Party politician, currently the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition.
Born in London in 1969, Miliband graduated from Corpus Christi College, Oxford and the London School of Economics.

PART C: WRITING (30 points)

TASK 1
Based on research reported in extracts from the academic article below
1. write an article for the Parents Magazine (not exceeding 200 words) informing the public
on the impact of IB schooling on students’ class consciousness. To do so, SELECT and
PARAPHRASE what you consider as worth-communicating information to a general-
purpose readership,
2. provide a title for your magazine article.

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Tristan Bunnell,

Volume 31, Issue 3, 2010. The International Baccalaureate and a framework for class
consciousness: the potential outcomes of a ‘class-for-itself’

Introduction
The educational field of ‘international education’ involves a multitude of areas. The one labelled ‘international
schooling’ involves a fundamental dichotomy of approach (Cambridge & Thompson, 2004); pragmatically

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educating the globally mobile child and the emerging middle-class in a national setting, and ideologically
educating the ‘global citizen’. At the core of this activity stands the bewilderingly diverse body of ‘international
schools’, numbering (in March 2010) 5600 in 236 countries, serving 2.6 million children. It is expected that there
will be 15,000 such schools by 2020.
The ideological role has been asserted more recently. Ellwood (2006) says there is ‘a growing realization that our
international schools do have the potential to affect change’, whilst Dunne (2008) argues that it is time to
reconsider ‘international schools’, viewing them more as ‘agents of social change’. This paper explores the
concept of class consciousness within the context of a particular variant of ‘international schools’: the ‘IB World
School’. In the late 1960s, the International Baccalaureate (IB) examination system appeared, offering its 1962-
instigated Diploma Programme (the IBDP). The IBO celebrated its 40th anniversary as a Geneva-registered
organization in October 2008, and stands as the world's major curriculum for ‘students across frontiers’ (Thomas,
1988). In March 2010 there were 2800 ‘IB World Schools’, offering over 3000 programmes to 778,000 ‘IB
Learners’ in 138 countries.
One under-reported development has been the involvement of the IB with networks of ‘international schools’
offering a branded and replicated product. The IB is closely connected with the ‘Capitalist Plan In Education’ (D.
Hill, 2006), involving the commercialization and privatization of education (Hatcher, 2001). Dulwich College was
the pioneer (in Phuket, Thailand) in 1996 of a system of education involving the exportation of a replicated elite
English private schooling. Repton Dubai was authorized to offer the IBDP in March 2009, whilst Brighton
College now seems the most openly ambitious (Paton, 2009). Alongside this hyper-capitalist experiment (Rifkin,
2001), stand a number of private schooling networks. One of the most ambitious is the GEMS (Global Education
Management Systems) grouping, headed by the Dubai-based entrepreneur Sunny Varkey, who aims for 5000
schools worldwide by 2020 (Woodward, 2005).

Conclusions
It was reported in one journal (Public Finance, 8 December 2006, no by-line) that the principal of a college in
England believed the IB was like Esperanto, a ‘nice idea but completely irrelevant’. This view, somewhat
unjustified, completely misses one fundamental point. The IB is increasingly gaining access into elite schooling.
Fettes College, in Scotland, the alma mater of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, became an IB school
in June 2007. The Qatar Leadership Academy was authorized just three months earlier. Here lies a great
opportunity for the IB to realize its idealistic mission. Of course, here also lies a great opportunity for the global
elite; to network and forge allegiance using the prestige of the IB as a quality-assured global brand. In some
ways, this is what many consumers of an IB education pay for. This may not be social justice, but it seems
financial justice. At the same time, it makes the ‘idealistic agenda’ more feasible, hence the ideological
compromise. This relationship is problematic, as it involves a system of education with two complex ‘agendas’.
What is certainly clear is that class consciousness, and the awakening of a ‘class-for-itself’ in a global
educational context, needs further discussion and conceptualization, and this paper is offered as a starting point.

References
Cambridge, J. and Thompson, J. 2004. Internationalism and globalisation as contexts for international
education. Compare, 34(2): 161–175. [Taylor & Francis Online]
Dunne S. 2008 Host-national students at international schools: Identity, local connections and social
responsibility Unpublished MEd. thesis, Monash University, Victoria, Australia
Ellwood, C. 2006. From the Editor. International Schools Journal, XXVI(1): 5–6.
Hatcher, R. 2001. Getting down to the business: Schooling in the globalised economy. Education and
Social Justice, 3(2): 45–59.
Hill , D. 2006 23 . Class, capital and education in this neo-liberal/neo-conservative period Information for Social
Change Retrieved March 2, 2010, from http://libr.org/isc/issues/ISC23/B1%20Dave%20Hill.pdf
Paton G. 2009 March 18 Private school to open ‘replicas’ overseas The Daily Telegraph Retrieved
August 9, 2009, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/5011746/Private-
school-to-open-replicas-overseas.html
Rifkin, J. 2001. The age of access: The new culture of hypercapitalism, where all of life is a paid-for
experience, New York: Putnam.
Thomas, P. 1988. Students across frontiers. Journal of College Admissions, 121: 7–14.
Woodward W. 2005 December 13 Business class The Guardian Retrieved August 8, 2009, from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/dec/13/schools.newschools

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KEY to Final Exam June 2012
PART Α

TASK 1
Postgraduate students are being used as 'slave labour' (newspaper original title)

TASK 2

The paragraph should be inserted after paragraph (7).

The paragraph rounds off the news report by a recommendation for future action (The conference
called for the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) and the National Union of Students (NUS) to launch an
inquiry into the conditions PhD students face). It also sets the problem as a whole by making a point
about both PhD students and academic teaching staff. It does so by taking up on the previous
paragraph which raised the issue of PhD students and academics, since the two are seen in a cause-
effect relationship by the author.

TASK 3

(a) bite
(b) mounting
(c) precarious
(d) rung
(e) vociferous
(f) dwindling
(g) commensurate
(h) brunt

TASK 4
Students should elaborate on the following statement:

“We [PhD students] have become main face of academia, but we don’t get any office space, decent pay or job
security. And if you consider that undergraduate students are now paying 27,000 for their degrees, that is a
cause for great concern, as we are unable to provide proper support.”

by providing information extracted from paragraphs……...

PART C: WRITING (30 points)

1. Students should draw attention to worthwhile research findings, e.g. The IB is closely
connected with the ‘Capitalist Plan In Education’ (D. Hill, 2006), involving the commercialization
and privatization of education.
2. Students should make explicit reference to the researchers in their new magazine text.

3. They should paraphrase academic content in informal, popular magazine language.

4. They should provide a reader-friendly title – shorter than the academic, and more
appealing (humorous, witty, etc)

5. Overall, the new text should be short, and easy to understand.

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TASK 4

Reasons why the quality and standards of undergraduate studies in UK are falling. (80 words)

APPROX TIME: 30 minutes

1. Cutting teaching costs at universities in UK.

2. As a result, PhD students are used as a substitute for experienced senior
lecturers under poor (‘slave-labour’) working conditions.

3. PhD students are overwhelmed with work they cannot handle (e.g.
disagreement with students over essay marking).

4. The amount of workload (e.g. supervising 13 undergraduate dissertations),

short-term contracts, hourly-rate payment, and increasing pressure for unpaid
work, places PhD students at a vulnerable position.

5. As a result, the impression of their being less appreciated compared to faculty

members creates a feeling of resentment towards teaching, supervising
dissertations, or marking. (98 WORDS)

(examples: optional: 12 words)

PART B
Select one feature (linguistic or pragmatic) and explain how it supports the
overall attitude retrieved.

Examples
TEXT A
In the phrase “it tapped a nerve of anxiety about whether all New Labour’s social schemes
were really extending the ladder of opportunity.” epistemic modality in the form of a
conditional and the evidential “really”, as well as the explicit meaning encoded by “anxiety”
encode the author’s doubts as to the genuine intentions of politicians to implement
opportunities for social mobility in Britain.

The parallelism between ‘social mobility’ and the American dream in the extract “that has not
stopped demands for more mobility becoming the British political equivalent of the American
dream” conveys the implicature / implies that social mobility is a tool in the hands of
politicians who use it to lure voters into the prospect of climbing the ladder of social mobility.

TEXT B
The passive expressions “was brought up”, “was babysat” in “It is always a pleasure to hear
what someone who was brought up in Hampstead and babysat by professors thinks about “the
assumptions behind social mobility”.” trigger implicated premises along the lines of “Ed
Miliband is an elitist liberal”, “Ed Miliband has not experienced inequality”, “Ed Miliband is

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not truly concerned about the social mobility of the working class”, aimed at persuading
addressees of pretence in politics, and of the fact that “The fashionable hostility towards
social mobility is just another way of saying 'know your place'”.

In the last statement, the author implies that Ed Miliband considers working class members
who fight each other for the right to social mobility responsible for the lack of social
inequality, shadowing the upper-class’s own responsibilities by clinging onto their inherited
rights and privileges.

SAMPLE ANSWERS (final exam June 2012)

(7) 1
(a) Both editorials adopt a negative stance towards the opportunities for social mobility in
UK. The author of editorial 1 manipulates naming devices to declare his opposition. For
instance, “David Cameron has ducked every chance …”. The author here assigns identity to
David Cameron, depriving however his political identity or title. … Moreover, the author
refers to … “Gen Xers” and “baby boomers” …, in an attempt of demeaning them.
Presuppositions are used in Editorial 1 … to declare the author’s negative stance. For
example, “it is a phrase that sounds like it would not resonate anywhere outside a sociology
department” presupposes that it only resonates to a sociology department and that social
mobility applies only in theory. (ST 14)

(b) The author adopts a positive stance towards opportunities for social mobility and criticizes
PM David Cameron for not taking adequate action. … Another metaphor where Cameron
bangs a drum and all he makes is “empty noise”, comes to criticize his fruitless efforts and
foreground his inertia. (ST 20)

(c) The metaphor of the “empty noise” which refers to the reassurance that Cameron had just
been fooling people, aims at the attribution of the traits of empty noise to Cameron. Such
traits are lies, wrong expectations, vagueness, disappointment, inadequacy, all leading to the
opposing stance of the author. (ST 43)

(a) … in terms of agency, in the beginning Miliband is pictured as a passive recipient

“who was brought up” and “babysat”, however, later on he is transformed into active agent,
who is “problematizing” upon matters against social opportunities. (ST 45)

(e) To enhance the positive attitude, the editorial contains implicatures like “is comfortable
there”, insinuating that people who are high in the social ladder never needed to struggle so as
to be there, as well as “(and wouldn’t that be nice?)”, where he indicates that there is no
expanding economy nor easy social advance. (ST 45)

(f) … the author uses the noun “pleasure” to describe Ed Miliband’s discussion as “It is
always a pleasure to hear what someone who was brought up in Hamstead … thinks …” .The
role of the noun is to express irony towards Miliband’s credibility since he is a rich man …
(ST 10)

(g) … background knowledge is necessary when the author compares the demand for social
mobility of the British to the American dream (“the British political equivalent of the
American dream”), as it is known that the American dream proved to be destructive, a phony
notion of hollow content. (ST 52)

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Student answers have been included as originally produced in the final exam of June 2012,
maintaining any language infelicities intact.

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 (h) … he employs implicit modality “It sounds radical”, which misleads the audience into
considering the opinions expressed as their own, … (ST 63)

(i) … he draws from the semantic field of music (‘banged’, “drum”, “noise”) questioning the
elected members and alluding to Messrs Brown, Clegg and Cameron’s aim to manipulate
common sense about offered equal opportunities … (ST 66)

(j) Using irony in “He started out at the top of the tree, is comfortable there…” the author
humiliates the politician David Cameron implying that he has not strived to get to the position
he is now so he has a lot of nerve talking about social scale problems. (ST 67)

(k) Instead he is referred to simply as “Miliband” or “he” thus undermining his social status
and trying to make him seem less significant and somewhat inferior. (ST 75)

(l) The use of lexical markers such as “playing off” or “grasping members against less
fortunate members” which trigger the semantic domain “game” denotes the author’s
perception of Miliband’s stance towards social mobility as playing games with people’s lives.
(ST 80)

PART C

Select 8-10 facts which merit the public’s attention.

1. International schooling can cater for the needs of a child wishing to climb the social ladder
at a national level, or shaping the ideology of a global citizen.
2. Demand is expected to increase by 2020.
3. The IB examination system, which first appeared in 1962, in particular, gave rise to a
great number of international schools: 2,800 school’s in 138 countries, offering 3,000
programmes to 778,000 IB learners.
4. It is a system of education replicating and exporting English private schooling.
5. It marks the “commercialization and privatization” of education, according to Hill, seen as
part of a capitalist plan in education.
6. Example of GEMS, headed by the Dubai-based enterpreneur Sunny Varkey, working nin
establishing 5000 schools worldwide by 2020.
7. Research specifically examined the role of class consciousness in IB school environments.
8. Conclusions show that IB schools promote class consciousness by having access to elite
schooling which is socially unjust, but financially feasible. (158 WORDS)

Popularize academic discourse by using features from your Popular Discourse list.

1. ___________
2. ___________
3. ___________
4. ___________
5. ___________
6. ___________
7. ___________
8. ___________
9. ___________
10. ___________

REMEMBER to paraphrase.

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