Love Island is, like, stunting children’s vocabulary
LOVE ISLAND is encouraging children to use the word “like” too much in conversations, teachers have warned.
One primary school, Copthorne Primary in Bradford, has drawn up a list of prohibited one-word answers to questions on a classroom wall.
Words such as “good” or “nice” have joined a “word jail” aiming to encourage pupils to improve their vocabulary when expressing their opinions.
However, “like” is censured most often. An example of such language featured on ITV’S Love Island last week, when contestant Amy Hart discussed dating.
She said: “Molly was like ‘oh he’s my type’ and I’m like ‘no, sorry, you’ve already got two’. It’s like three out of seven boys.”
A 2017 episode featured a conversation in which the word was used 76 times in five minutes. In a clip from last year, an exchange between two contestants featured the word 17 times in less than three minutes.
Christabel Shepherd, the school’s executive head teacher, told The Sunday Times: “They use the word all the time and we are trying to get rid of it. It is
‘They use the word all the time and we are trying to get rid of it ... they haven’t actually made a sentence’
when children are giving you an answer and they say ‘is it, like, when you’re, like ...’ and they haven’t actually made a sentence at all.”
Nick Gibb, an education minister, added: “Anything that helps children broaden their vocabulary is hugely important for their future.”
The move by teachers to ban “like” comes amid concern that private school pupils are given more opportunities to develop speaking skills.
They fear that this fluency helps explain their success in gaining elite university places and jobs in professions such as banking and law. Last month, an all-party parliamentary group on oracy education launched an inquiry into what schools are doing to help children express themselves.
Barnaby Lenon, former headmaster of Harrow, the public school, told the newspaper: “It makes you look stupid if you have this sort of verbal tic.”
He said the overuse of “like” was also a problem at Harrow.
Meanwhile, this year’s national curriculum tests assessed whether pupils can distinguish between informal and “standard English”.
Eleven-year-olds were asked to underline the most formal sentence in: “Hope you can make it to my birthday party next week! It’s going to be great! The venue is yet to be confirmed. I’m still checking out a couple of places.”
Many and grievous are the crimes laid at the door of the Love Island villa. The soufflélight summer confection of exiguous bikinis and inconclusive grapplings has been criticised for a lack of diversity and promoting an unrealistic body image. Now the censorious finger of linguistic probity is wagging at the contestants who can’t, like, hold a conversation without, like, punctuating every clause with “like”.
Someone has gone to the trouble of counting the “likes” in the islanders’ discourse, and the statistics are impressive. In 2017, gym instructor Gabby Allen apparently achieved a remarkable 36 “likes” in 90 seconds. The fact that Allen is now an author, her fitness book published last month by an imprint of Penguin Books, has failed to impress Christabel Shepherd, the executive head of Copthorne Primary school in Yorkshire, where “like” has been placed on an index of forbidden words.
Insipid qualifiers such as “nice” or “good” join “like” in “word gaols” on the Copthorne classroom walls, intended to promote a more vivid turn of phrase among the students. Oracy – or how to talk proper – is a hot political topic: last month the sonorously named Oracy All-party Parliamentary Group launched an inquiry into the provision of oracy education in state schools.
A dispassionate observer of the current state of oracy in British society might arrive at some curious conclusions – among them, that only people with a glib command of Received Pronunciation can aspire to lead a political party. A fearless mastery of spoken English is a magnificently empowering skill, and it is right that our children should be taught it. But I worry about those word gaols. A vast and flexible range of register is one of the glories of the English language. Of course, the monotonous repetition of a
phatic interjection (“like”, “innit”) can sound arid (though no more so than the maddening political tics of “let me be clear”, “fit for purpose” or “strong and stable”). But a demotic vocabulary doesn’t have to be impoverished. The academic Dr Katie Edwards, of Sheffield University, recently presented an episode on Yorkshire dialect for Radio 4’s Tongue and Talk series. Her own Yorkshire dialect was often corrected by her teachers, but having retained it “gives me a strong sense of connection to the people and places I love”.
Rather than putting words in prison, we should turn them loose to fertilise the linguistic landscape. Pied, peng, graft, chived, absolute sort – who could deny the pungent contribution of Love Island to our national conversation?
Every few weeks, a cruise ship moors in the Thames outside our window. The passengers seem to lead extraordinarily regulated lives and the general impression is of a luxurious prison hulk. These days, a majority of cruise passengers are apparently not elderly, but millennials in search of an “authentic” travel experience with ever-changing, Instagrammable vistas.
Yet still the tension grows between tourists avid for authenticity, and the inhabitants of the places in which they seek it. The Mayor of Bruges has recently echoed the concerns of Venetians over monstrous cruise ships, saying that he doesn’t want Bruges to become a Disneyland. And it is undeniably disturbing to realise that your home is just a bit of local colour for tourists on a ruthless quest for a “real” experience. read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion