DP English A Language and Literature

To this day whenever I'm addressed by someone with crisp received pronunciation I still feel the instinctive need to tug my forelock and sink into a deep curtsy (opinion column)

As part of a Tonight programme investigating whether social stigma and snobbery still exist towards regional accents, an exclusive poll reveals that more than a quarter of Britons feel they have been discriminated against because of the way they speak.

On the fifth anniversary of Barack Obama's acceptance address, David Edgar explores what unites - and divides - the great American speeches of the last 150 years (Guardian)

If you want to help the white working class, try tackling your own prejudices about accents (Guardian opinion column)

Study guide for a theatre adaptation of The Bluest Eye gives lots of background and context. Good revision.

The Bluest Eye has often been labeled by critics as a bildungsroman, or a novel that chronicles the process by which characters enter the adult world.

Excerpt from James Finn Garner's updated version of the classic fairy tale.

Roald Dahl's version of the classic fairy tale.

Parody of a fairy tale.

More US universities are including offbeat essay topics on students' admissions applications to separate the highly creative from the highly ordinary.

Newley Purnell explores how ads for "charcoal" doughnuts and skin-whitening cream have sparked a heated debate about racism in Thailand (New Yorker)

Halloween costume checklist

Time-lapse video shows how photo-retouching software transforms a model's appearance

"Dark Girls" is a powerful documentary on the issue of the separation - between light-skinned and dark-skinned African-Americans.

9-minute trailer for the documentary Dark Girls. In it, African American women discuss their own experiences of bias toward dark-skinned women, both in pop culture broadly and from people in their own lives.

Video.

Catherine Gee considers whether Cheryl Cole was fired from the US X Factor because of her strong Geordie (Newcastle) accent. (The Telegraph)

Anzaldua, poet, feminist, and writer, writes in "How to Tame a wild Tongue" about her life as an Hispanic immigrant to the US, and how the new language and culture were "forced" upon her.

Last year, reports consistently found that teens were not very interested in Twitter but were unhealthily addicted to Facebook. Now that seems to be flipping. (NYT)