In case any linguabloggers are interested, here are some links that students in my classes are looking at just now:

Voices is a bbc project mapping the accents and dialects in the UK. It also has some good links and individual pages on things like isn't innit ungrammatical?

Students are looking at the Voices project to see to what extent it's scientific and how useful the data might be.

Then there's Philip Pullman's article giving his opinion on the research suggesting that teaching grammar doesn't help children to improve their writing. He expresses his view really strongly but it's all a very complicated debate and I'm sure it's not as clearcut as he thinks it is.

These are news stories mentioning the research he's talking about:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,1393672,00.html

http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,1393206,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4185507.stm

And this is a teacher, Andrew Cunningham, disagreeing:

http://education.independent.co.uk/schools/story.jsp?story=604889

One thing worth noticing is that Pullman refers to the research but Cunningham doesn't.

B-)