[Grade: A+] HG2020 Language in Society Review
- christabel teo
- Dec 30, 2025
- 4 min read
Module Review: HG2020 Language in Society
Nanyang Technological University (NTU)
What is HG2020 Language in Society About?
As its name suggests, HG2020 looks at how language is used in everyday life and how it reflects social identities, power, and culture. This mod helps students understand why people speak differently in different contexts and how language shapes social relationships. Emphasis is placed on cross-cultural comparison and critical reflection on language use in Singapore.
Assessment Breakdown
Component | Weightage |
Class Participation | 15% |
Quiz 1 | 20% |
Quiz 2 | 25% |
Individual essay | 20% |
Vlog (Group Assignment) | 20% |
My Experience
The concepts in this module are quite easy to pick up, especially if you’re naturally curious about how people talk in different situations. We covered things like style and styling, Communication Accommodation Theory, speaker vs. audience design, and linguistic prestige – all of which felt very intuitive and relevant to everyday life.
Tutorials with TA Nicole were very chill and mostly discussion-based, so there were lots of chances to speak up and get them class part marks! We sat in groups and she would usually call on each group to share a designated part of the tutorial activity with the class. Lectures (by Prof. Luke Lu) include quite a few videos, which makes them more engaging, but do note that the lecture slides alone aren’t enough (concepts are mostly one liners), so you’ll still need to read the textbook to fully understand the material.
If you're a non-LMS major, I would still recommend this as a BDE as it's easy to study for (concepts aren't rocket science) and workload is very manageable.
Study Tips
Quiz 1 was an MCQ with 30 questions and was generally manageable, although I'd honestly say I had a bit of luck here because I was quite stumped by some of the example-based questions. For instance, there was an example shown in lecture about Superdry T-shirts and we were asked to identify which sociolinguistic concept it reflected, and while I didn’t specifically study examples in detail, I managed to guess correctly. Because of this, I’d strongly recommend knowing the lecture/textbook examples well and not just the definitions. I scored 28/30 for this quiz.
Next came the mid-term Quiz 2 which was also MCQ but slightly more challenging, mainly because the questions focused much more on concepts and definitions rather than examples. Even then, the questions were not very straightforward and required some thinking instead of pure memorisation. Make sure you read the textbook to fully understand the concepts! I scored 25/30 for this quiz.
For the individual essay (1000 words), we could choose from these questions:
I chose question 1 and wrote about using SSE even when being spoken to in SCE, or Singlish. You may read my essay here:
I got an A for this essay, although based on what my friends told me, quite a lot of people also got As, so take that with a pinch of salt since my sample size is small.
Do keep to the stipulated word count, because although my TA mentioned in class that +/- 10 percent was acceptable, that apparently did not quite hold in practice💔
Next was the vlog group assignment. We were allowed to choose our own groupmates, with six people in my group including myself.
During the Week 10 tutorial, we had to decide on a sociolinguistic concept and submit an outline of our video for the professor’s feedback before starting on the actual filming, and my group decided to focus on language change with the title “How TikTok Changes Language Use”.
Now, I knew it was going to be challenging working with so many people in the group. Hence, I created a table to break down the different roles needed and asked everyone to indicate what they preferred to take on. We did this together in class, which really helped to play to everyone’s strengths and made responsibilities very clear from the start.
For myself, I was in charge of doing the storyboard and video editing. (Watch the process here!) What I did was combine our script with the filming sequence so we knew exactly what to shoot and in what order. Really gotta thank my Mass Communication roots in polytechnic for this hahaha.
Editing the final vlog took VERY, VERY long as some parts had to be done on Canva, and some on CapCut (and my laptop is a Macbook Air too... cries). Thank goodness it was the very last assignment of the semester so I had a weekend to work on this.
We got an A for this assignment! Hard work pays off!!! We really busted our asses on the filming day trying to get interviewees and also it was like the Friday before we had 2 core mod tests the following Monday😵 Also, keep to the rubrics closely because my friend's group didn't include citations in their vlog and were penalised for that.
Final grade: A+
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