pupoture

With the clocks going forward, beautiful blossom blooming on the trees and summer rapidly approaching, it's time to cast happy thoughts from your mind and think about the looming exams in June. Sorry. There's still plenty of time to get revising (or just 'vising' if you haven't done some of the course content yet) but there are a few key things you can do now to make sure that what you are on the right lines for later on. We've already had a revision post from Olivia which focused on advice from her as a former student for students in the run-up to the exams, so this one takes a slightly different tack and thinks about the bigger picture and some suggested reading. Big ideas Think big, to begin with. Before you dive into the details of different topic areas and sections of exam papers, think about the big questions around English. How confident are you about them? Back in this blog post , I suggested that one of the ways to help understand the scope of areas su...

In this blog post, we've invited former A level English Language student, Olivia to give some advice to students about how she revised and what her top tips are for students doing the course. Thanks to Olivia for writing this and for all the great ideas here. Hi, I’m Olivia! Two years ago I sat the A Level English Language exams. I’m now at university and make and share English Language revision resources for ambitious students as @astarlevels on TES  and Twitter . With that in mind, in this post I’m sharing my revision tips for aiming high in A Level English Language. I’ve split it into four sections: learning theory, preparing for writing essays/ articles, tackling data and general revision tips. Learning theory               The first step in preparing for the exam is to get familiar with the AO2 you’ll need. Go through your notes from the past two years and fish out all the bits that look interesting or ...

When Dan asked what he should post about next on this blog, one of the most common responses was this, the World Englishes topic.   Maybe this is because it’s relatively new on the AQA spec, especially if you previously did Spec B; but actually many of the issues and debates involved should be familiar from other topics in language diversity or language and power.    I love teaching World Englishes because it’s the most summative of all the topics, so students can use all their knowledge of language diversity and change.   We teach it at the end of year 2 for this reason.   These are the questions that we cover: 1.     How did English become such a dominant language in the world? 2.     What are the different ways of grouping English-using countries around the world? 3.     What are some characteristics of different global varieties of English and of English as a lingua franca (ELF)? 4. ...

This is just a quick plug for the new AQA A Level English Language Workbook that was published by Oxford University Press before Christmas. We wrote it to give lots of texts and practice tasks to help with the A level and if you've been following this blog for a year or two, you might even recognise a few things that have been covered here in the past. Anyway, I hope it proves useful. Book Depository link Wordery link Amazon link

Following on from the last blog about AO2 on Paper 2, another aspect that I think it is important to address, for hitting Levels 4 and 5 in particular, but more generally in terms of an understanding of language across the board is that of the overlapping nature of the ‘topics’ on Paper 2. I use ‘topics’ in slightly wanky quote-marks because I think there’s often an issue around the word that I hadn’t really twigged until the new spec appeared. For some, ‘topics’ are just blocks of content, often optional ones from a wider list, so if you used to teach the old AQA B spec, you could choose from 3 topics on ENGB1: language and technology, language and power and/or language and gender. A few centres taught all three, most seemed to do two of the three and I think some might have just done one and crossed their fingers and hoped that it was a nice question. This is clearly very different with the new spec; the topic areas (if I can call them that without falling into the ‘topic’ trap) are ...

I’ve been at quite a few meetings recently where teachers have asked if the exam board can publish a list of the key theories and studies needed for each topic and that question has got me thinking about what students need to know to do well on the English Language A level, especially on AO2, which at 26% of the weighting of marks across the whole course, is equal highest with AO1 in terms of importance. And while most people are familiar with what AO1 involves – a grasp of linguistic terminology, methods of language analysis and coherent written expression (balanced out differently on different kinds of questions), AO2 isn’t always as clearly understood. The request for a list to cover is perfectly understandable: there is a lot to cover on the course (including some areas that are new to experienced English Language teachers), many teachers (still) come from a Literature background and the exam boards haven’t always been very clear on exactly what might come up, either in the specifi...