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Following on from the last post about how I'm approaching the topic of Language Change, here's a rough plan of the question I'm setting as a way to build up skills and knowledge for Paper 2 of the A level and a few ideas that one of my A level classes came up with this afternoon. We're heading towards an essay question "Evaluate the idea that language change is either a process of evolution or of decay" and we're trying to build a range of different case studies and examples along the way. As well as that, I'm trying to kill two birds with one stone by looking at some examples of older texts in preparation for Paper 1. What I'm hoping is that this allows us to do some close work on short texts, thinking about how they use language to convey ideas and represent their subject matter (all part of Paper 1's textual analysis focus) and then the same texts can be sources of examples and evidence for the bigger Paper 2 essay questions. One thing that...

We've made a start on Language Change as an A level topic at our college and been thinking about the different phases the language has been through. While 1600 is the cut-off point for texts on Paper 1, it's useful to look back further to see how the language started and the processes it went through to help with Paper 2 and a better overview of the whole topic. These links from the OED site are really good for explaining the main changes, while the British Library timeline is great for the bigger picture. The approach I'm taking at the moment is to look through the changes to lexis (word formation), semantics (meaning changes), grammar, phonology and orthography/graphology framework by framework, stopping to focus on a few more detailed discussions of things like semantic reclamation and political correctness along the way.

One of the new things in the A level, as opposed to the AS level, is the appearance of coursework. Except we're not supposed to call it 'coursework' any more and that's probably got something to do with political arguments about the validity of internally-assessed work in a high-stakes testing regime...but I'll save that discussion for another day and maybe some bright spark out there could do a language investigation into the semantic pejoration of the term 'coursework' in media discourses around education. But anyway, here's a thing I've put together for our returning AS students, now embarking on the 2nd year of the A level course. It's not a complete explanation of what's involved in the Non-Exam Assessment (NEA) but sets a few starting points and offers some ideas for what you can do before you really get started. We're not officially starting our NEA work until nearer Christmas (and just to mention Christmas seems obscene at this ti...

Welcome back to English Language A level if you are moving into the second year of your course and hello to new AS/A level students and teachers. This year, I'm going to try to focus primarily on the material that's new for the AQA A level, so the areas of Language Change, Child Language Acquisition and Language Diversity, including World Englishes. There's already quite a lot of material on here from the old specifications, but I'll set up some new posts linking to the most useful material and then some suggestions for new idea and activities. As ever, I'm keen to expand the pool of writers for the blog and you will have seen some contributions from a few different writers over the last year (thanks again to them) so if you are interested, contact me via the @EngLangBlog Twitter account.