pupoture

One of the challenges of exams is that they not only test you on what you know but they also test you on how you interpret the question to show what you know. A case in point is last summer's AS Paper 2 in which lots of students (including many of my own, I'm sure) saw a question about gender and thought "Woo hoo! We've done this one already - it was on last year's Paper 2". Or words to that effect... Of course, a gender question was set on the 2016 paper, but with a very different focus. The problem with this is that - like all the other areas you do for Paper 2 in the AS and the A level - you have to select the most relevant knowledge to address the question that's been asked... not the question you'd have liked to be asked. And with Question 3 on Paper 2, the focus was very much supposed to be on representation of gender. That means that it's not really relevant* to talk about studies into language use and interaction. What's more, the qu...

As a follow-up to the last blog, a couple of other things that you can do as part of a longer term approach to success in A level English Language are covered below. Get used to different kinds of data If you're new to the course, you'll be surprised to find that parts of it are a bit more like Psychology and Sociology A level than you might have expected. Ok, we have the textual analysis that I talked about last week and the discussions around how people feel about language use, but you'll also need to get to grips with what linguists have researched and get used to the methodologies involved in language study. What does this mean in practice? Well, you might be given something like the data below in class and asked to interpret it. What would you do with it and what does it tell you? Have a think about what's being measured here: "H-dropping" is on the y-axis, a phonological process that many of us use when we leave the /h/ sound off words like house , half ...

The last two posts have been about starting A level English Language and what you can think about now to get going on the course and get a flavour for what's involved. This post takes a longer view and sets out some of the things you can start to do now to set you in good stead for the whole two years of the course, including the NEA and the two exam components. If you start doing some of these things now, your knowledge, skills and wider grasp of the subject will be much greater by the end. Start thinking (and reading) like a language student To do well on the course you will need to start thinking about language in a different way to how you've done in your studies so far. Marcello Giovanelli's article "Becoming an A Level Language Student - a Quick Guide" in emagazine 65, September 2014 gives you some really helpful pointers about this, as does the article by Billy Clark and Graeme Trousdale in emagazine 51, February 2011, "Looking for Clues - How to be a ...

In yesterday's post I mentioned that linguistic analysis is part of what you do on this course, but another aspect of language study is language itself: how people use it in different situations and for different reasons. Sociolinguistics is the name given to the study of language in relation to society and in many ways that's what a lot of this course is about too. Each individual uses language in a different way and as groups of people - whether it's groups based around things we do together (football, online gaming, dog obedience courses, charity work), around the place we live in or the social class we are born into - and we all use language to do different things. As part of your work on Paper 2, you will look at how to study these differences, but you'll also become increasingly aware of how there are many similarities too, not just in the actual language we use and are familiar with, but how we alter our language to suit particular situations (job interviews, cas...

If you are starting English Language A level this week, you might be wondering "What the hell is this subject and why am I doing it?". That's quite a normal reaction, to be honest, and is becoming more common as the GCSE (laughably known as "English Language") moves further and further away from what I would see as genuine language study towards something else...something (in the words of Donald Trump when describing Hurricane Irma) that "looks like it could be something that will be not good". So, what is A level English Language? Well, what it is is the best course you could possibly do for A level. It is varied, challenging and fascinating. But I'm biased, obvs. Over the next few blog posts, I'll show you a few aspects of what I think make it an interesting course and offer a taste of some of the work you can do on the course. First off, you'll be analysing things. You'll have done this before, but you'll be analysing all sorts o...