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1st of 2 AL Language conferences for academic yr 19/20 is fixed for Oct. We've added an extra conference, with different line-up in Feb due to demand! Details for the Oct conference are up now but booking opens in Sept. An INCREDIBLE line-up of speakers! https://t.co/qTthSROiW0 pic.twitter.com/tSIOPU0Ezm — English & Media Ctr (@EngMediaCentre) July 22, 2019

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...

Welcome back to all of you picking up your A level English Language studies from last year and hello to all new students of the best A level course*. There will be a few new posts this term about different areas of the course and lots of stuff on the @EngLangBlog Twitter account , but this post is about a project that linguists at Lancaster University need your help with. Researchers there are currently putting together a 100-million word corpus of written language. A corpus is basically a well-organised database of language that then provides a body of material to be explored and analysed in different ways later on. Because the ways we write and the devices we use to write on and with have changed over time, linguists need examples of electronic language from actual, real-life users of it to build up a better picture of what's happening. Which is where you come in. Extracts of emails, online conversations, WhatsApp messages and the like are all needed, so if you can help feed data...

As I'm currently holed up in my marking bunker with only a red pen, a bag of Monster Munch and a 2L bottle of Diet Coke, I've not got time for a full blog post on the NEA Language Investigation, but here's a thread on Twitter where teachers talk about some of their favourite and most interesting NEA projects of recent years. See what you think. Thanks to everyone for the excellent ideas in this thread. This would be a brilliant starting point for anyone thinking about #EngLang NEA investigations this year. https://t.co/ZMhm7ace1k — EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog) July 6, 2018

If you're thinking ahead to Paper 2 at the end of the week and wondering about potential case studies to use for the language change question or even for debates about language for Section B, gammon might be a good place to look. It's one of those words that's been around for a while with one main meaning (a kind of smoked ham) but it's recently developed a newer and more controversial meaning that's been used online and debated in various newspapers by some of the most high profile columnists and sharpest minds of our generation (and Brendan O'Neill from the appalling Spiked Online). It's a neat example of semantic change, polysemy and debates about the potential of language to cause offence. It also ties in quite nicely with the sample paper on 'literally' and attitudes to language change. 'Gammon' has meant other things too and you can find definitions that relate to the police (presumably a link to the pejorative slang terms 'pigs...

Paper 1 of the A level isn't that far away so here are a few suggestions about approaching the first 3 questions. I've posted in more detail about these in previous blogs which you can find here , here  and here but here are some quick pointers: It's all about meaning. Texts mean things and are made to mean by the people who produce them and the people who receive them. Think about what each text is actually about before you put pen to pen to paper. What are you being presented with? What's happened? Who is involved? What perspectives are being offered? Meanings depend on contexts. You need to think about how meanings are being created in the texts in front of you. Look closely at how language is being used in particular places in the texts and how that relies on context. Is it the context of text being spoken, online or written? Is it the context of what has gone before in the text? Is it the context of who is saying or writing something? Texts can be from all sort...

You've still got over 2 weeks before you sit Paper 2 so there's still time to do some reading. In the last post I mentioned how it's important to read plenty of articles about language, but there's even time to read around the subject (or listen if that's what you prefer). I posted these suggestions earlier in the year, but there's still time to dip in and out and these are all accessible for students if you've got a bit of time and patience. My top tips are: Deborah Cameron,  The Myth of Mars and Venus  - a brilliant, dry take on how women and men use language and the myths around it. Henry Hitchings,  The Language Wars  - a readable and comprehensive overview of some of the ways in which English has been debated about and argued over ever since it came to be. Jean Aitchison,  Language Change: Progress or Decay?  - excellent for how language changes and what people think about it. Essential reading for Paper 2. Annabelle Mooney and Betsy Evans,  Langu...

As you'll no doubt have studied on this course, descriptivists  describe  language while prescriptivists  prescribe , telling us what we should (or shouldn't) be doing with language. After (nearly) two years of language study, you'll probably have got the general idea that we (your teachers) would prefer you to be descriptive rather than prescriptive about language. That's not (necessarily) because we want you in some kind of liberal-leftie lockstep in which anything goes, but because if you're studying language you really need to be able to do better than just say "I don't like X and that's why you shouldn't use it" (where X is vocal fry, 'Americanisms', rising intonation, 'like', (non-literal) 'literally' or 'bae'... Ok scrub that, no one should say 'bae'). Overall, what I think we want you to avoid is knee-jerk prescriptivism. And that doesn't mean you can't challenge language change and/or l...

If you ask a linguist to describe a form of language, they'll probably focus on its features, its functions, its background and history. Ask a non-linguist and they'll probably describe it using evaluative terms such as ugly, broken, lazy or even beautiful (sometimes), or they'll reach for metaphor: language is an amazing tool; language is a beautiful building that needs to be protected; British English has to be defended against an invasion of awful Americanisms; urban slang is polluting our once proud language etc. These metaphors are interesting because they often encode a way of seeing the world - and usefully for you, sitting the exam - a way of conceptualising language that you can analyse and discuss. What's important about these metaphors is that they will often seem quite appealing - or even perfectly natural - as an idea and you might even read them and think that it's quite neat way to describe language, but if you dig a bit deeper, you can often see that...