pupoture

Revision of Paper 1 skills and approaches has been on our agenda recently, so here are a few things that we've been looking at. Given the limited amount of time to read two substantial new texts and write three answers, I think we probably have to be quite disciplined about time on this paper, so it pays to read for meaning effectively and plan cleverly. For our students, I've been suggesting an approach to planning answers that allows for getting an overview of each text to help with the meanings and representations in Questions 1 and 2 and which also starts to focus on the compare and contrast requirements of Question 3. Underpinning it all is a focus on finding examples of language and describing them accurately. Here's an outline of what I've given our students to work with. I've been quite pleased with the results this week, so let me know if it works for you. In the short time you have in the exam, you need to make sure every minute counts. Your note-taking ...

In the textual analysis post yesterday I focused on how to analyse language to look at meanings and representations. In this post, I'll take a look at the ways in which you can explore how different opinions and views are put forward in texts and how you can start to do good AO1 and AO3 work on different kinds of texts. Again, this focuses primarily on Questions 1 and 2, where you are encouraged to look closely at how language creates meanings and representations. On one level, as I said in yesterday's post, this means getting a sense of how the overall subject of each text is being represented. If the topic of the text is the natural environment, how is this topic being represented? Here is an example taken from a Wildlife Trust leaflet: Here, you might make the point that the environment is being represented as under threat. How is this achieved? Through a series of different language choices, all contributing their own meanings to an overall representation. For example: the ...

Paper 1 of the new AQA AS and A level focuses on ideas about how language creates meanings and representations, so I thought it might be useful to look at what could be meant by these terms and what the difference might be. I suppose the first point to make is that the focus of the first two questions is now very much on how language is used (AO1) to create meanings and represent the topic (AO3), rather than on the types of texts they are (which now comes under the remit of Question 3 and the new AO4). AO1 and AO3 are quite distinct on the new specification, so you can pick up AO1 marks for labelling  and exemplifying word classes, sentence functions and higher level grammar features such as the passive voice, progressive aspect verbs and clause types, but to get AO3 marks you need to explain what these language features do. For example, you could get yourself a Level 5 mark (9 or 10 AO1 marks) by identifying (correctly!) something like the following range of language features: nou...

With the new term starting and new A and AS levels being taught for the first time, I thought it might be handy to think of ways to get classes starting to think about the kinds of things they'll be doing as the course goes on. I'm sure lots of teachers already have plenty of starters and ice-breakers up their sleeves, but it might be worth thinking about tasks that link to some of the newer areas of the specification. For example, for the first time in ages, we'll be teaching accent, dialect and sociolect to AS/1st year A level students, so why not look at a couple of things connected to that? Here are two ideas based on Language Diversity and another on Textual Variation . Language fingerprints : ask each student to think about what characteristics make up their own unique language identity.  Where were they born?  Where else have they lived?  Which other languages or dialects have they spoken? Where were their parents from? Do they work part-time or do volunteering?...