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If you're revising for Paper 1 and want to do some last-minute terminology work, these are good places to look. The Internet Grammar of English The Interactive Grammar of English

If you're revising Paper 2 of the new AS level, there have been some really helpful articles about some of the topics covered, over the last few days. This piece from The Guardian on Friday (thanks to @ENSFCEnglish ) looks at research carried out by Dr Alexander Baratta into accent prejudice in education and quotes some staggeringly ill-informed views about how trainee teachers should speak. The story is also covered in The Sun  (thanks to @paulkerswill ). A couple of years ago, this story about a teacher made news when it was suggested she had been told to 'tone down' her northern accent while working in a soft, southern, shandy-drinking school (thanks to @Lisa7Pettifer for that link). Elsewhere, Rob Drummond at MMU kindly posted the results of a short survey he had carried out into attitudes towards young people's language and you can find them here . All of this material is useful for both sections of the new Paper 2 (AS and A level) where you might see examples ...

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 ...

While marking my students' recent work for the directed writing task on Paper 2 of the new spec, I've been jotting down a few ideas about how to address the main areas that need improvement. Apart from some of the stuff I've blogged about recently - making the opinion pieces accessible to non-specialist readers, including enough language knowledge to hit the higher levels of AO2 and developing effective openings and conclusions - one thing that has struck me is this part of the mark scheme for AO2: Under the 'Performance Characteristics' heading (i.e. the general expectations of what students will be doing to be in this Level, rather than the more specific 'Indicative Content' for each paper), the key thing seems to be the notion of identifying different views, approaches and interpretations . If we assume that students already need to have "show detailed knowledge of linguistic ideas, concepts and research" (Level 3), then what Level 4 seems to be...

One area of Paper 2 of the new AQA English Language AS level I've been trying to address is the focus on how users of language varieties are represented. In the examples I posted in January , stimulus texts taken from stories about schools 'banning' slang and/or dialect touched on how regional varieties and youth sociolects are represented and discussed, so they make a useful starting point.  Another area though is how fiction represents accent and dialect, often through 'eye dialect': a way of writing words to make them resemble how they are pronounced. It's less precise than using a phonemic alphabet but creates an easy to understand representation of how a regional accent might sounds. Irvine Welsh uses it in Trainspotting , which is set in Edinburgh and through the eye dialect you can hear the sound of the Leith accent coming through: Third time lucky. It wis like Sick Boy telt us: you’ve got tae know what it’s like tae try tae come off it before ye can act...

Over the last week or two, we've been working on the Directed Writing part of Paper 2 and thinking about ways to make the opinion pieces both rich in language knowledge - so the reader is actually informed and educated about language - and able to grasp the main ideas without being a specialist. Having set a task on the language of social groups in which quite a few students erred on the side of catchiness and style over language content, with a few swinging the other way and writing things that were more like essays than articles, I put together the following as a worksheet for the best part of a double lesson. We're going to use it next week and see if we can get the opinion pieces a bit closer to what I think the mark scheme can reward. Obviously, there's more to this kind of writing than just aiming to hit the different bands on the mark scheme and I'd encourage students to read as wide a range of opinion pieces - op-eds in papers, online articles like those on  Com...

Section B on Paper 2 of the new AQA AS-level sets a directed writing task which means that students will need to get used to writing in a different way about language topics. In Section A of the paper, they will be writing an essay in response to some stimulus data and a "Discuss the idea..." essay prompt. The sample material on the AQA site has one task (you can find it here and a student response to it with examiner commentary here ) asking students to "Write an opinion article in which you discuss the issues surrounding people changing their accents". The stimulus text is a short extract from the Mail Online looking at media celebrity Donna Air changing her working class Geordie accent to something closer to her posh boyfriend's accent and it's pretty clear that this is not the kind of article that students will need to write for themselves, because a) it's very light on language issues (and AO2 is worth half the marks here) and b) it's a very sh...