ENGA3 June 2013 collected revision tips

With the exam coming up on Monday, I've collected together a few of the revision tips from 2012, 2011 and 2010 here. Hopefully, they'll help you target your last day or two of revision:

Tips from 2011
Revision tips from 2012 (BTW World Englishes has cropped up now as a discourses question in Jan 2013)
General ENGA3 exam advice from 2012

I'll add a few more bits and pieces on Sunday, if I get a chance.

Dealing with AO2 on ENGA3

ENGA3 is assessed using three AOs - 1,2 & 3 - but AO2 is the chunkiest of these on this paper, accounting for 40 of the 90 marks available.

While you should still be using the close textual analysis skills you've been learning throughout the course (i.e. the linguistic labelling with clear examples for AO1 and the discussion of meanings, effects and representations created for AO3), it does mean that you need to think carefully about addressing the wider issues of change, variation and discourses that usually appear as part of the 2nd bullet point in each question.

What exactly is AO2, though? The AQA spec says "AO2: demonstrate critical understanding of a range of concepts and issues related to the construction and analysis of meanings in spoken and written language". I've generally taken the first part of this as the most important, namely the concepts and issues part.

In the top band for AO2, you can see what they're after each year from the non-italicised descriptors (i.e. the bits that remain the same each year, whatever the question set):

So, from the top 4 descriptors you can see that it's mostly about theories, research and ideas about language. It should also be clear from this that to hit the very top of the mark scheme, you need to do more than just regurgitate all the ideas you've learnt and revised.

To use a tortuous analogy from the world of rubbish, you need to do more than just wheel out your wheelie-bin of knowledge and dump it across the pavement for the examiner to sift through. You've got to be a bit more like the person who sifts through their recycling and splits it into various types - cardboard, paper, tin cans, bottles -  working out where things go before you put it all out for collection.

(Of course, this analogy breaks down the minute the council rubbish truck (aka the AQA examiner) comes along and just tips it all into one big pile before shipping it off to Albania to be dumped as landfill. But why let truth get in the way of a tedious attempt to make exam revision entertaining?)

So, evaluation of knowledge is critical:

• weigh up ideas and look for competing explanations (e.g. reasons for people using non-standard English)
• discuss contrasting models (Charles Hockett's bull's eye theory or Paul Postal's "non-functional stylistic change" versus Jean Aitchison's functional approach, as outlined in Chapter 8 of her Language Change: Progress or Decay*)
• think about alternative explanations for the same linguistic features (Robin Lakoff argued that women use more tag questions because they're insecure; Janet Holmes found that women use more tags but only of a certain type, and that male tags tend to be the ones seeking reassurance)
• be prepared to challenge ideas within the texts you are given in the exam (especially true in Section B where the texts are non-specialist and often caricature, or present simplistic versions of, linguistic arguments)

We'll come back to ENGA3 again before Monday's exam, but in the meantime it's probably a good idea to chase up a few references to various theories about language change (such as those described and evaluated in Aitchison's book) and variation.

*thanks to Sherif for raising the issue of AO2 evaluation and these ideas

Language Discourses revision June 2013

For those of you revising for the ENGA3 exam next Monday, there have been some really good recent examples of articles that focus on attitudes to language use and abuse. A few of these have featured on the @EngLangBlog twitter feed, so thanks to the various teachers and students who alerted me to them.

Last year's ENGA3 paper featured a Section B question all about the Queen's English Society and their prescriptivist views about language. Some really on-the-ball students - readers of this blog, no doubt ;-) - managed to mention the demise of the QES as reported here in their answers to the June exam: exactly the kind of contemporary reference that always impresses examiners.

The recent articles that you might like to have a look at all take a look at how people feel about the ways in which language changes.

In this one, Steven Poole looks at how the internet has both spawned linguistic development and, for some at least, linguistic abominations such as LOL and bad spelling.

In this one, Simon Horobin, an English Professor at Oxford University, stirs up the readers of The Daily Telegraph into splenetic projectile-vomiting by telling an audience at the Hay-on-Wye Festival to chillax and STFU about apostrophes and spelling errors.

In this one, Michael Rundell of MacMillan Dictionaries has a dig at those who tell us we should strictly adhere to grammar "rules" just because they say so.

All of them provide plenty of food for thought and ammunition for the exam.

Gender revision

If you're revising ENGA3 Gender and Language Variation (like the students at the Convent of Jesus and Mary Language College in Harlesdon - hello!) then this interview with Deborah Cameron from Woman's Hour might come in handy.

Cameron is one of the key thinkers in this field and her Myth of Mars and Venus is an excellent book to study before the exam.

A quick look at other posts about her would also be handy and you can find a load of them here.

Good luck for ENGA1 tomorrow.

Good luck, everyone.

The language of the workhouse

Val Gillies has written a great piece on the revival of a "Victorian lexicon" to describe class in the UK which echoes and magnifies some of the points brought up in this blog post from January about the polarised discourses surrounding people in work and out of work.

If you're looking for ENGA3 topics related to language and representation (for PC discourses) or are thinking ahead to ENGA2 topics for next year's coursework, it makes a good, if deeply depressing, read.

Language Development essay advice

You can find plenty of advice for the data question on ENGA1 in previous posts on this blog (like this and this), but if you want help on the essay, here goes...

With my examiner hat on (it's a bit like a wizard's hat, but less fashionable), I'd say that some of the things that examiners really want to see are as follows:

• People who answer the question . This may seem blindingly obvious, but lots of students seem to write very generic answers which don't really address the question that's been set. So, avoid this by actually addressing and deconstructing the question right from the start. By this, I mean try to define what you think the question is really asking about and how you are going to deal with it. So, if the question says "Discuss the ways in which children develop their grammatical skills" you need to define what's meant by "grammatical skills" (i.e. syntax and morphology). 
• Examples.  Give examples. It's all very well knowing plenty of the bigger picture, but you also need to bring in examples of what children (and sometimes adults) actually say. Have examples of your own ready. Failing that, use some from the data question.
• Evaluation. Many questions are phrased with "How far..." or "To what extent...", so you should be able to see that it's not just a question of raising a flag for Chomsky, Piaget or Skinner, but to really evaluate how different theories might explain how children acquire language. And remember, just because conditioning seems to work in a way with politeness features, doesn't mean it works for everything else. Think about different elements of language and how - for example - social interaction theories are very good at explaining children's pragmatic development, but pretty poor at explaining the overgeneralisation of grammar rules.
• A clear structure. You've got to write clearly and offer a logical and developed argument. Think through your answer, use a plan and paragraph it!