Thursday, May 22, 2008

ENA6 - Feature Spotting

You've had the chance to practise lots of 1b questions over the last few weeks, now it's time to practise the other 5 mark question in question 1. This is pretty simple: you're asked to "comment linguistically" on 3 different language features (the nature of which depends upon the topic of the paper). This basically means that you pick out 3 interesting language features and label them accurately (2 marks per feature up to a total of 5). It's that simple. You don't need to explain the features, or who has researched them: just label them. You can - if you feel a bit insecure - say a little more about them to clarify what you mean.

An example might be the one below:

Comment linguistically on 3 features of child language in the following extract.

Parent: Did you have a nice day at nursery?
Child: It was good. Some childrens from big school came and play guitars for us.
Parent: That sounds fun.
Child: My hurted my knee at nursery.
Parent: How did you do that?
Child: My falled over.
Parent: Where did you hurt it?
Child: On my knee, I telled you dat.
Parent: But where were you. Inside or outside?
Child: At nursery. I was riding bike.


So, for one feature you might say "The child has used overgeneralised past tense endings on the verbs hurted, telled and falled". And that would get you 2 marks out of the 5 you need.

What else could you pick out and label to get you the full 5 marks?

Black British English vs MLE

The latest episode of Lexis is out and it features an interview with Ife Thompson about lots of issues connected to Black British English, i...