Advice for ENA6

OK, I know it's six months away... June 18th to be precise, but ENA6 needs to be planned for well in advance. Here's the advice sheet I've given out in the deranged hope that you'll do some of it.

ENA6 is a tough paper, lasting 2 hours 30 minutes and consisting of 5 different questions and quite a lot of reading. The whole paper is based on one topic that you’ve covered from the AS and A2 years, so it could be on child language acquisition, language & representation, male female conversation, spoken language in different situations, language change, language variation. The most likely topics this summer are language variation (accent and dialect changes in the UK) or spoken language, but you must be prepared to answer on any topic.

To make sure you are well prepared for the exam and for when we start teaching it (after half term) it’s important that you start doing the following:


Read a broadsheet newspaper article at least 2 or 3 times a week making sure you take in a variety of different forms – news, editorial, op-ed and letters to the editor. You will be set a writing task in the exam and it might take the form of an article like the above. Broadsheet newspapers: The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Independent.

Listen to at least one formal, spoken radio broadcast/podcast a week, preferably a programme like Radio 4’s Word of Mouth, or the A Way With Words podcast. You will be set a writing task in the exam and it might take the form of a radio/podcast script.

Use this blog! It’s been running for four years now and has hundreds of different posts and links about topics for ENA5 and ENA6. The articles are all focussed on aspects of language that might crop up on ENA6, and there is specific advice given about how to answer certain questions on the paper. Use the search bar at the top left of the screen to look for specific units and key words.

Read emagazine. It’s in the LRC and there are always 3-4 language articles in each edition. Many of these cover aspects of the course that will be covered in ENA6.

Develop your vocabulary. Try the flex your lexis exercise every couple of weeks. The words have been chosen because they are of a slightly higher register than what we normally see in student responses here, but which you’d be expected to understand and use when writing at A Level standard.