ENGA3 June 2014 - revision tips part 1

There's just over a week to go before the ENGA3 exam, so my plan is to do a short post each day with advice about how to approach this difficult (but rather splendid) paper.

Seeing as there is still a whole week of half-term in which to revise, the first tip I'd offer is to read a couple of books. Yes, whole books.

First off, read Henry Hitchings' The Language Wars. It covers pretty much every Language Discourses question you could hope to get and it's a damn good read.

We've covered it here on the blog lots before (like here and here) and I did an interview with the author for emagazine a couple of years ago. Click here to visit the emagazine website and use your school/college log-in to find it under Language Topics: Attitudes to Language Change: At War With the Pedants.

Secondly, if you haven't already looked at it, Jean Aitchison's Language Change: Progress or Decay? is a fascinating read. It's got many of the things you'll no doubt have covered as part of your course (the crumbling castle, damp spoon and infectious disease models, for instance) but lots of other excellent stuff too, including discussion of how and why language changes, which is pretty much a staple of Question 1 on Language Change on the paper.

Tomorrow, we'll start looking at each question on the paper in turn and some ideas about how to prepare for them.