Connections between texts on Paper 1: dealing with AO4

Question 3 on Paper 1 has often been a bit of a low-scorer for students and you can maybe see why. It comes an hour in to the exam, and you’ve still got all your knowledge about child language to unleash, so perhaps you treat this one as a bit of a stopgap question. On top of that, you’ve already rinsed Text A in Question 1 and Text B in Question 2 for all the inspiration you could find and now you’ve got to go back and compare them. Why not just do that in the first place? Well, that’s a good question but have a look at Question 3 on Paper 2 and you can see that’s actually quite a tough thing to do. What you’re doing here is a slightly more staged process of exploring the two texts and actually a bit more straightforward. 

So, what can you talk about in Question 3? The question is marked using AO4 which is the connections AO (you’ll see it in Question 3 on Paper 2 and in the NEA commentary too) so it’s important to think about the kinds of connections you can make between the two texts and how you can do that. 

If Questions 1 and 2 are largely about avoiding too much unnecessary contextualising and cutting to the chase to analyse what the texts are about and what they are saying (and I think that’s the usual message about them), then Question 3 is a chance to talk more about some of those other contextual things. In other words, if the topic is broadly similar (and both texts are always on the same theme) then how and why do the two texts handle that theme in similar and different ways? What is it about the types of texts they are, the modes they are in, the purposes and audiences that they have, the time that they were produced in, that makes them do that differently. And how does their use of language show that? 

While there’s bound to be some discussion of context in your answers to Questions 1 and 2 (because the AO3 requires you to talk about meanings in context), there’s more chance to develop that focus here. And as long as you use specific features of language to do that, you should be able to hit Level 3 or above. 

A quick look at the mark scheme should reveal that Levels 1 and 2 are largely about spotting and identifying quite implicit and basic (Level 1) or quite literal (Level 2) connections without focusing on the language itself. This will probably be quite descriptive, so perhaps saying that a text is written and formal without identifying an example of this, or noting that the texts have different audiences but not illustrating how you can tell or how the address to those audiences is different in the language choices being made. 

Levels 3 and above require you to discuss language, “compare use of xxx” being the key descriptor here, where the xxx will be the specific language features that you think are relevant. And here it’s about linking these to a specific aspect of context such as how an adjective helps describe flat-sharing/the rules of boxing/goths/how a runner missed her lane, or how a sentence function is used to engage or address the audiences. Comparison is important too because that’s what AO4 is all about, so make sure your language points are ones that can be used to discuss similarities and differences across the two texts. 

For example, if you think pronouns are being used in a way that strikes you as interesting – lots of direct address in one text but often quite impersonal address in the other – that’s a good AO4 point to base a paragraph around. Equally, there’s this semantic field used in one text and that one used in the other – to describe the same topic – so that could be another good comparison. This text has been scripted to be spoken so there are frequent discourse markers to structure it, while that one has been laid out as a webpage so the structuring comes from its subheadings as part of its graphology. 

At Levels 4 and 5 you’re taking this further. Level 4’s buzzword is connect and Level 5’s is evaluate so you’re engaging much more here with the ways that language is linked to mode, genre, purposes and audiences, and the historical and social contexts to each text. I’ve often reminded my students that it’s not just the older text that has historical context; the contemporary one does too and that’s also worth focusing on, even if that history feels very ‘now’. This doesn’t mean just offloading a lot of historical knowledge or trying to summarise all the social movements of the last 100 years, but instead it means discussing ways in which the texts themselves have been produced and consumed within a historical and social context and how that might have affected or even shaped them. 

What is there in the text about student flat shares that makes you realise that going to university has only become an opportunity for a large minority in the last 30-40 years? What tells you that while vegetarianism has been around for well over a hundred years, it’s still treated as something of a food fad? What tells you that in 1743, boxing was relatively new to the public and therefore had to have its rules explained? These things could all be relevant to the contexts of the texts and to the language used within them and what that language is used to do. 

But the other thing to notice is that as you work your way to the top of the mark scheme you’re expected to think less literally and more holistically. What’s the significance of these connections that you’re starting to see? Why are these texts treating the same material in different ways? By the time you hit Level 5 you should be evaluating all of that and also placing these texts within their wider discourse, taking the AO4 beyond just the connections between the texts themselves and into the texts’ connections to the wider world.  

If you’re looking for a few ways to do this as practice for Paper 1, then this post from 2021 should offer you a few ways in.  

What's it all about?

When I'm teaching students how to approach text analysis questions (like Paper 1 Questions 1 and 2 and Paper 2 Question 3), I often advise them to take a look at the bigger picture first, before diving into the analysis. So looking back at yesterday's blog about tackling the In Defence of Good Grammar article, I probably should have taken my own advice as I have definitely dived into that before discussing what it's actually about. 

One way of doing this is to have an initial read and just ask yourself a few basic questions:

• What's it about? This might be as simple as identifying the specific language issue that's being focused upon and working out how that relates to the language study you've been doing on the course. 
• What's it actually about? There's often a subtext to these pieces: something that starts with language but hints at a concern about something else - standards or fashions changing, young people doing something different to previous generations, a group in society having more prominence than they did a while ago, a technological change causing concern. Sometimes it's not so subtle - less a dog whistle than a miserable man in a suit, standing behind you shouting "I hate working class people and the way they use language". 
• What is the point? This is where you need to get to grips with what views are actually being expressed. What's being said about the language issue/s? What opinions are actually being offered? Pinpoint some key parts of the text/s so you can come back to these and really pull them apart. 
• Who is this guy? Who is writing this piece and why do they feel they have something worthwhile to say? At some point, you're going to need to look at how the text producer represents themselves to the reader and how they try to pitch their position to you. This is slightly more tricky if you're presented with a news or feature article, as opposed to an opinion piece as you might have to unstitch the different positions presented to you and work out what the overall picture is. 
• Where is this leading? So, this might be the last big question to ask. Given that the article is about x and this writer is telling us y, where does that take us? What's the agenda? How might we be expected to react to this view? What are we expected to do about this knowledge we've gained? About this persuasion we might have undergone? This could open up a few points for Question 4 too because it might get you thinking about the evaluation you can offer here, the assessment of the ideas that have been presented. 

If you start with a few questions like these, then the analysis can actually be pinpointed a bit more closely on the really important parts of the text/s. I've tended to adopt a hotspots approach with these questions (and those on Paper 1) and having that bigger picture and sense of what's going in is vital when you're trying to build an analysis of the whole text rather than just isolated moments. 

Another way to do this is to produce a summary of the text. Imagine that you've just read the article and someone says "What are you reading?". You've got two or three sentences at most to explain what it is and what's being said. If you can't do that, then you probably need to go back and read again to unpick the information you need. 

So, why not go back to this post from a couple of days ago and try these approaches on the three texts I've suggested there? 

Tackling 'in defence of good grammar'

One of the text extracts that I linked to in this post, was a piece called In Defence of Good Grammar, written by James Innes-Smith for The Critic website, which bills itself as a "monthly magazine for politics, ideas, art, literature and much more". 

The language pieces on there are not very frequent but, when they do appear, seem to me to be a mixed bag. Some of them recycle quite common prescriptive positions. So there's this one from April 2023 which starts off by complaining about supposed Americanisms in the English language before firmly aiming its fire at just Americans more generally.  It even manages to include a language discourses greatest hits in this paragraph: 

Turn on the wireless at any hour, and you may think this country has been infected by a linguistic virus. Words and phrases that were once regarded as intrusive Americanisms have become commonplace. Curveball (what’s wrong with bouncer?) and stepping up to the plate (taking a fresh guard?) are daily horrors which merit six firm strokes of the cane.  

Then there's this one which focuses on language and class through the lens of Angela Rayner's non-standard grammar. But then you also see a few others - like this one on accommodation, class and downwards convergence - which are a bit more linguistically descriptive in their outlook. 

But it's the other article on Angela Rayner and language 'standards' that I want to focus on here, so what follows is an attempt to offer a few things: a bit of analysis, some discussion of some of the techniques and language choices being used and a couple of suggestions about where this article and some of its ideas might sit within wider discourses about language. 

You can probably tell that I've taken quite a critical stance towards it but you may well want to look at it from other perspectives and see if some of its arguments can be supported linguistically or if they might be seen as being more coherent and well-supported than I thought. Towards the end, there are also a few suggestions for other extracts in the article that you could analyse and evaluate. Anyway, here goes...

Sub-editorial features

Title immediately suggests a discourse of conflict: a defence is being made against some kind of attack.

The standfirst presupposes that Angela Rayner is torturing our language and the only question up for debate is why she needs to be stopped.

Interesting choice of verb in ‘torturing’: language is being represented as the victim of a painful process. 

Who is the ‘we’ in ‘our language’ and why has this possessive determiner been chosen? What might be the implications around the portrayal of those who are not part of the 'we', 1st person plural, group?

The image (from 1954) is in black and white and presents an elocution lesson. 

Is this the era the writer wants us to return to? A post-war utopia where people were happy to be taught how to speak ‘properly’? A simpler time when rules were rules and everyone followed them? 

Opening paragraph

• What is the language issue and how is it being represented here? 
• Interesting modifiers in this noun phrase: clear, educated English. Why choose these? 
• And what do we make of these choices of abstract noun? class division, snobbishness and elitism

The second sentence uses a coordinating conjunction as a discourse marker to establish a counter-argument to the position in the first sentence. The idea here seems to be that clear, educated English isn’t ‘exclusive’: it’s welcoming and inclusive. I wonder what the writer of this piece would think about the varieties and styles of English used by many of those close to a billion people…

Selected extracts: 1

…and yes, I do believe “speaking well” has value however unfashionable that may sound.

Have a look at the positioning being used here. 

How is the author representing himself to his readers? Bravely out of touch with modern society? Proud to be out of step with modern, ‘woke’ sensibilities? Traditional, conservative and proud to be upholding standards? 

But what is this fashion that he’s out of step with? We see, on a few occasions in this article, that he makes reference to what it’s supposed to be like these days, but we don’t see a lot of empirical evidence for that. 

Selected extracts: 2

In the UK there remains an underlying sense that speaking well is the sole preserve of a posh elite, which may explain the lack of educational rigour when it comes to teaching the language.

So, where’s the evidence for this claim? It sounds very certain: look at the modality of that first sentence – ‘there remains…’ – as if this is an undeniable fact. 

And in the next clause (speaking well is the sole preserve of a posh elite), it's the the same use of the declarative mood. The adjective choice too (‘sole’) seems to accentuate the exclusivity he claims to be opposing. 

And what about the final clauses. Does that ring true? Ten- and eleven-year-olds in the UK do grammar tests… you’re doing an A level that involves some quite hardcore grammar. But no, this is a lack of ‘educational rigour’. 

And what of the emerging discourses? We started with one around conflict and now we’re into ones around rigour and permissiveness, good versus bad, right versus wrong. It’s a fairly familiar prescriptive discourse.

Selected extracts: 3

By this paragraph, we are well into some fairly common anecdotes about young people these days…

You may have noticed the extent of adolescent inarticulacy when listening to school leavers struggling to construct a coherent sentence without having to fall back on verbal ticks such as “like”, “innit” and “you know what I mean?” Yet this pummelling at the foundations of communication is by no means limited to the less well educated.

The use of ‘pummelling at the foundations of communication’ seems quite hyperbolic as well: as if the very basis of communication is being attacked by young people’s ill-educated language choices. 

And a few lines later, you could analyse the representation of ‘street’ language – whatever that might mean in this context – through the adjectives used in the examples of ‘mangles phrasing and sloppy grammar’. 

Selected extracts: 4

By the time we get to the rather predictable George Bernard Shaw quotation and the author’s assertion that ‘this embarrassment about the way we speak has become endemic’, we are firmly into the kind of language discourse you’ll have seen many times before: language styles and variations as a disease. 

‘Endemic’ has less wide-ranging connotations than ‘pandemic’ but still implies that something has become widespread in a certain community and that’s quite an interesting theme in this article, because the author reflects quite a lot on this problem that he’s identified as being an English thing: a modern English disease, perhaps? 

Does this suggest that his theme - that 'we' are squeamish about 'good grammar' is a modern development and one we should jettison?

Other sections to look at

There’s plenty more to analyse in this article but I’ll leave you with these final extracts to think about.

Look how opposing ideas have been represented here, the metaphors being used and their implications if you take them to their logical conclusions. 

How fair or accurate do you think this might be, when you think about some of the linguistic arguments you’ve explored on your course? 

Instead of lowering standards to meet ideological whims and cultural and class sensitivities we should be lifting young people out of the prison of low expectation and equipping them with the tools they need to live a rich and communicative life.

And what about the discourses conveyed through the metaphor choices in these two extracts? What kind of arguments about language and society are being advanced?

What language deconstructionists fail to acknowledge is that without these vital literacy skills, children will always struggle to find purpose and meaning. By allowing language to become part of the culture war we deny children access to the great works of literature as well as limiting their chances of gainful employment.

Angela Rayner may have lucked out but millions of working class people remain trapped in systemic disadvantage brought about by a lack of will on the part of teachers and parents to instil a love of language.

...without fluency of language, they will remain trapped in a cycle of ignorance and poverty...

Analysing texts about language

While I'm doing posts about Section B of Paper 2, I'd better mention the kinds of texts that appear here and that you have to analyse and respond to. They're often (but not always) articles from newspapers and online sources, but can also be book extracts or something like, as was the case of the 2019 paper, an article from an accent tutoring website. I've summarised a few of the others below: 

• An extract from an online piece equating political correctness with ‘thought control’ and a blog post complaining about ‘Orwellian’ language reform.
• A feature article from the Mail Online focusing on young women’s speech and a feature article from The Guardian complaining that young women won’t be taken seriously unless they change the way they speak.
• An extract from The Telegraph reporting on the use of emojis in writing making people appear ‘incompetent’ and an extract from an online student newspaper complaining about emojis ‘destroying’ the language.
• An extract from a 2002 Independent article about English as a world language and an introduction to a book from 2017 complaining about American English. 

What you'll probably see from these texts is that many of them come from a position of criticising or complaining about an aspect of language change or diversity, often with a prescriptive slant to them, and that they are often open to linguistically-informed criticism and challenge. Not all of them are totally unreasonable rants; in fact some of them are carefully assembled to foreground opposing and contrasting views. The 2022 paper even had a text that included a 'head to head' style article as one of its texts, where two opposing language commentators argued their cases. 

Bear in mind too, that you're being assessed using 3 AOs in Question 3, so you'll need to be approaching these texts from a few different angles, such as:

• what aspects of language the texts are focusing on
• what arguments and views about language are being presented to the readers and what we might be supposed to make of that
• how these views about language might fit into the bigger picture of language discourses we see in debates about language out there in the world all the time
• how the text producers are using language to represent the issues 
• how the text producers represent themselves and try to convince the reader of their views
• how the texts might be connected: how are they handling the theme, approaching it similarly/differently etc?

Here are a couple of recent texts that might make for some good material for analysis. I've chosen ones that I think link nicely to wider discourses about language (perhaps you can spot a few of those discourses straight away and dig deeper for others) and ones that have a pretty clear view. I'll post a few more in days to come where it's a bit more subtle, as I think you need to be prepared for that too. 

• James Innes-Smith of The Critic website complains about Angela Rayner's language, with a focus on standard English and class.
• The Mail Online's Julie Henry lays into university academics who now claim "there is no such thing as correct language". This one is less an opinion piece and more like a new story with a clear line of attack. You might also find the comments worth exploring as mini-examples of language discourses in action. This is one we talked about on Lexis episode 23 in the Lang in the News segment.
• Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph: an article about accent prejudice and social class. We discussed this here on Lexis in the Lang in the News segment if you want some pointers. If the Telegraph one is paywalled for you, here is the press reader version. 

If anyone is interested in discussing these texts and what you make of them, I'll start a thread on the @EngLangBlog Twitter feed so you can reply with observations, points and questions. 

Specialist knowledge for non-specialist readers

Yesterday, I posted a few links to articles that I thought were pretty good examples of opinion pieces about language. There's always a bit of a caveat with this kind of advice though, because the activity you're engaged in during the exam is basically an exercise to secure marks from the available assessment objectives, rather than actually write something for publication and payment. 

That's why you need to be a little bit careful about using anything as an exact style model; while there are really informative and linguistically-informed pieces out there (and I think there's lots of good stuff in the ones I posted), they can also be a little bit thin on language detail and you need to provide that to get your 20 marks from AO2. 

What you might want to do - as well as looking at how those opinion pieces work - is have a mosey on over to The Conversation website, where linguists (and psychologists and many other experts) write about their research for non-specialist readers.  What you'll be able to see from many of the excellent articles there is how complicated and technical ideas can be explained clearly to people who don't necessarily work in the field. 

Some of my favourites also happen to be from some of my favourite linguists...

Rob Drummond on regional accent attitudes

Grammar pedants and fashion victims

Amanda Cole on attitudes to working class and ethnic minority accents

Posh Spice and accent change

Devyani Sharma on accent attitudes in the workplace 

Opinion pieces for exam revision

 As you get ready for the exam season this summer, it's a good idea to read lots of opinion pieces to soak up the features of the genre: the style, structure, sub-editorial choices and the ways that arguments are constructed, among them. 

It probably helps too to focus most of that reading and preparation on opinion pieces about language, because that's the course you're studying and what you're going to be writing about. So, here are a few suggestions for recent pieces about language that you might find useful. 

It's worth bearing in mind that in your exam, AO5 is worth 10 marks and AO2 20 marks, so you probably want to err on the side of caution with the language content and maybe offer a little bit more knowledge about language and ideas from language study than a few of these, while also making sure that every bit of language knowledge and research that you introduce is made accessible to your target readers. 

London Evening Standard piece on MLE

The i on MLE

Indy Voices on regional accent pride

A Nov 22 piece on the language round migration

An older (2015) Guardian piece on the language associated with migration

Next time round, I'll suggest a few recent pieces that could be useful for a bit of analysis for Question 3 on Paper 2. 

Getting the Word Out 2022

WOTY (Word of the Year) Season is in full swing and the lists from the various dictionaries and organisations who produce them, along with the blogs, the explainers and articles in the press about them are always a useful resource for the A Level, especially when looking at Language Change. 

I'll put together a fairly comprehensive set of links next week to all the stories I've come across, but in the meantime, here's a link to a piece I wrote for The Independent about WOTY2022. 

These stories (that aren't mentioned in my article) are also worth a look:

Gaslighting

Woman and woman again

Goblin mode and more goblin mode

Hybrid work

There's also the American Dialect Society's WOTY2022 to look forward to which is probably one of the most exciting dates on the linguistic calendar. Last year's overall WOTY for them was insurrection. 

Accent bias: a guest blog for TEFL Workers' Union

I don't normally blog opinion pieces on here but thought I'd share this one as I was asked to write a few things for the TEFL Workers' Union (here on Twitter and here on Facebook) on language discrimination. (And A level students might find it a useful model to look at/critique!)

Accent bias is real and affects people in tangible social and economic ways. Worst affected – according to the research – are those from working class and/or racialized minorities, as well as younger people starting off at university and in the workplace.

For many people, the accent norm is seen as a southern, often RP, voice, but the reality is that the majority of people in the UK don’t have those kinds of accent. ‘Regional’ accents associated with industrial cities are often among the most stigmatized.

Accent bias is about more than just a few jokes and hurt feelings: it’s about making people feel they are not good enough, making them feel like they need to change to ‘fit in’, and about overlooking people’s potential, expertise and intelligence, all because of lazy stereotypes.

The problem is obviously widespread & structural too. Attitudes to accent are often more about attitudes to social groups, so the language is often just an index of that. Interviews we’ve done on the Lexis podcast with language experts like Devyani Sharma, Amanda Cole and Lauren White all show this. 

Educators have an important role to play in fighting back against accent bias and all it entails. We can’t argue for equality of opportunity on one hand and uphold reactionary and discriminatory language attitudes on the other. It’s incumbent on all of us working in education to challenge this inequality.

While it’s usually good news for language educators to see issues about language prejudice getting an airing in the media, it also tends to show the gulf between what linguists think about language and what the general public thinks.

Last week, various newspapers and online outlets ran stories on the publication of a report from The Sutton Trust about accent bias in the UK. The report featured work from linguists on the Accent Bias Britain project at QMUL.

The findings made pretty grim reading: 30% of university students and 25% of professionals in workplaces said their accents had been mocked, while similar percentages felt self-conscious about their accent.

There was also a pattern of accents belonging to racialized minorities and people from working class backgrounds reporting more mockery of their varieties, leading to some people feeling a stronger need to change their accent to fit in.

Tellingly, even when responding using exactly the same words, accents indexed as working class and/or minority ethnic were rated as lower for professional expertise and competence. Of course, who these lower ratings came from were interesting too… mostly southern and upper class people.

None of this is particularly new: accent bias studies have been conducted for the best part of 50 years (and the Accent Bias Britain site is excellent for mapping and summarizing these studies) and the accent hierarchy of the UK seems deeply entrenched, along class, ethnic and regional lines.

What then can linguists and the wider education community do to challenge this? There are positive noises from the project about making people aware that accent bias exists and to be conscious of it, and that seems to have an effect on responses straight away in professional settings.

The comments that followed many of these news articles give us an insight into what we’re up against. One tweeter offered the cry laugh emoji at the end of their deeply empathetic reply:  “Do you need to ask why anyone ‘would want’ to lose a brummie accent?”.

Others variously saw the report as some form of ‘wokeness’ (yawn) or an appalling lack of ‘resilience’ on the part of the respondents. ‘Get over it’, ‘deal with it’ and ‘it never did me any harm’ seemed to be the order of the day for many others, with reactionary narratives the norm.

The ‘it never did me any harm’ response is perhaps one of the laziest of all and brings to mind other favourites of the reactionary boomer - smacking, power cuts or even world wars (fought before they were born) among them - as things we should just get over without complaint.

What’s so lazy about this is the self-assurance that just because the person thinks it’s never done them any harm that no harm has been done. What about those opportunities you were never aware of because you’d been written off as unsuitable the moment you opened your mouth?

When presented with research like this showing that accent prejudice is rife and has real world consequences - denial of opportunity and equal opportunities for large parts of the population – we’ve really got to do better than writing it off as the hurt feelings of woke Gen Z snowflakes.

Language bias and discrimination is an issue that is at the heart of a lot of work that language educators get involved in education to fight against – often because we come from backgrounds that bear the brunt of these prejudices but also because it’s about fairness and equality. And kicking back against reactionary narratives around accent bias, challenging prevailing popular discourses and offering a critical and socially just response is something that I think is incumbent on us all to offer.