Paper 1: salience & hotspots

Revision of Paper 1 skills and approaches has been on our agenda recently, so here are a few things that we've been looking at.

Given the limited amount of time to read two substantial new texts and write three answers, I think we probably have to be quite disciplined about time on this paper, so it pays to read for meaning effectively and plan cleverly. For our students, I've been suggesting an approach to planning answers that allows for getting an overview of each text to help with the meanings and representations in Questions 1 and 2 and which also starts to focus on the compare and contrast requirements of Question 3. Underpinning it all is a focus on finding examples of language and describing them accurately.

Here's an outline of what I've given our students to work with. I've been quite pleased with the results this week, so let me know if it works for you.

In the short time you have in the exam, you need to make sure every minute counts. Your note-taking and reading of the texts needs to be smart and give you material for your answers to the text analysis (Questions 1 and 2) and the compare and contrast of Question 3.

The approach I’d suggest is to use the first few minutes to read for meaning. That is, get a decent sense of the following:

• What each text is about – the topic that they share
• What’s being said about that topic
• What different views are being offered

You can also make some initial notes to help with the other parts of the questions, such as:

• What kinds of texts they are - genre
• The mode/s they are in – spoken, written, computer-mediated communication
• Their audiences and purposes

These observations can help you sort out some useful starting points for your notes, which can then help you form the basis of your main paragraphs for each answer. Next, I’d suggest finding 5-6 ‘hotspots’ in each text. These are areas in each text that convey the clearest and most useful ideas. These hotspots could be a single phrase, a section of the text (an image, a headline, the opening or closing lines), a sentence or even a pattern of language across the whole text.

These hotspots should mean something and, in some cases at least, represent the topic or views on the topic in a way that you can pull apart. There’s no point just picking a few words because you can label them with terms that you’ve learnt (“x is a determiner and y is a pronoun”); it’s vital to get to grips with language that means something and contributes to the overall meanings in each text.

With these hotspots, you can explore what things mean and analyse the language used to create these meanings. This means thinking about your language frameworks (or methods, or levels, or whatever you’ve called them this year) and your AO1 terms, making sure you are offering a good range across each text. AO1 is not just about grammatical labels (word classes, phrases, sentences, clauses, tense etc.), but also about things like semantic fields, patterns of meaning (contrast, antithesis and juxtaposition, for example), graphology, interaction patterns (especially in spoken texts or ones using features of spoken language), discourse structure, pragmatics and perhaps phonology too.

 As you discuss the language used in these hotspots, try to cover a range of different language points but concentrate your attention on the ones that are most important in creating meanings and representations. For example, if the topic is a famous actor, perhaps think about the ways in which adjectives modify nouns to describe her performances and how metaphor might be used to describe her career. If the topic is an event like a football match or gig, look at the verb choices, the use of tense and aspect to structure events. If the topic is more of an ‘issue’, look at the patterns of abstract nouns and their meanings, and perhaps the overall discourse structure used to present conflicting ideas.

There will be many different ways to do this and if you’ve selected, meaningful parts of the texts, you’ll be able to explain them effectively. Examiners don’t really want to read about a text having “lots of long sentences to make it flow” or “lots of pronouns to make it personal” because these are meaningless generalisations. Look closely at what is actually meant in each text in its given context.

While analysing these hotspots, keep in mind the bigger picture of what each text is doing and what kind of texts they are. You will need to address these issues a bit more in your answer to Question 3, but they will also be useful in Questions 1 and 2. For example, if the text is typical of a particular genre, you know it will generally do certain things (recipes tell you what to do, stories recount events etc.).

 Another important aspect to consider is not just how the topic of each text is represented but how the text creators (writers, speakers, posters, texters etc.) represent themselves and each other. How do they position themselves in relation to the text receivers? How do they present a face or image to the audience and to each other? How does this relate to what the texts are about?

In the example text you’ve been given, spend 7-8 minutes doing what’s outlined above. Read for meaning, make notes, identify 5-6 hotspots and then get writing. Use the remaining time (25 minutes) to draft your analysis of these hotspots, linking them back to the overall meanings in the text to keep a coherent thread running through your analysis.

We've used different texts to practise on, but a good one supplied by a helpful teacher from another school (thanks Wendy!) is this blog about Alan Rickman, which we then used alongside this article about Rickman (well...more about Snape really).

Analysing meanings and representations 2

In the textual analysis post yesterday I focused on how to analyse language to look at meanings and representations. In this post, I'll take a look at the ways in which you can explore how different opinions and views are put forward in texts and how you can start to do good AO1 and AO3 work on different kinds of texts.

Again, this focuses primarily on Questions 1 and 2, where you are encouraged to look closely at how language creates meanings and representations. On one level, as I said in yesterday's post, this means getting a sense of how the overall subject of each text is being represented. If the topic of the text is the natural environment, how is this topic being represented?

Here is an example taken from a Wildlife Trust leaflet:

Here, you might make the point that the environment is being represented as under threat. How is this achieved? Through a series of different language choices, all contributing their own meanings to an overall representation.

For example:

• the graphology anchors the themes being talked about and presents us with a clear picture of what is under threat
• the vocabulary uses a lexical field of nature and keeps the focus squarely on key areas, while there are quite specific references to breeds of bird, types of environment and precise figures
• vocabulary choices like the adjective 'iconic' help to represent the natural environment as part of the UK's heritage
• the grammar helps to present the threat as current and ongoing through the present progressive verb phrase "are disappearing" and as a victim of external forces through the passive voice in the second box "...has been lost"

Overall, these combine to create a particular set of ideas about the situation.

Another kind of text offers you different angles to explore. The text above represents an idea with just one voice, but many texts - for example, spoken conversations and online message boards - give you different people's views, and these are worth looking at in more detail because they might use language in different ways to represent different ideas. Equally, they might share similar views and put them forward with a degree of similarity.

Here's an example of a couple of posts on the Mumsnet forum, that are about school proms (the same topic as the sample AQA AS paper for Paper 1). Look at how the opinions are expressed here, how the posters create particular meanings and offer different representations of their views and the topic as a whole:

from http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/teenagers/a954953-School-Prom-outrageous-expectations

The poster 'mumblechum' expresses her (appalled) view of the picture that has been posted using the adjective phrase "utterly chavtastic" in an exclamative sentence, while 'thursdaynamechange' makes use of the emojis on the forum to put forward a representation of her own face (a bit like you might do in a spoken conversation) before ending with a simple sentence that also makes use of a negative adjective phrase "utterly ridiculous".

They both have a very negative view of the lengths to which some people go to impress others at a school prom and make their views very clear with these language choices. What does 'chavtastic' mean? Why choose that adjective, rather than (say) 'chavvy'? Why has the second poster emboldened "primary school" and put scare-quotes around 'environmental'? What do these mean? And how do they work together to represent a view?

There are quite a few other things that you could look at here, as the two posters are not just talking about school proms and how much money some people spend on them, but are also representing themselves (and their daughters) as particular kinds of people. They are using language not just to express ideas, but to position themselves too. This is something we'll have a look at in more detail in some posts later this week.

Meanings and representations

Paper 1 of the new AQA AS and A level focuses on ideas about how language creates meanings and representations, so I thought it might be useful to look at what could be meant by these terms and what the difference might be.

I suppose the first point to make is that the focus of the first two questions is now very much on how language is used (AO1) to create meanings and represent the topic (AO3), rather than on the types of texts they are (which now comes under the remit of Question 3 and the new AO4).

AO1 and AO3 are quite distinct on the new specification, so you can pick up AO1 marks for labelling  and exemplifying word classes, sentence functions and higher level grammar features such as the passive voice, progressive aspect verbs and clause types, but to get AO3 marks you need to explain what these language features do.

For example, you could get yourself a Level 5 mark (9 or 10 AO1 marks) by identifying (correctly!) something like the following range of language features: noun, verb, adjective, 2nd person pronoun, present tense verb, simple sentence, a minor sentence and a relative clause. But if you left it at that, you'd probably get something like 2-3 marks out of 15 for AO3 at best. What we need to see is some useful discussion of what each of these actually means in its context - not just catch-all generalisations such as "The 2nd person pronoun makes the text more personal." - and (crucially) how they help create a representation of whatever it is that's being discussed. Take the example from a Cancer Research UK below:

If you describe the first sentence as a simple sentence that uses the present progressive, you'll get some good AO1 marks. But to get some AO3 marks, think about what this helps represent: the charity is shown as engaged in an ongoing battle, a fight that they are now taking to the disease and its effects on people. The whole idea of finding cures and treatments for cancer is represented (unhelpfully perhaps?) as a war and the charity and disease as two opposing forces.

If you start with AO3 this time, you might then move on to talk about how time is represented in the rest of the extract above. Several adverbials of time are used: "for a long time", "someday soon" and "anymore". Why are these important? They seem to suggest that time is important and that a turning point is about to be reached.

There's plenty more you could look at in this short extract or in other parts of the ad (like below) but this is a start and (I hope) illustrates what's needed at this level.

So, what's the difference between meanings and representation? To my mind, it's the difference between looking at the possible effect of a single language choice (e.g. the use of different pronouns to show separate sides) and the overall effect of a number of these choices on how the topics are shown to us (cancer as an opponent in a battle; Cancer Research as an organisation fighting on our behalf).

There will be another post soon, looking at other approaches to meanings and representations.

For Starters (part 1)

With the new term starting and new A and AS levels being taught for the first time, I thought it might be handy to think of ways to get classes starting to think about the kinds of things they'll be doing as the course goes on.

I'm sure lots of teachers already have plenty of starters and ice-breakers up their sleeves, but it might be worth thinking about tasks that link to some of the newer areas of the specification. For example, for the first time in ages, we'll be teaching accent, dialect and sociolect to AS/1st year A level students, so why not look at a couple of things connected to that? Here are two ideas based on Language Diversity and another on Textual Variation.

Language fingerprints: ask each student to think about what characteristics make up their own unique language identity. 

• Where were they born? 
• Where else have they lived? 
• Which other languages or dialects have they spoken?
• Where were their parents from?
• Do they work part-time or do volunteering? 
• Do they spend a lot of time doing certain activities: football, online gaming, going to gigs/festivals, writing, looking after younger children?

If each student maps out these ideas, they'll build up a bigger picture of the influences that affect their language. You can introduce social, ethnic and gender/sexuality influences too, if that seems appropriate, or at least flag those up as aspects for students to think about themselves. Each area can then be mapped to the course they are about to start.

Proper English: use some of the links on these posts to find relevant articles about slang bans and school policy on "proper English". 

• Ask students to have a look at the lists of banned words/expressions that feature in many of these stories. 
• What's "wrong" with these terms?
• Why might they be used?
• What alternatives are there and why might the schools see these as better?
• Is it right to ban these terms and how can that be achieved?
• What are the problems with trying to change people's language behaviour?
• Is there such a thing as "proper" English and how might that be defined?

This can lead into discussion of attitudes to Language Diversity (on Paper 2 of the new AS and A levels) and Language Discourses (same).

Found texts: following on from ideas like this one, you might want to ask small groups of students to spend 10 minutes gathering "texts" from around the classroom or form their own pockets and bags before selecting 6 per group to start analysing in a fairly simple way:

• Who is it by?
• Who's it aimed at?
• Why is it written in that way? 
• How can you characterise the style?
• What do you notice about language patterns?
• What do you notice about visual design? 

Examples of texts might be:

• a film poster on the wall of the classroom
• a college diary with the code of conduct
• a letter hone about book deposits
• a book blurb
• the writing on a packet of Wotsits
• the writing on a tube of hand gel/chapstick/tin of vaseline

You can decide if you want to include electronic and spoken texts. At this stage, getting phones out and starting to read texts, Tweets, Snapchat messages and the like might not be the best starter in an early lesson, but you can play it by ear.