Quickfire Comparisons: Paper 1 Question 3

This is an activity I've been using for revision of Question 3 on Paper 1. The texts are all ones I've used before and some might be recognisable from courses and/or resources I've presented before, but I think the activity is a new one (for me, at least). The idea is to think about connections (the AO4 bit of Q1-3) by quickly identifying them (points of similarity or difference) and then including a language point to support each one. This starts with short texts and then moves on to slightly longer ones, so you might want to find more than 2 connections in these later ones. The point is to read the extracts and identify points as quickly as possible...

Rather than look at lots of pairs of full texts, you might want to try some quick comparisons of shorter texts for Question 3. Read each pair of extracts quickly and identify two points to compare/contrast. Each time, try to make the representation of the topic one of your two points, but then vary the other point from the following list, so you have discussed a range by the end:

• mode
• genre
• time
• audience
• purpose
• representation of author/text producer

Identify at least one feature of language for each example to help you illustrate your points.

Pair 1

A. Extract from TV cookery show

so I’ve got some pancetta here (1) and (.) I’m gonna fry it (.) in the pan (.) need a bit of oil (2) I love pancetta (.) such a lovely flavour

B. Extract from cookery book (Lorraine Pascale, Glam Mac and Cheese recipe)

Fry the pancetta in a medium frying pan over a gentle heat until it just starts to brown and crisp up, then add the thyme leaves and spring onions and cook for a further 3 minutes.

Pair 2

A. Spoken account from beginning of a story about an incident at school (Source: QMUL spoken language resources)

Zack:  no it was like (.) it was the end of school yeah so that school's finished yeah

                      and everyone was going home 

                      and I was getting my bike from the bike rack 

                      and I was going out 

                      and I was riding my bike 

                      and he stopped my bike.

                      I was like "yeah" 

                     and he goes "get off the bike”

B. Extract from an Arthur Conan Doyle story (1903)

A quarter of an hour passed, and then a second cyclist appeared. This time it was the young lady coming from the station. I saw her look about her as she came to the Charlington hedge. An instant later the man emerged from his hiding-place, sprang upon his cycle, and followed her. In all the broad landscape those were the only moving figures, the graceful girl sitting very straight upon her machine, and the man behind her bending low over his handle-bar with a curiously furtive suggestion in every movement. She looked back at him and slowed her pace. He slowed also. She stopped. He at once stopped, too, keeping two hundred yards behind her.

Pair 3

A. An extract from The Scotsman website (2011)

B. An extract from The Scotsman newspaper (1871) 

 Pair 4

A. An account of an anti-fascist demonstration against “alt-right” Trump supporters in 2017 from an American politics website

 

B. An extract from a letter giving an eye-witness account of part of the “Gordon Riots” in London in 1780

 

Many Ways to Climb the Mountain

And the guest blogs keep coming... 

This one is another from Neil Hutchinson, who teaches at Kirkbie Kendal School in the Lake District (on Twitter as @Hutchinsonnet) and here he looks at the foundations of Meanings and Representations when approaching Paper One: Section A.

For students and teachers it can sometimes feel as though the analysis of texts is an arduous uphill struggle. It needn’t be. It’s always heartening to discover you’re not alone on the expedition. The thought that you’re isolated in your decision making is so often the foundation of existential panic. So it was a huge relief to me, and I’m sure countless others, to read this post from fellow guest blogger Mr McVeigh. In this excellent entry, he talks about his approach to Paper One: Section A with a focus on questions 1 and 2. It was heartening to see that there are other practitioners out there making planning a response by examining meaning, before effect, the focus of approaching the questions. 

My own approach is broadly similar, with a few differences, and based on the needs of the small bunch of Year 12 students sitting in front of me, sometimes struggling to meet the demands of these questions and scale the heights of the mark scheme, due to shaky foundations beneath their feet. 

To remedy this I decided to refine my approach. The historical ‘framework’ approach is of course useful. I do want my students to be able to spot clause elements a mile away. Or label lexical items, with precision, but these alone are not summit markers in a response. Making meanings and representations the top and bottom of their approach, with terminology acting more like the gear to help them along the journey, seems the most sensible route plan. 

Mr McVeigh wrote:

I like students to identify at least three representations. I normally say that the author is always represented within a text so that is always a good starting point.

This after he has them, “contextualise the text by identifying the purpose, audience and form of a text (PAF)”. 

This is similar to my approach. We spend a lot of time focusing on the layers of representations as a starting point and then allow the meaning to reveal itself as the trek begins. I use the simple image of a triangle (mountain if my extended metaphor has landed thus far), which I will go into in more detail below. 

As an example, for upcoming exam(ish) preparation we looked at the June 17 paper, featuring the article from the Metro on athlete Veronica Campbell Brown. Spoiler warning ahead. 

The ‘What’

The first thing I asked the students to do was to read the text and simply list all of the representations they can find in the text. I don’t want them to come up with ideas about these representations at this stage. For the students who struggle to generate ideas to discuss in the questions I find this is extremely valuable as it gives them something to aim for. They’re mapping out their route through the questions already before they’ve even thought of anything analytical to say. 

At this stage I will write all of these representations on the board: 

They listed Veronica Capbell Brown as the most obvious person represented, but from there I encouraged them to consider who else or what else was being represented through her. It stands to reason that people don’t exist in representational vacuums. Especially with celebrities and the world of sport, people see themselves reflected back in those they look up to or hold in high esteem. They were then able to say:

• Women
• Black People
• Black Women
• Jamaica

And just as the students wearing their uniforms outside of school represent our institution I ask them to consider how the individual might represent organisations or institutions. This led to:

• Athletics
• The Olympics
• Sprinting
• Professional Etiquette
• Celebrity

And then through polarisation present in the article, and again similar to Mr McVeigh, they were able to identify:

• Britain/British Identity
• British Athletics

And as Mr McVeigh always reminds them, I ask them to consider how the writer is representing themselves or the publication they’re writing for. So to cap it all off:

• The Metro
• Will Giles (writer)

This really gives the students a solid base camp with a variety of routes to follow. And it is something every student of every ability can do in an exam context. Naturally, those aiming for the highest bands will be more able to discuss the wider implications of the representations on display. They will even be able to spot patterns of wider discourse, which is really going to help them with AO3. More on that later. While those at the lower end will all be able to explore the representation of the individual named in the text, often the most obvious, yet still, the most salient of all listed above. 

At this point it is worth reminding them that they can’t discuss everything. This is where the interactive whiteboard comes in handy because we now organise that list into a hierarchy (see images below). We decide on this together based on the text in front of us. I ask them is the representation of Veronica Campbell Brown more salient than the representation of black people or women in general? We decide yes. After all she is named in the headline as opposed to say, “Black athlete runs in wrong lane…” or “Female athlete runs in wrong lane…” We do discuss that Campbell Brown is referred to as “The Jamaican” but we consider this as part of the patriotic, tribal stance The Metro is adopting, which we discuss later.

Before developing that, I first ask them if this seems more openly critical of black people or of women? For simplicity, does it seem more racist or sexist? That is not to say it is neither, arguably these prejudices exist between the lines because they feed into the wider social discourses, which are still present in our society. What we are doing at this stage is glancing back over the whole text and spotting what jumps out, again before we have really started to think of the ‘How’. They decide that for a number of reasons, the representation of women seems salient. They look to the overall discourse structure of listing Campbell Brown’s achievements in the opening and then following it with the angry sounding second paragraph, in which Giles utilises the verb phrase, “managed to RUN…” They felt this fed into a wider social discourse of belittling successful women’s achievements. 

The final order is listed above in the images of my board. The triangle/mountain image comes into its own here because although Veronica Campbell Brown is undoubtedly the peak in terms of representation, that can only exist on the foundation of typical/historical representations that exist within society. Her image in this article rests on the patterns of how women, black people, athletics etc are represented in our wider culture. 

Before moving on to discussing how these representations were being established through language, I emphasised with students that once they had organised them in order of salience they could choose any three to focus on in their answer. Again this is crucial in eliciting a response from every student which is personal and potentially different. The lower ability students may want to focus on the top three whereas those aiming for the highest marks may want to start at the top and pull in something less obvious and perhaps more perceptive. 

The ‘How’ 

As this article is more about an approach to the questions, I will focus less on this part. But it is here where we start to come up with statements about how these people and institutions are being represented. Again, nothing too linguistic at this stage. Simply what seems to be jumping out? These can be seen in red in the image, but they decided VCB was being represented negatively as either a heartless cheat or as an incompetent woman who did not seem deserving of her accolades. As mentioned above it was very easy for them to now suggest that women are often ridiculed in our wider culture as a way to downplay their achievements. Some discussed, away from the world of sport, the ongoing, relentless and hateful treatment of Mary Beard here. 

It is only now we get to frameworks. Once they have organised their thinking in this way, the language and structure seems to reveal itself in a way it otherwise wouldn’t have done before. They have a solid route and the terrain looks easier for them to negotiate. If you want a more detailed approach for this stage, I recommend this one. 

With these representations and meanings in mind we explored that second paragraph in more detail:

But despite all that experience, she has still managed to run in the wrong lane. 

Verb phrase aside, they discussed the sentence opening with the coordinating conjunction functioning as the opening of the adverbial, something I’m sure would have led to much prescriptivist moaning, if they happened upon the Metro that morning on their commute. Why make this deliberate “error”? Well it must be to emphasise that what follows is bigger than all of those achievements just listed. This ramps up the tone of anger, sarcasm, humour and does a great job of reducing this successful athlete to the status of either ‘silly girl’ or ‘evil witch’ or both. We re-wrote this sentence in a variety of ways and decided the fronted adverbial was loaded with meaning, which supported what they had already said about the representations. Then there’s the obvious graphology of the capitalisation to anchor this. 

The ‘Why’

If in reading this so far you have wondered where the PAF (purpose/audience/form) or GCAP (genre/context/audience/purpose) as I teach, comes in. Well it’s here. I call these the macro concepts of linguistic analysis. The micro elements come from the areas of the frameworks or language levels and should always be used to comment on the macro concepts. 

We now make decisions about these macro concepts and the impact they have had in the writing of the text. Did Will Giles set out to destroy this athlete because she is a woman or is this an unfortunate consequence of something else from GCAP? Starting with the macro concept of Context of production, we looked at the date (2015), and the patterns of language which seemed to focus on British athletics and came up with the idea that there may have been a renewed interest in the sport in this country as a result of the 2012 Olympics. This focus on nationalism and tribal loyalties to Team GB goes some way to underpinning what The Metro might have been trying to do in this article through these representations. They have perhaps tried to position us against this Jamaican athlete to drum up tribal support for our team, but have used conventional negative representations of women to do it.  We also discussed the impact of The Metro and its tabloid style in the informal register adopted in our example. On the part of the producer, it may only be a funny (not funny) story for someone to read in 5 mins on the bus (Audience+context), but as we know, context of reception is everything and for a young woman aspiring to be an athlete this could have a far reaching impact. 

This layering of meaning according to GCAP is going to unlock a variety of interpretations of features and patterns that will allow the students to score highly in AO3. As with subject terminology for AO1, points about genre, context, audience and purpose are only as valuable as the argument you pin them to.  

So just because we come to the macro concepts of GCAP last in this strategy does not make it an afterthought. Quite the opposite in fact. An understanding of the construction of a given text from the perspective of GCAP is part of the foundation to understanding the representations in the first place. But rather than taking the approach of, ‘this is a tabloid newspaper article therefore it will represent x as y’, I much prefer, ‘x is represented as y, possibly because this is a tabloid newspaper article but it may be more to do with z.’

I think that the macro concepts should be something outlined and discussed in introductions as part of the foundation on which the students can build. As long as they’re tied to meanings and representations and contribute to the direction of travel. So putting all of the above together a successful intro to a Question 1, with this text as a basis, may look like:

In Text A, The Metro and writer Will Giles, offer a stereotypically negative representation of women, through Veronica Campbell Brown, as a means of generating national support for British Athletics in the wake of the 2012 Olympics. At various points Campbell Brown is represented as foolish and dull-witted, someone undeserving of her previous achievements and at worst, a dishonest cheat. Giles adopts a classically tabloid style to create these meanings, potentially for click-bait in an online format or to entertain a tribal sports fan on their daily commute. 

This is slightly wordy, but you get the picture. This intro condenses everything into one paragraph, which covers three strands of representation and their link to audience, genre and two contextual factors. 

Hopefully this has given you some ideas about how to approach the Paper One mountain with students, particularly mixed ability students. Well done for reaching the summit! 

Rules & Regulations: Paper 1 exam-style question

If you're a teacher and you've exhausted all the previous papers from AQA and are yourself just a bit exhausted after the... stuff... that's been happening over the last year, I thought I'd try to offer a few possible exam-style questions here. I won't claim any great originality for these as they have all appeared in some form or other in different places - either in textbooks or resources I've worked on - but some of them are in a slightly new form, so they might prove useful. 

Anyway, here's a possible pair of Paper 1 texts for Questions 1-3, based on school rules. Both of these texts originally appeared in a Workbook I did for the old AQA B spec which is now long out of print. I've also done a mark scheme for this which you can find here.

Finding the ‘Meaning’ in Meanings and Representations!

In this second guest blog of the week, Mr McVeigh takes a look at how he approaches Paper 1 Questions 1 & 2 with his students. 

As a Linguistics graduate, I loved the part of my studies where you started to acknowledge language around us. I could no longer sit at a train station people watching. I was consumed by the way that words encapsulate our everyday lives, connect with us on so many levels and shape our thoughts and attitudes.

To me, Meanings and Representations is the aspect of A Level English Language that helps students to see the power of words; the careful construction of texts and the ability to influence society.

Within this short blog post, I am going to outline some of the approaches to single text analysis of the construction of Meanings and Representations that I have found useful over the past few years.

When I first begin teaching Meanings and Representations, towards the start of their A Level journey, I try to encourage students to reflect on the construction of texts. Simply by making judgements on the way that a range of different texts impact and influence the students, we start to explore the connection between our attitudes towards a text and the language used to convey that.

The main aspect of the single text question is to understand what is meant by Meanings and Representations. I define this as; what is demonstrated or highlighted from a text (Representations) and what can be inferred from the text/ what that text wants you to do (Meanings). Introducing this terminology is essential as I ask students to ensure they use both words within their written responses to clearly demonstrate to an examiner that they are reflecting the assessment expectations.

Students then need to understand language frameworks and levels. This aspect of Meanings and Representations is the most complex aspect of this question: students often feel overwhelmed with the precision of terminology required to reach the top band in their answers. To begin to introduce language levels, I tend to start by setting students a SATS test. This gives them an understanding of some of the expectations needed when analysing texts and also gives me an indication of support needed. 

Graphology, as a language level, tends to be something that students fall back on as a support. Although, I stress its importance, I encourage students to apply more grammatical and pragmatic comments to their essays to try to show a greater control over their analysis. Recently, I taught a lesson on clause types. We spent the whole lesson trying to familiarise ourselves with the way that different clause types are used within journalism. I can’t say we all had fallen in love with grammar at the end of the 60 minutes but it certainly has helped to see an increase in grammatical points being expressed in writing.

Once students have grasped language level analysis (this is by no means something that happens overnight!) I begin to teach the construction of analytical paragraphs. Often, I have to do a layered approach to language levels, building confidence throughout the units we study in Year 12, connecting meanings and representations-style texts to language discourses.

Prior to annotation and beginning the writing process, I ask students to contextualise the text by identifying the purpose, audience and form of a text (PAF). I then ask students to have this as their introduction to a Meanings and Representations question. This helps to strengthen the overall structure of writing.

My approach to Question One and Two for Meanings and Representations has been refined over the past few years of teaching. I like students to identify at least three representations. I normally say that the author is always represented within a text so that is always a good starting point. I then say to focus on layers within the issue being discussed in the text. E.g. if the text talks about the representation of women in an old advert you may talk about both how women are represented and how men are represented with strong contextual connections and comments.

To clearly demonstrate an understanding of representations, I ask my students to begin each paragraph with “the representation of ‘x’” and apply language levels to that representation. Originally, I used to ask students to take a language level per paragraph but felt that, by fronting representations, students had a tighter control over their overall structure and were able to be more precise with their language level analysis. 

I also encourage students to apply a range of language levels throughout. As mentioned previously, I place emphasis on inclusions of grammatical and pragmatic references but also encourage lexis and semantics for students who may not feel as confident applying more grammatical terms.

Having applied language levels to support the representation, students need to mention audience positioning. This is where they can connect the representation to the meaning. I ask students through questioning the following questions: “How does the writer position a reader to connect with this representation?” and “What meaning do you think they are conveying?”. This then builds the deeper analytical points needed to hit the top band answers. Audience positioning is also something that is frequently written in the AQA mark scheme so I try to encourage this phrasing being written alongside representations and meanings.

The last component of the paragraphs needed is to contextualise their exploration and connect back to the PAF stated previously. When exploring the older text, students can reflect on society at the time, similarly with the more modern texts, students can reflect on more pragmatic viewpoints that help to justify the meanings established.

Now that I am in my fifth year of teaching A Level English Language, I feel confident in this structure. My students have found the methods logical and apply these to essays and show a willingness to apply more complex linguistic features. I only hope that the next time they are sat at a train station, they too can no longer people watch!

If you wish to find out anymore from this strategy, please do have a look at the Teacher Guidance Pack shared on my Twitter account which provides an example paragraph to support.

Paper One: Section A - Trying Something Else

This is the first of a few guest blogs coming up this week, so thank you to all those teachers and linguists who have contributed their ideas and time. This one is by Neil Hutchinson, a teacher at Kirkbie Kendal School in the Lake District (on Twitter as @Hutchinsonnet). Thanks Neil!

In what has been a surreal and tumultuous ‘Endgame’ lead up to exam preparation with Year 13, like most schools across the country we are having to find our own way to assess our students in the face of cancelled exams. As a result of this we decided to make Paper One an integral part of this, as it does seem the bread and butter of English Language: the analysis of language and structure in unseen written texts has been something these kids have been working towards all of their lives in our subject. 

It is so important then that we constantly revise our practice to help them practise this skill. Twitter has a knack of placing you in the middle of a number of converging narratives when it comes to resources. Think of a shared universe of linguistic superheroes teaming up in one megablockbuster. So at the same time Dan posted this thread containing an article about an assault on a woman “on a path” (we’ll come to that later), another fantastic member of the linguistic twitter Avengers, Mr Crawford, whose superhero moniker is @MrCrawford9, posted this excellent entry on his own blog about a method of analysis he calls “Try Something Else”. 

I shamelessly adapted Mr Crawford’s idea in combination with the article posted by Dan, and so, like a low rent linguistic Thor (let’s face it I’m more like Falcon hanging on the cape tails of the enhanced) I am answering Dan’s call to assemble and sharing the outcome of this combination of ideas. 

I do encourage you to read Mr Crawford’s blog for a more detailed breakdown of the method but in short, I found that if you have students who want for a way in to the analysis of lexis and grammar (particularly grammar) in a given text, this works perfectly. If you have students who struggle to move beyond the obvious in terms of audience positioning, representation i.e. pre-modification and specific adjective choices writer’s make, this works perfectly. What Mr Crawford advocates is taking what, on the surface, seems a fairly innocuous sentence and making changes to it in order to draw attention to what was there in the first place. For example:

The text was taken from The Guardian, and was about the writer’s attempts to overcome her addiction to Diet Coke. I asked them to focus their analysis on the grammatical features of the text. We focused on the text’s sub-heading (known as a 'standfirst' in the media), which read:

 “I have been obsessed with the sugar-free soda since I was four, spending £500 a year on up to seven cans a day. This is what happened when I tried to quit.”

The students said that they had been able to identify grammatical features, including the use of present perfect tense, and adverbial and non-finite clauses, but that they did not know what to say about the text’s use of these features.

So, I asked the students to try something else. We swapped one of the words in the sub-heading:

“I had been obsessed...”

Now, instead of present perfect tense, we were looking at past perfect tense.

By focusing on the altered meanings, the student’s are now well placed to consider the original in a way which they may not have seen first time round. Aside from the advantages of this approach, I found it was also an excellent way to revise subject terminology, spot linguistic and thematic patterns and crucially to write a lot about a little - all essential AO1 goodness. 

So what I did was take the original headline in the article:

Teenage girl headbutts man after being grabbed on path

Not innocuous by any means, I know. In fact it was the justifiable criticism posted in response to this headline that makes this an essential piece of journalism for practising analysing representations. 

The first thing I had the students do was split their page into four quarters, putting this piece of text in the centre of the crosshairs. I then proposed the students re-write the headline in four different ways. At this juncture you can suggest they focus on using language to alter the representations or simply leave it as vague as “change the headline”. I did suggest they have a go at changing the grammar in at least one of their examples, again to move away from simply looking at lexical choices. 

 

Next I simply put some of their examples on the interactive whiteboard and modelled annotating and analysing. 

One example of a change was:

Man tries to grab teenage girl on path, receives headbutt

The first strikingly salient point in this student’s example (thanks Millie!) was the overall grammatical structure carrying a very “online” tone. The omission of a final coordinating conjunction in place of a comma followed by a final verb (receives) and indirect object (headbutt) is something we’re used to seeing pop up on our phones. But instead of dwelling on this we focused more on agency in this construction. The students suggested that in the first clause, the fact that the man is the agent of the verb phrase shifted the story to being about his crime and represented him as the wrong-doer. This formed a pattern with that second clause as “receives headbutt” almost removed the teenage girl as the subject and agent of the headbutt through the passive construction. The student in question said definitively she didn’t think the girl had done anything wrong and therefore wanted to suggest this in the headline. At this point we were able to go straight back to the original and looked more specifically at the agency. The students suggested that “Teenage girl headbutts man”, placing her as the agent seemed to represent her as the criminal in the story. And coupled with the violent nature of the verb “headbutt” this painted a very ugly picture of a young woman who had been attacked. Further to this, they similarly went straight to the second subordinate clause, like they did in the changed example, and suggested that “after being grabbed” similarly removed him as an agent in this assault, once again through its passive nature.

I mentioned pattern spotting was an area we wanted to revise and this method unlocked this perfectly. We went next to terms of address. Sticking with the changed example I asked why they stuck with “teenage girl” as the original did. The rest of the class suggested that in the changed headline the pre-modification of the noun with the adjective “teenage” in the changed headline represents her as brave and courageous in the face of the man’s assault. Indeed the juxtaposition between “teenage girl” and “man” demonstrates an unpleasant imbalance of power again representing him as an older criminal and she as a child victim. However, because the original seemed to offer a polar opposite set of representations, this pattern didn’t hold up in the original. Instead because the girl was being held up as the instigator of the incident by the BBC, “teenage” carrying now the socially negative connotations of “chav” or “delinquent”. This was a gift in revising pinning our analyses down to audience pragmatic awareness. They even paired these negative connotations with the traditional newspaper headline format (as opposed to the online style in the changed version) and suggested the target audience would be your older, more conservative reader of BBC news stories, who may hold more negative views about women. All agreed the BBC had a wide ocean of fans, so they let the linguistic construction of the headline guide them as to who, in that vast sea, would be drawn to the line cast by this headline. Going back to terms of address they were also able to suggest that the noun “man” in the original did not suggest an imbalance of power, as in the changed version, but instead through its lack of modification and dispassionate, bland and unemotive tone pointed towards his innocence rather than guilt. 

I think this was one of the more illuminating discussions in the lesson. The fact that the same set of lexemes can have polar opposite connotations depending on their position in a sentence and crucially, their presentation through the prism of contextual factors is AO1 and AO3 gold. 

Want more? Well let’s turn our attention to the verb phrase the student added. “tries to grab” rather than well...his possible role in her being “grabbed” in the original threw up some interesting discussion. Many said it makes the headline almost funny. I asked them if that would be true if it simply said “man tries to grab teenage girl”. They all agreed no. We go back to the pattern of the online tone that comes about with the inclusion of the last clause, “receives headbutt”. They suggested that because the “tries to” is there it makes him seem incompetent and someone who bit off way more than he could chew. Again emphasising her strength, her bravery. Celebrating her as a hero, not a victim. Placing it at the beginning gives the reader permission to laugh at this incident before we even find out about the headbutting, which arrives with a clunk at the end like the punchline to a very funny joke. How online in its patterning! These ideas are implied in the original. The story hasn’t changed. He tried to grab a girl, didn’t succeed and got his comeuppance. The class were actually horrified that the BBC didn’t have the nouse to take the same angle. 

So why didn't they? Well they decided, because it is 2021. And many still believe uppity women are perhaps getting a little ahead of themselves in calling for change. Remember contextually this story appeared in the same week as vigils were to be held in opposition to violence against women as a result of the Sarah Everard kidnap and murder. And we all saw how the status quo reacted there. Instead of seizing upon that and using this story as an opportunity to chime in with the chorus of women who have decided to stand up against injustice, the writer of this article instead simply replicated a thematic pattern when representing women: that they are to blame for their own abuse at the hands of men. Remember that’s men. Not “attacker”, a noun the BBC could have used. 

Finally in this changed headline, the student kept “on path”. Exploring this prepositional phrase in close detail revealed that both headlines seemed to highlight that these incidents of violence were occuring in open spaces, in public. Typical genre fair in newspapers is to feed into moral panics. The key difference being in my forward thinking student’s headline the message is clearly ‘women, watch out for men’ whereas the BBC seemed to be saying ‘men, watch out for teenage girls’. 

This wasn’t the end of the lesson. In fact this wasn’t the only headline we looked at. We then explored a couple more, constantly going back to the original and making informed judgements about the language used to create meanings and representations. 

The irony is if you click that link in the article now, the headline you actually get is:

Teenage girl fights off man who grabbed her on canal path

The next part of my lesson was focused on analysing what the BBC had changed it to and why. How they were now positioning us to feel about the girl (removed “teenage” eh? Hmm) and how they were positioning themselves as a voice in this debate. 

The first thing they noticed? The subordinate clause has been changed to a relative clause. Now the BBC were laying the blame squarely at his feet and coupled with the more politically motivated “fights off” as opposed to the violent “headbutts” (I know some still have issues with “fights” but that is a debate for a sequel perhaps), seemed to be reading the same script as the countless women protesting for the basic human right to walk down a canal path without the threat of being assaulted. The linguists won. Would my students have noticed a relative clause first time round? Honestly, I doubt they would have. Thank you Dan and thank you Mr Crawford. I encourage you all to try something else. 

Revision: for now and later

With the clocks going forward, beautiful blossom blooming on the trees and summer rapidly approaching, it's time to cast happy thoughts from your mind and think about the looming exams in June. Sorry.

There's still plenty of time to get revising (or just 'vising' if you haven't done some of the course content yet) but there are a few key things you can do now to make sure that what you are on the right lines for later on. We've already had a revision post from Olivia which focused on advice from her as a former student for students in the run-up to the exams, so this one takes a slightly different tack and thinks about the bigger picture and some suggested reading.

Big ideas
Think big, to begin with. Before you dive into the details of different topic areas and sections of exam papers, think about the big questions around English. How confident are you about them? Back in this blog post, I suggested that one of the ways to help understand the scope of areas such as language change and language diversity was to think about the big questions around how and why language changes and varies. To this, you can also add questions around children's language development. What are the main influences on children's spoken language development? How does children's writing development differ from their spoken development? Have some idea about the broad answers to these questions and then you can work out the ways in which the detail can be added as you work through the rest of your revision.

Op-eds
Read plenty of opinion pieces about language and get a good grasp of a) the language discourses used and replicated in them, and b) the style and structure of these pieces. Paper 2 Question 4 is where you need to write one of these yourself, so the more you have read and thought about, the better your chances of producing a good one of your own will be. You'll also be answering Question 3 on two texts that put forward views and opinions about language, so it'll help you with that.

Here are some suggestions for recent pieces that might help:
Regional Diversity
Meghan Markle's accent
The ugly rise of accent softening
Identity and International English


Get to grips with meanings
There's a worrying tendency in lots of English lessons these days, from Key Stage 2 to A level, to get completely obsessed with masses of literary and linguistic terms. You're doing an A level in which you need to show linguistic knowledge and expertise - and terminology has a role to play in that - but it's much more important to engage with what texts mean and then trace back how the language creates these meanings and representations.

In examiner-speak, this is an AO3-led approach. What is the text about? What is being said about this? How is the text producer using language to represent the issue, the events being described, the people or sources in the text, themselves, language? Once you can talk confidently about this, you can look at how the language - across all the levels of grammar, graphology, semantics and discourse - works and get more technical about it.

Using a deluge of technical terms is not a substitute for thinking deeply about a text's meanings, so revise by reading texts and immediately asking yourself quick-fire questions like "What is it about?", "What's being said about that?", "Who is saying these things?", "Why should I believe them?", "How are they trying to come across?". If you can't answer these confidently, read the text again. Practise with short texts and then build up to longer and more demanding ones as you get closer to the exams.


Work through your own ideas
As I said before (here), there's not an official list of theories and case studies that you can use as a tick-list, but there will be studies and theories you will have covered in class and through your own reading. Organise your notes on these and think through them. Be clear you know how you can use these ideas for different kinds of questions and pay particular attention to those studies that have multiple applications. Emma Moore's Eden Village Girls study in Bolton is a good one for this, because it opens up discussion about gender, region, class and friendship groups, and introduces ideas around 'communities of practice'. Likewise, Peter Trudgill's classic Norwich study takes the variable '-ing' and traces its pronunciation according to region (Norwich), class, gender and context (different kinds of speech formalities) while also considering how people tend to report on their own usage.

Understanding and exploring the intersection of different factors in people's language identities is a crucial part of doing well in the higher levels of AO2, so it makes sense to use studies that help address this, but equally, you can draw on any relevant research, so long as you use it intelligently (see the original blog).

Do some reading
There's still time to get some reading done. I know it's English Language and you don't have set texts, but there are some really good, accessible and fascinating language books out there. Even just dipping in and out of a few chapters from some of these will give you some added insight into the debates and the history but also lots of original examples and perhaps a few nice quotations. Here are my current favourites:

• Deborah Cameron: The Myth of Mars and Venus (how we talk and think about gender and speech)
• Lynne Murphy: The Prodigal Tongue (history and debates about American English)
• John McWhorter: Words on the Move (all about language change and how it happens)
• Lane Greene: Talk on the Wild Side (how we think about language change and try to 'tame' the language)
• Henry Hitchings: The Language Wars (the best book for understanding language discourses)
• The EMC Language Handbook: 14 chapters on different language topics and areas of research, all designed for A level students.

There are plenty of blogs and sites produced by linguists and experts which can keep you up to date with language in the news and the latest research. Some of my suggestions are:

• The Linguistics Research Digest
• Teach Real English: great material and resources for most aspects of A level English Language
• Tony Thorne's Language & Innovation site: articles, links and collections of slang
• Deborah Cameron's blog

And then there's always emagazine from the English and Media Centre. Every issue has great articles for students on the course and you can access the digital archive with your school/college's user name and password.

Thinking about Paper 1

Paper 1 of the A level isn't that far away so here are a few suggestions about approaching the first 3 questions. I've posted in more detail about these in previous blogs which you can find here, here and here but here are some quick pointers:

• It's all about meaning. Texts mean things and are made to mean by the people who produce them and the people who receive them. Think about what each text is actually about before you put pen to pen to paper. What are you being presented with? What's happened? Who is involved? What perspectives are being offered?
• Meanings depend on contexts. You need to think about how meanings are being created in the texts in front of you. Look closely at how language is being used in particular places in the texts and how that relies on context. Is it the context of text being spoken, online or written? Is it the context of what has gone before in the text? Is it the context of who is saying or writing something?
• Texts can be from all sorts of modes, genres, times and places, and for all sorts of audiences and purposes. Many of these will use language in recognisable ways that you'll be used to seeing and writing about. Some might be a bit less familiar - older, for example - but they'll still have been produced by a human being who's using language in ways that you'll recognise. 
• Language is not just words. When you're analysing how language is used, look for what words mean, patterns of meaning, structures and visual design. Think about all the language levels or frameworks that you've been learning over the last two years and use the most appropriate ones for the texts in front of you. Graphology isn't an issue in a spoken text (it's not designed to be seen on the page, after all) but phonology might be. An online text might use visual design to structure ideas and create meanings, so that could be vital.
• Structure is important. This could be grammatical structures (how phrases are put together, how words and clauses are placed in certain positions, how modal verbs, pronouns or tenses are used etc.) but also bigger, text-level, structures (beginnings, middles, ends...).
• Don't write anything until you've read the texts and don't start writing your answers for Questions 1 and 2 until you have made notes and annotated your texts. 
• Think about what you can include in your Question 3 answer while you're planning for Q1 and 2. It *is* OK to repeat yourself in Q3 but you need to explore connections and you need to think more carefully about the things that make the texts similar or different. One text will always be older and one contemporary - so there's your first difference -  but also think about organising your Q3 answer around things like audience, purpose and mode. 
• Don't offload huge amounts of knowledge about language change when you think about the older text. Stick to discussing what's relevant to the text and its immediate context.
• Be selective in what you write about and try to structure your answer clearly. There is no one right way to do this but it's best to avoid working your through a text in order ("In the first line there is a pronoun, in the second line there is an adjective, in the third line there is another adjective...") but to select the most useful parts to talk about and think about how they link together.
• Don't write a long, rambling and generic intro. Get into the texts as quickly as you can with just a  short introduction.

I'm sure you will have lots of advice from your teachers about how to approach these questions, but these are things I've often told my students and I think they usually help. Best of luck.