Analysing patterns and structures

You might have seen Dan’s recent post for the Oxford Education blog; in it he distills the examiners reports on last year’s A-Level exams into some key advice.   Here’s what that post has to say about text analysis and patterns:

‘A key message in last year’s reports was that ‘patterns’ across texts were as important as – if not more important than – identifying isolated features of language. Both the Paper 1 and Paper 2 reports this year stress this again. So, for example, the feedback on Paper 1 states “examiners noticed that those students who had a clear sense of each of the texts as a whole were far more coherent in their responses” as that made them “better placed to identify patterns in language use” across the texts.’

I’ve been trying to encourage this in my own students; it’s more useful and interesting to focus textual analysis on structures and patterns than on single words or even single sentences, particularly when time is as limited as it is in an exam.  You should link these features to contexts, of course – ‘why’ is always more interesting than ‘what’ – so you need to think about what these patterns tell us about how a topic is represented, how genre conventions are used or challenged, how an audience is positioned, how this text can be related to wider discourses about the same topic, how the producer or participants represent themselves …

These are the kinds of features I’m suggesting that you could look for if you want to avoid the disjointed, one-word-at-a-time approach.

·       Semantic fields, extended metaphors or other patterns of imagery

For example, is that football match represented using the imagery of war with words like ‘fight’, ‘battle’, ‘attack’?  Or is it represented as a more scientific, thoughtful game with descriptions like ‘clinical’ and ‘precision’?

·       Lexical patterns and repetition

For example, are there lots of first person plural pronouns suggesting inclusivity or the attempt to create a pseudo community?  Lots of highly modified noun phrases suggesting that the producer is introducing a new topic to the audience?   Is a particular word or phrase often repeated, and what aspect of the topic does this foreground?

·       Syntactic patterns

For example, are there a lot of conditional clauses suggesting a complex, nuanced topic and a tentative approach?  Is there syntactic parallelism for persuasive rhetorical effect?  Is the subject of the sentence missing or does the text use passive voice to conceal agency?

·       Modality

How much certainty, uncertainty or reliability is expressed?  Is it all about ‘slightly’ and ‘might’ or is it ‘must’ and ‘definitely’?  Did an event ‘definitely’ or ‘apparently’ happen? 

·       Whole text structure

For example, is there a problem/solution structure?  Are there any adjacency pairs? A circular structure?  Are there any narrative structural features such as binary oppositions?  What aspects of the topic are foregrounded?  How does the producer guide the audience and provide cohesion?

Here are the notes one of my classes came up with on structural features and patterns in a newspaper article – this one is from AQA Paper 1 in 2018, and you can find the rest of the paper here.

I’m sure you could add to these notes: my students didn’t get around to discussing discourse markers or modality, for instance.    But their notes would provide the basis of a fruitful, ‘big picture’ analysis of the text which I think could be much more successful than analysing the connotations of the specific adjective ‘smelly’, for instance.  Looking at patterns also provides a way into how the text fits into wider contexts. Once you’ve noticed the repeated binary opposition between past and present, for example, you can see that the article feeds into nostalgic discourses which see social change as decline; this could provide a big-picture focus for your analysis.

Top student revision tips

In this blog post, we've invited former A level English Language student, Olivia to give some advice to students about how she revised and what her top tips are for students doing the course. Thanks to Olivia for writing this and for all the great ideas here.

Hi, I’m Olivia! Two years ago I sat the A Level English Language exams. I’m now at university and make and share English Language revision resources for ambitious students as @astarlevels on TES and Twitter.

With that in mind, in this post I’m sharing my revision tips for aiming high in A Level English Language. I’ve split it into four sections: learning theory, preparing for writing essays/ articles, tackling data and general revision tips.

Learning theory

             

The first step in preparing for the exam is to get familiar with the AO2 you’ll need. Go through your notes from the past two years and fish out all the bits that look interesting or important.

Work smart before you work hard. You don’t need to learn everything. Select the best bits from each theory or case study, maybe two or three sentences that focus on the main findings or key ideas. Forget about learning the exact number of participants, endless details of the procedure or how the results were analysed. Stick to what they did and what they found. These are the parts that will help you answer the question.

Once you’ve lifted this information from your notes, you need to think about it. This is the crucial bit: make sure you have something useful about every piece of AO2 you plan to use. Ask yourself these sorts of questions that will encourage you to evaluate the essay title you have been set:

• What does it show about the broader topic?
• Why does it matter?
• What could the real life implication be?

It can also be useful to see how different studies and ideas link up and agree or disagree with each other. This is good preparation for evaluating ideas in the exam. Look at this example on language and gender:

• Zimmerman and West found men do the majority of interrupting in mixed conversation suggesting men want to dominate conversation.
• But Geoffrey Beattie suggested one man could have a disproportionate effect. His own research found the ratio of interrupting to be more or less equal.
• Deborah Cameron suggested that our need to find differences between language used by men and women causes us to exaggerate certain perceptions and ignore others. This creates a distorted picture. 

Then, just like that, you have the foundation of three paragraphs that can clearly evaluate an idea about language and gender. It’s worth remembering that you will have looked at lots of different studies and that while there are common studies and ideas in the various textbooks, it’s what you do with ideas, research and theory that really matters.

Writing essays/ articles

One big piece of advice is don’t let the day of the exam be the first time you write an essay or an article! You’ll feel a lot more confident if you know you’ve already tackled everything in the exam at least once.

Practise planning or writing essay answers to a question asking you to evaluate an idea about accent/ gender/ social group/ etc. This will help you link up the studies and theories, and you’ll also get an idea of the lines of argument and structure you might be able to apply to the real exam question.

A simple bit of prep for writing an article on paper 2, is to think up some kind of headline that you can use. “Language and gender: its every man for himself” could really be the headline for any article on language and gender. Having something like this in mind for all the topics, before the exam, stops you panicking on the day desperately searching for something vaguely funny to open with.

Analysing data

To tackle the paper 1 questions, you need to be confident in identifying and analysing language, including patterns of vocabulary and grammar. To practise, there are lots of activities online that show you how to spot clauses and sentence types, as well as nouns, verbs and adjectives. It’s also worth looking on mark schemes to see what specific bits of grammar are classed as high level by the exam board. Analysing these in your answer is a quick way to climb the marks.

It can be tricky to come up with interpretations of the grammar. A tactic I devised to overcome this is to use synonyms as your AO3. Take the phrase “protestors poured onto the street” for example, here’s what you’d do with it:

• Label interesting feature ‘poured’ = dynamic verb
• Synonym for poured = gush, cascade, huge amounts moving quickly
• Pull it together = the dynamic verb “poured” suggests the President is unpopular because huge numbers of people were surging through the streets to show their protest against him.

General tips

And finally, here is some general advice for revising for any A level…

• Try not to talk about how much revision you’re doing with your friends. There’s no need to compare and this usually results in more stress.
• Keep checking back to the specification, mark schemes and examiners reports – these are written by the exam board and are a good way to understand what they’re looking for.
• Set realistic and worthwhile goals. No one can (or needs to) write six essays and memorise a textbook in a day. Also, creating a colour coded revision timetable isn’t the most beneficial use of time.

So, I think that’s everything for my student to student advice. I hope some of it will be useful in making your revision more efficient and effective.

Remember that you can find tried and tested resources to help you revise A Level English Language here.

Thank you so much to Dan for inviting me to write this and good luck to everyone sitting exams in June!

                                                                                                       

Showing what you know

One of the challenges of exams is that they not only test you on what you know but they also test you on how you interpret the question to show what you know. A case in point is last summer's AS Paper 2 in which lots of students (including many of my own, I'm sure) saw a question about gender and thought "Woo hoo! We've done this one already - it was on last year's Paper 2". Or words to that effect...

Of course, a gender question was set on the 2016 paper, but with a very different focus. The problem with this is that - like all the other areas you do for Paper 2 in the AS and the A level - you have to select the most relevant knowledge to address the question that's been asked... not the question you'd have liked to be asked. And with Question 3 on Paper 2, the focus was very much supposed to be on representation of gender. That means that it's not really relevant* to talk about studies into language use and interaction. What's more, the question actually gave stimulus material based on discussion around sexist language as a way into the task.

This article, which appeared on The Guardian website a few weeks before the exam, is much more like the kind of thing that I think examiners were after: a text that looks at how language represents gender and how ideas about gender are constructed and challenged.

This is also a good one to think about; it's a blog by Deborah Cameron about the politics of pronouns and the reasons why various writers and linguists have argued about them and their significance.

The key thing to think about here is that when you look at the main areas for Paper 2 - broadly speaking, at AS it's accent & dialect and sociolect (including social groups, social class, occupation and gender) and at A level it's those plus ethnicity and world Englishes - you need to be aware that it's not just how people use language that is being assessed but how the users of language can be represented in language.

So, three things that you can do to help you avoid producing the wrong knowledge are:

1. Think carefully about how questions might be phrased that ask you to focus on representation of some of the other areas - social groups, ethnicity, occupational language.
2. If you are doing the AS, think carefully about the stimulus material and the steer it's giving you. 
3. Read the question very carefully and select from the most relevant parts of your knowledge. Don't assume that the keyword 'gender' should be the cue to offload all your knowledge about everything you've ever learnt about gender.

(*There are a few cases where it might be a little bit more relevant - like how certain pop linguistics books represent men as from Mars and women from Venus, or how deficit theorists represent women as weak - but these aren't enough to sustain a good answer.)

Mode mini-moments mark 1

In the run-up to the ENGA1 exam in a couple of weeks, here's the first in a short series of short posts on Language and Mode. Today it's about Mode...

What is mode? If you can't answer that question by now, I'd respectfully suggest that you should do some basic work on the topic. After all, the first part of the paper is called "Language and Mode", so you might be advised to understand what it's all about.

So, what is it? Mode, on a really basic level, is how a text producer conveys something to a text receiver. The text producer could be a person writing, texting, tweeting, talking face-to-face or telephoning and the text receiver could be one person or a much bigger audience. So, the mode part of this is what is in the middle - how it gets from A to B. Historically, mode has been separated into spoken and written forms, based upon the channel through which the text is received (visual - i.e. read or auditory i.e. heard) but that's too binary, so the way we generally conceptualise mode for this course is along a continuum. This approach owes a lot to the linguists Doug Biber and Dick Hudson who have both written about the ways in which certain texts exhibit particular mode characteristics or dimensions.

Jarvis Cocker demonstrates his knowledge of 2nd person
pronouns & multi-modality through gesture

More recently, a wider view of mode has been suggested (by, among others, Gunther Kress) in which mode does not apply simply to speech and writing but to other forms of meaning making too, such as gesture and images. This means that a written text with pictures might be seen as multi-modal, as would a spoken lecture accompanied by a power point and gestures (not the kind of gestures I am fond of making to my students to demonstrate first and second person pronouns).

So, if you think about mode early on when addressing the texts you are given in the ENGA1 exam, you can start to make some useful observations about the nature of each text before you start considering more familiar elements such as genre, audience, subject and purpose.

ENGA3 - making your examiner happy

It's just one day until ENGA3, so here's a quick post to wish you luck and to offer a few suggestions to make your examiner look upon you favourably.

Quote helpfully 
You should be using quotations from the texts you're analysing in your answers, but make sure they're helpful quotations. What's the difference between 1 and 2 below?

1. The writer uses the noun phrase "the foul degradation of our language continues apace" to support his prescriptive view of language change.
2. The writer uses the noun phrase "the foul degradation of our language continues apace" to support his prescriptive view of language change.

In short, 1 is wrong and 2 is right. That's because the quote used in 1 isn't actually a noun phrase, but a whole simple sentence/independent clause, while the quote in 2 actually specifies which bit is the noun phrase. I don't doubt that the person answering in the first one knows what they mean, but they're not making it easy for the examiner to give them marks.

Use examples

It's good to know stuff, but it's even better to show you know stuff. While that's a good bit of advice for the exam tomorrow, it might not be great life advice: no one likes a know-it-all, so forget this after tomorrow. Right? Examples are important to developing arguments and showing a grasp of a topic. If a question on language change asks you about how and why language changes, the big picture is obviously very important, but the examples can be really significant too. Think about going off the beaten track to find a few examples of neologisms (try here for starters), or here for some discussion of South African English or here for Australian English. If everyone uses the same revision guides and textbook (however brilliant the latter might be, ahem) then the examiners will get used to them. Surprise them with a few exciting and original gems.

Keep up with the times, daddio

As with the advice on examples, try to find some recent news stories about language to help you offer a bit of originality and range. This may reflect poorly on my sad and empty life, but I was excited and delighted to read an answer a couple of years ago in which the student made reference to a recent news report on the apparent demise of the Queen's English Society. This was particularly good as the question on Language Discourses that year used extracts from the QES website. So, what news stories have there been recently? Maybe you could have a look at a few of these and see if you can find some interesting angles.

Selfie

Slang and dialect bans

Rising intonation and career prospects

Young people and texting

Menglish?

Anyway, that's it for revision tips for ENGA3 for this year. Good luck in the exam.

ENGA3 June 2014 - revision tips part 5

Today's tediously titled top tips will focus on analytical frameworks for ENGA3, in particular the Section B Language Discourses question.

As I was saying in yesterday's post about Section B, the key difference between the two sections on the paper is that Section A deals with language as it's actually used - in different times, different places and by different people - while Section B deals with language as something to be discussed, argued about and debated. So, in terms of analysis, you can apply many of the same frameworks - word, phrase, clause and discourse analysis - to texts in both sections, but Section B really lends itself to a Critical Discourse Analysis approach.


In effect, this means that you're using language analysis to work out the ideological position a text producer is taking in discussing a language issue. So, this could mean you're using language analysis to work out how a writer is using the following:

• pronouns to address the reader and position him/herself in relation to the ideal reader (direct 2nd person address, inclusive 1st person plural, maybe some synthetic personalisation)
• lexical formality to suggest closeness to the ideal reader/distance and expertise
• modality to suggest elements of certainty or doubt, sometimes in the form of modal verbs, but also modal adverbs

Norman Fairclough: the daddy of Critical Discourse Analysis

For example - and I've shamelessly nicked this from an article I did for emagazine last year - with last January's question on the supposed Americanisation of English, Matthew Engel positioned himself in particular ways:

...in an article for The Daily Mail on Americanisms entering English, the columnist Matthew Engel, seems to humbly and self-mockingly position himself as out of touch by saying “Old buffers like me have always complained about the process, and we have always been defeated”. Should we take such a move at face value? Perhaps not. Engel goes on in the article to stridently berate the UK for adopting what he calls “ugly Americanisms”: “Nowadays, people have no idea where American ends and English begins. And that's a disaster for our national self-esteem. We are in danger of subordinating our language to someone else's - and with it large aspects of British life”. That doesn’t sound too much like the stance of a man who’s labelled himself an “old buffer”, but the words of a man who feels he’s still got battles to fight and wars to win (if not, home-runs to hit). His self-effacing positioning earlier on helps him appeal to his reader as a gentle, even rather defeated and pessimistic, sort of character, which his subsequent warnings and call to arms belie.

If you're still working on revision for this exam, you could do worse than look back through a few of the texts we've flagged up as being of Language Discourses interest and think about how you could analyse short chunks of them to see how the writers are positioning themselves through their language choices and how they're representing the particular language topic.

For example, this article by Lindsay Johns is fantastic for a bit of analysis, not only for the way he presents and positions himself but in the way he presents language to us as "an incredibly rich inheritance": a noun phrase that casts language as like a solid object passed unchanging from generation to generation. Is that the reality? Well, you might argue that it changes all the time and isn't something that is the gift of one person to give to another but something we should all share and contribute to.

In the simple sentence containing this phrase ("The English language is an incredibly rich inheritance.") there's no modality to suggest doubt, only certainty. This is the kind of analysis that can really help you in the first bullet point for Section B, because it links the AO1 language detail (words, phrases & sentences in this case) to the AO3 interpretation of meaning and discussion of representation.

There are plenty of good articles to practise this approach on, so have a look through the links here for a few examples.

ENGA3 June 2014 - revision tips part 4

To carry on the boring naming convention established earlier this week, this is part 4 of your ENGA3 June 2014 revision tips. So far we have looked at a bit of Section A Change and a bit of Section A variation, so now it's time for Section B Discourses.

One of the first things to remember is that Section B is different from Section A. In Section A the texts are based on language in use (language being used in different times and in different varieties) but in Section B the texts are about language. They will raise questions around how people feel about language and the way it changes and varies from time to time and person to person.

Last year's question was on Language and Gender, setting two extracts from a text which gave a very simplistic, difference model-style, interpretation of how women and men talk. It was there as a starting point for discussion, a springboard for offering a critique of such reductive models. If you 'd read Deborah Cameron's Myth of Mars and Venus, you'd have been laughing...

Back in January it was a question about American English and attitudes towards it. Again, the main text was provocative in its prescriptive outlook, giving students who knew their stuff a chance to argue against the author's anti-American views.

This time, it could be anything. All Change and Variation topics are fair game for this question, so make sure you have revised areas such as the following:

• political correctness and language change: how "change from above" is implemented, theorised about and (sometimes) resisted
• attitudes to different accents and dialects: the views people often have about different regional, social and national varieties
• views about technology and language change: how people feel about social media and texting's influences upon language use
• arguments about standard and non-standard English: what people say about slang, non-standard grammar and the social consequences of using non-standard forms

Of course, there could be plenty of others and we've covered a lot on this blog. Click here for all posts tagged as being to do with Language Discourses and you'll find plenty to mug up on.

The next post will offer a bit more focus on analytical frameworks for this question.

ENGA3 June 2014 - revision tips part 3

So... here's a post to help you revise for ENGA3 Section A Language Variation. And if you're wondering why I'm starting this post with so, starting everything with so is apparently undergoing a boom. Just look here for something on this from 2010 and here for something even more recent.

And how is this relevant to your ENGA3 exam? Well, the questions on Language Variation don't have to be about regional or national variation - or even variation according to class, ethnicity or gender - as they have been in the last few years; they can also be about the ways in which language varies in other ways, like rising intonation (uptalk or HRT), the use of vocal fry or even something like so, or innit, or this is me. All of these are recent variations in the ways people use language to communicate and what's interesting about them is that they represent the intersection between so many different factors.

We're no longer in a world of language study where we say that x speaks y because she's z, but that x speaks y in one situation because she's sometimes like z, but often like a, b or c, but might also want to sound a bit like d, e or f. But never u, k, i  or p. So...in many ways, with Language Variation, what makes a good answer is an awareness that people don't just use language because of some accident of birth (born male/female, white/black/Asian, to poor/rich parents in Birmingham/Bermondsey/Jaywick) but that language identity is so much more fluid. Good answers to questions on Language Variation will always acknowledge this.

There'll be more on Language Variation tomorrow, including the topic as a Language Discourses question for Section B.

ENGA3 June 2014 - revision tips part 2

Today, we will have a quick look at Section A Language Change questions. The last two ENGA3 exams have used pairs of texts in this section of the paper. So, last June we had an advert from the 19th Century to look at alongside a Caffe Nero webpage*. The January paper of that year (the last time a January paper was set) had a rugby match report from The Scotsman in the 19th Century alongside a web version of The Scotsman reviewing a similar game.

While it's quite possible that such a question will turn up again, there's a chance it might be a different type of question, so be prepared. Political Correctness is an interesting topic for Language Change as it is the kind of "change from above" that we rarely see (or at least, rarely see working) in English. To revise this topic you might want to think about some of the reasons why words become viewed as offensive - how they pejorate and how changes in society lead to different meanings being viewed as offensive. A good case study of course is gay and the coverage of its changing meanings here might help. Elsewhere, there's a fair bit on the blog from years ago about words such as spastic, mad and coloured, so have a look through the old articles for some good ideas.

Another type of question might focus on how a more recent text uses language and how that reflects a changing aspect of modern language, perhaps technology, popular culture or youth fashions. Again, we've covered these areas in the past, so articles like this one on youth slang or this one on slang through through the decades might be worth a read. Remember, you're encouraged to use your own studies and knowledge on this paper, so come equipped with plenty of examples of language change in action; Kerry Maxwell's Buzzwords is a great place to look. Examiners like to see new and original examples, rather than the same ones year in year out.

Whatever happens, the chances are your second bullet point will be asking you to address ideas around how and why language changes, so you should be prepared to think about the big drivers of language change and the processes that lead to change taking place. This link from the I Love English Language blog is handy for some useful theories and concepts.


*For the benefit of any Daily Mail "journalists" reading this, that was a demanding 19th Century text alongside a modern webpage, not a question "simply asking students to analyse the language of the Caffe Nero website". Got that?

Depeche mode

Good luck to everyone doing tomorrow's ENGA1 exam*. Just a couple of quick things to remind you of for Language and Mode.

Mode can be both big and small: a tiny detail like a non-fluency feature (umm...errr) or a non-standard spelling are worth looking at and relating to mode, but don't forget the bigger picture of what each mode can offer (affordances) and how it can hold you back (constraints) .
E.g. think about why a particular mode (and technology?) might have been used: what does it offer that another mode doesn't? And how does it restrict what you can say or write?

Mode is for life, not just for Christmas: don't just talk about mode in your intro and then forget about it like that unwanted Christmas puppy. Weave mode into the rest of your answer.

Channel your thoughts: don't forget the concept of channel. You've got texts using the visual channel and/or the auditory channel.  Even fairly basic points about (say) graphology (in the visual channel) or emphatic stress (in the auditory channel) can become quite significant in a text when you relate them to mode.

Things mean things: don't forget meaning. One of your first jobs should be to work out the following:

• What is each text about?
• How is that topic being represented?
• What views and perspectives are being presented to the reader/other speakers?
• How can we tell?

Language analysis underpins everything: if you don't analyse (and give clear examples), you're not going to do very well. Remember the linguistic frameworks and think very carefully  about how you can get a few more marks by adding a touch more detail. Have you identified a noun? Is it an abstract, concrete or proper noun? Is it part of a longer noun phrase? Own those language features... err... girlfriend.

*or any other English exam

Defending A level English Language

Anyone with an interest in English who has been following the news over the past week can't have missed the storm over the exam board OCR's plans to include the language of Russell Brand, Dizzee Rascal and Caitlin Moran in their proposed Language and Literature A level specification.

The Guardian ran the story on Tuesday, claiming that a "DFE insider" had already slammed the syllabus as being "immensely patronising" and "rubbish". The Telegraph was also up in arms about it and The Daily Fail was predictably splenetic, splashing large pictures of Brand, Mr Rascal, Grayson Perry and Michael Gove all over their article to reinforce the horror of what was being proposed. After all, these figures - bar the eminent Mr Gove, of course - are enemies of mainstream British values: Russell Brand is a former heroin addict (and therefore, as a drug user, no longer a human being with a valid opinion on anything), Dizzee Rascal is young, black, working class and successful (Why is he not in prison?) and Grayson Perry is a man who dresses as a woman (What my butler and groundsman often refer to as a "tranny". I ask you!).

The articles themselves gave only a tiny taste of the rage bubbling under the surface of middle England against this crackpot left-wing conspiracy to dumb down British students and ruin their education. Comments from Mail readers included some of the following gems:

• Finally, it has happened! The barbarians have taken over and the country is officially in the gutter.
• This dumbing down of education began back in the late 50s and early 60s when the lefties infiltrated the whole education system where they are now in full in control - as they are in most public services.
• The dumbing down of a nation continues.

But what was reported in all of these papers was only part of the story. In a response to the furore, OCR and The English and Media Centre (a brilliant educational charity who produce resources and run courses for English teachers - and, I've got to add, for whom I do quite a lot of work) issued a statement to explain what was actually happening. The tweets of Caitlin Moran, the speeches of Russell Brand and the interview between Dizzee Rascal and Jeremy Paxman were not being treated as "great literature" - as some stories had implied - but as forms of spoken and blended mode language for linguistic analysis, alongside a range of classic and contemporary literature:

The language of a House of Commons Select Committee, with Russell Brand, is not being put up as a challenge to Shakespeare. It is not a literary text and it is not being judged against the measure of whether it is ‘good’ literature, because it isn’t literature. That is not comparing like with like. That is muddling the literary aspect of study with the required linguistic elements of the course. It’s not even saying it is ‘good’ speaking.  That is not what linguists do. It is being offered to students for analysis, as a fascinating example of language use, in the terms used within the academic discipline of linguistics.

And that - as they point out elsewhere in their statement on the blog - is exactly what the exam boards have been tasked with producing by Ofqual for the new A levels (which start being taught next year). I'm involved in a team working on AQA's new English Language specification and I know we have worked very hard over the last two years to ensure we meet those demands, so it's immensely depressing to see others' hard work rubbished in this way and deliberately, wilfully, misinterpreted by those with a massive axe to grind.

It's not exactly surprising to see the Daily Mail up in arms about contemporary texts being taught - their standard view tends to be if it's dead and white, it's alright - but in an article in today's Mail (The A-levels in idiocy: Celebrity obsession of examiners revealed in MoS survey of test papers as Gove is told standards are being ‘fatally undermined’) they go a few steps further and start to attack the existing A levels. And if you're a student reading this, or a teacher preparing your students for the forthcoming exams, that's the set of exams you're working towards now. Normally, the press hang on until results day to tell you your qualifications ain't worth sheeit, but they're telling you this the week before your AS level exam. Nice touch, I think.

And what are they telling us about English Language A level? Well, it's very much the same angle they took with the OCR Language and Literature specification: that you are being taught dumbed down, incorrect, fashionable speech because it's trendy and accessible and that teachers and exam boards don't want to challenge you with really difficult texts because we're intellectually lazy and morally suspect. And let's remember, this is The Daily Mail telling us this: telling us A levels in English are "celebrity-obsessed". Next to a sidebar of pictures of celebrity cellulite, Katie Price's ample cleavage and a picture of Will.i.am. Irony? Not half.

They have chosen to illustrate this supposed dumbing down by quoting examples from recent exam papers. Let's have a look at a couple of these in more detail, because I think these make great case studies of spin and selective quotation. Nice practice for a bit of critical discourse analysis too, if you're revising for your ENGA3 exam!

According to the Daily Mail...

One question simply states: 'Analyse the text on this Caffè Nero website'

I checked last summer's ENGA3 paper. Here's what appeared:

Text A, below, is an advertisement for coffee published during the Great Exhibition of 1851. Text B, on page 3, is a webpage produced by the coffee company Caffè Nero in 2012.

Analyse how language is used in Text A and Text B to represent the companies’ coffee. 

With reference to Text A, Text B and your own studies, illustrate and evaluate different ways of explaining how language changes.

It doesn't take a genius to see that the Mail has reworded the question and deliberately left out the most important parts of it, namely that the Caffe Nero ad is being looked at alongside a 19th Century text as an example of language change in action. They also quote an extract from the Language Variation question on that paper:

Analyse the distinctive features of American rapper Juvenile’s language in Text C (an interview) and how he conveys his experiences and ideas, eg ‘You know when I was young a lot of cats would make a song… you know what I’m saying? Now you got it to where artists is goin’ out there makin’ money like football players… I ain’t doin’ nuthin… I ain’t causin’ no harm to nobody. She [his mother] widdit, you know what I’m saying?’

This time, the quote is a little more accurate, but not much. There's more to it, obviously, because the actual question featured a longer interview in which Juvenile switched from non-standard to a more standard form of English. It also featured a second bullet point that stated:

Referring to Text C, Figure 1 and your own studies, evaluate how far people’s social class affects their use of English.

This was alongside a diagram from Janet Holmes' An Introduction to Sociolinguistics which presented data on ethnicity, class and the use of multiple negation. So, dumbed down? Lacking rigour? Clearly, the Mail hopes to present the idea of a rapper's language being studied as part of an A level in English Language as both of these things. But it's not is it? To answer these two questions well, students need to know a large amount about grammar, phonetics, sociolinguistic theory such as code-switching, ideas of covert and overt prestige and much more besides. In fact, I wrote a fairly long article for NATE's Teaching English, using this interview as an example of much that is good in the English Language A level, some of which I've quoted below to illustrate why I think it's a demanding and useful text to explore.

...the interview offers a slice of English language at its most vital, subtle and provocative, not simply in its delivery but in the areas for discussion that it opens up. In doing these things, it offers some of the most fruitful territory for students interested in finding out more about how language works: the influences that shape our linguistic identities, from where we were born to the colour of our skin, from the work we do to the people we associate with, and maybe more importantly than all of these, the choices we make ourselves about the identities we wish to project to others. In other words, an analysis and discussion of such language can open up the external and internal factors that shape our language use as individuals, as members of groups in society and in a multiplicity of different situations, using language for different purposes with different people. And this can all be done with genuine linguistic depth and, dare I say it, rigour.

With Juvenile, the question in the ENGA3 paper tells us that he is a rapper from a working class area of New Orleans, and we might also assume from his language choices (correctly, in this case) that he is black, so we already have a number of “boxes” we could put him into based on his nationality, region, gender, ethnicity, social class and occupation – all factors that have been looked at in detail by linguists such as Peter Trudgill, Viv Edwards, Malcolm Petyt, Sue Fox, Paul Kerswill and Jenny Cheshire, who would be known to most students – but there are many other factors to consider too.

Juvenile employs a number of features of non-standard grammar in his language: the deletion of the copula verb in the utterances “We family” and “Everything the same”; the deletion of auxiliary verbs in “We still doin the same thangs”, “We paperchasin, cousin” and “We tryin to get all the money, cousin”; the multiple negation of “Ain’t nuthin changed”. In terms of phonology, he drops the –g in some –ing endings such as “livin”,“doin”, “paperchasin” and “tryin” and pronounces the i in things as thangs. Lexically and semantically, he uses colloquial terms of address such as man and cousin to relate to his interviewer, as well as the slang term for making money “paperchasin” (where dollar bills are the paper being chased).

There’s a lot to look at in terms of Juvenile’s non-standard usage here, but what’s also interesting is that it’s not a question of him being unable to use standard forms; on many occasions he chooses to use them. So, he uses a copula verb when he says “She’s down with it now”, inserts an auxiliary verb (admittedly with a non-standard agreement between subject and verb) when he tells us that “artists is goin out there makin money” and elsewhere in the interview switches between standard and non-standard English. He is making choices about his language, many of which may well be dependent on the audience he’s addressing and the persona he wishes to project. The discussion of what Juvenile is saying and how he says it is much more than just identifying “errors” in his speech and blaming them on different facets of his identity – his upbringing, his education, his class, his lifestyle - but treating what he says and how he says it as a source of wider discussion. Why does he choose to say a) here while he chooses to say b) there? Why does he choose this form when he’s addressing this topic, but that form when he addresses that topic?

There's more, if you want read it, and you can find it here, but I hope that the extract above makes the point clearly enough that what we're looking at here is not something that is dumbed down and fashionable, designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but genuine language in use by real people and eminently worthy of close study.

That's why the Daily Mail is so massively, colossally, knuckle-headedly wrong about everything they say in their article.


For those of you doing ENGA3 Language Discourses, you might recognise the tendency of the comments in and after the articles to dredge up notions of decline, pollution and collapse - all great staples of the prescriptivist mindset - and it's no great surprise to find that such reactions appear in right-wing  publications when spoken language and contemporary reference points are held up as valid for analysis. Because, after all, studying contemporary English - spoken language, text messaging, urban slang and twitter, for example - is just shallow, unacademic and immature, isn't it?

Well, no. And I hope I've made it clear here just how valuable I think this kind of study is and why the AS levels you are taking next week, the A levels you are taking in June and (I hope) the Language and Linguistics courses many of you will go on to do at University are valuable, useful, intellectually stimulating, rigorously academic and, above all, worth defending.

Edited on 11.05.14 to add link to NATE Teaching English article - thanks to NATE for permission to link and lots of other English Language teachers for their support :-)