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.
