Associated Resources

• Transcripts Pack
• Guide to Conversation Analysis.doc

This guide is intended to support teachers preparing students for tasks involving the analysis of transcribed conversation at AS and A2 level, although teachers of the new GCSE unit on Spoken Language may also find some helpful information here, especially in the “Key Issues” section.  Just don’t get carried away with the technical terms or theories at this level!

The advice and information given here is relevant to many specifications, both Language courses and...

Associated Resources

• A Guide to Conversational Analysis

Introduction

This collection of transcripts has been produced with A Level Language and combined Language and Literature teaching in mind, although some of the transcripts may also be suitable for use with the new Spoken Language GCSE unit.

• Never Mind The Buzzcocks.doc
• David Beckham and Jonathan Ross.doc
• Paxman and Cooper on Taxes.doc
• Husband and Wife - Nan and her Fruit Pies.doc
• Student and Teacher.doc
• Jeremy Kyle.doc
• Hugh F-W - Beer Batter.doc
• Loose Women.doc
• QI Daniel Radcliffe.doc...[ read full article ] »
  

Language Investigations

This is a guide to preparing students for the various ‘Investigations in English Language’ units that form part of many A Level English Language courses. It has been written to cover the A2 coursework requirements for the following examination boards:

• The basic requirements for the investigation are broadly similar across all boards but where needed, specific advice for a particular exam board’s specification is shown and clearly identified.

Assessment Focus (Assessment...

When looking for ways to ‘group’ texts, subtlety is what gains marks. The choice of grouping itself gains few marks; but the discussion of the problems or subtleties of the text within its grouping gains many marks. Texts are never either ‘one thing’ or ‘another’: they lie on a continuum between the grouping’s extremes (see the EnglishEdu Guide for more on this).

It can be argued that, at some level, all texts are persuasive: that is, they act, if their audience recognises the text as ‘addressing them’, to influence their...

Click on the link immediately below to download our Text Analysis & Grouping Grid.

ENGB1a_-_Analytical__Grouping_Texts.doc

• Unfortunately, it’s not possible to learn by rote a fixed set of categories into which a set of unseen texts can be ‘grouped’ – but there are some central linguistic ideas to have ready in your head to apply on the big day.
• Whichever categories you eventually choose to use on exam day (and typically, you’ll choose four different categories or grouping), the key is to discuss the variability of each text...

ENGB1 Part 2: Introduction

Language & Power; Language & Gender; Language and Technology

Power is so intimately woven into our social fabric that no student in any classroom anywhere will be unaware of its existence, sometimes to their pleasure, sometimes to their distaste and sometimes, in the case of bullying, to their horror. Year 12 students are at an age, too, where they are naturally prickly towards many aspects of power be it parental, institutional or other. Rebellion, if not often in action is often in mind.

But power and influence...

ENGB1 Social Contexts: Language and Power

From birth, aspects of power infiltrate our daily lives to such a degree that, for much of the time, we are likely to fail to recognise either its presence or at least how pervasive it can be. Influence of various kinds forms a kind of ‘backcloth’ to daily life such that we can easily see it, if at all, as ‘obvious’, ‘common sense’, ‘natural’ or ‘for the best’. Paradoxically, we hold dear to the belief that we are ‘free’ individuals with levels of ‘freedom’ that we see as...

If there’s one ‘framework’ that has the ability to haunt both teacher and student alike, it is surely grammar. For many teachers, putting a tentative toe into the Sea of Grammar seems all-too-easily to risk slipping on a coastal shelf and floundering to seemingly bottomless and very murky depths – not waving but drowning, maybe?

This guide is the result both of a passion for grammar and several years of trying to find ways to teach it that work for students of varying abilities and levels of interest. It’s not an attempt at...

This guide considers ways of teaching textual analysis using the exam boards’ ‘linguistic concepts’ (aka analytical ‘frameworks’). The guide works alongside the previous guide that, under the umbrella of ‘discourse analysis’, explored the mnemonic ‘G-CAP’: genre, context, audience and purpose.

The purpose of using these ‘linguistic concepts’ is to provide a selection of useful ‘levels’ from which a text can be considered analytically, levels that will allow a close, methodical and above all, subtly revealing...

AQA English Language B – ENGB1

An Introduction

ENGB1 is the first unit of the new (2009) AQA B course; it’s a wholly examined unit worth 60% of the student’s AS mark (i.e. 30% of the A-level). It consists of two sections:

• Section A: ‘Text Varieties’

• Section B: ‘Language & Social Contexts’.

The introductory unit, ENGB1, needs to be viewed as far more than just ‘a unit’ within this AS level course. Whilst it is, in some respects, a natural development from the students’ GCSE English course, many students are surprised...