1. Introduction to ELLA3 Revision Guide
2. ELLA3 Answering the Comparative Analysis Question
3. ELLA3 Comparative Analysis Question
4. ELLA3 Comparative Analysis Exemplar Response
5. ELLA3 Answering the Adaptation Question
6. ELLA3 Adaptation Exemplar Cupcakes Response
7. ELLA3 Adaptation Exemplar House Somewhere Response
8. ELLA3 Adaptation Checklist

This pack is to be used in conjunction with the ELLA3 paper set in Jan 2013 (the first with the new set sections in Section B), currently available on eAQA under ‘secure key materials’. It will...

1. ‘Burt’s Chips’ Textual Analysis PowerPoint

• Burts Crisps.pptx

2. Notes to Accompany ‘Burt’s Chips’ PowerPoint

The PowerPoint and ideas contained in these notes have been used successfully to introduce students to the linguistic methods or “frameworks” needed as a part of the AQA English Language course; however, the ideas contained here and in the PowerPoint are easily adaptable and entirely applicable to other A Level language courses as well as the combined English Language and Literature courses.

Slide 1 and General Notes

The...

Overview

• Accent & Dialect starters for A Level English Language lessons
• Key Sociolinguistic Studies into Variation
• Key Linguistic Concepts

Starters for A Level English Language: Accent and Dialect

A simple UK Geography test can be a fun starter for a lesson featuring particular UK varieties. It’s worth laminating a half class set of A3 outlines of the British Isles for this. Students work in pairs and either are given place names on cards to place appropriately (possibly with Blu-tak as well, so work can be held up to show the class) or a...

Gender, Media Representation and Power

This fairly old ‘riddle’ is a brilliant starter for the topic of gender, especially if students are not aware that the lesson will be focused on gender, so that they are not thinking along those lines already.  It’s my favourite way to start a unit of work on gender!

Some students will probably know the answer.  I find they can be fairly easily encouraged to keep it to themselves so as not to spoil the fun.  It works best projected on the board, with students writing down their answers secretly onto mini...

Spoken Language

Note that some of the starters listed in the ‘Language and Power’ guide focus on spoken language, particularly referencing status differences and politeness.

It can be interesting to ask students to draft a set of rules for conversations before studying speech in any depth. These can easily be drawn up in pairs and then tested against recorded conversations or transcripts. In some ways, it’s good for students to see that they can use their existing, ‘commonsense’ knowledge of language and yet, at the same time, it...

How do we address people? is a useful starter at an early stage in considering power and spoken language. Students can be asked to think of as many different terms of address as possible in a minute, or can be encouraged to think of different contexts and relationships and the relevant terms of address for these, perhaps with a three or five minute time limit.

Who has the power? can be a very effective starter to encourage students to use their intuition to determine who is more powerful from their speech. This can be good for encouraging...

Associated Resources

• Improving Your Analyses.pptx

Click on the link below to download Alan Thomas’s AQA A ENGA3 / ENGA4 Language Change within Language Explorations Guide.

Language Change within Language Explorations Guide.docx

This 110-page editable guide, written by a very experienced A Level English Language teacher, should prove helpful. It’s in Word (.docx) format, if you can only open Word (.doc) format files use the link below to convert it.

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats

We’ve also included a PDF version to help with printing.

For teachers coming into Language as Literature specialists, teaching linguistic theory is perhaps the most alien aspect of the course.  It is often seen as the most factual aspect within English teaching at A Level, and is sometimes (frustratingly) viewed by students as the only thing they can revise, as they see it as more explicitly ‘content’ than other elements of the course.

This is a collection of suggestions for different ways of introducing theoretical and research-based content to students, as well as ways of developing...

Associated Resources

• http://english.edusites.co.uk/index.php/category/c/teaching-ideas/

Carrying out linguistic analysis of texts and extracts in class

This is, of course, something that needs considerable practice in AS and A2 Language classrooms, and it can be a constant battle to engage in meaningful linguistic analysis while still ringing the changes.

This selection of ideas can be used for different kinds of analysis: general AS level analysis to embed and apply linguistic techniques; analysis of particular kinds of text (e.g....

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...