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A blog to help students and teachers get the most out of our A Level English Language conference

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Grouping texts: day one

Studying English Language at A level can mean that you look at some of the language's most ancient and glorious texts - Beowulf, William Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - but equally you might be given some strange and seemingly ephemeral texts to analyse: text messages, shopping lists, the opening paragraph of a Charlie and Lola book, some conversational exchanges about the weather, a status update on Facebook or a man talking to his chiropodist. Why?

Well, it's all language; that's why. And if you're studying A level English Language you're going to be looking at a huge range of material and trying to see patterns and connections in it. Most importantly, from an examiner's point of view, you'll be looking at extracts of language and grouping them using the linguistic methods (frameworks) that you've been learning on the course.

Marcello Giovanelli's session at the conference will be all about this - how you apply linguistic methods to texts in the exam - and he's well placed to advise on this, being an examiner for one of the biggest awarding bodies and a co-writer of one of the Nelson Thornes textbooks for the course.

Each day this week, and into next, we'll be giving you a new text extract to think about. As each day passes you'll be able to see potential links between the texts. They might share a similar target audience, use humour in their language, follow similar discourse structures, be from the same mode or feature words from particular semantic fields.

On day six we'll give you your last extract and ask you to suggest ways in which you could group these texts and linguistic reasons for those groupings.

It's all good practice for ENGB1 - if you do the AQA B spec - and will give you a taste of what's to come at the conference.

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