AQA AS English Language - 23rd May 2016

Any predictions on what will come up? Any exam tips?

My teacher is CONVINCED that both texts will be on technology. If they are, you could talk about:

Mimicking of prosodic features lost in written communication (e.g LOUD, happy!!!, emojis/emoticons to mimic paralinguistic features, you may not be able to tell if someone is being sarcastic)
Is it multimodal? (it most likely is)
How interactive is it? Is it a forum or an online newspaper?

Any other features of language & technology you guys can think of?

Good luck for (next) Monday!

My teacher doesn't know how to teach well, so i'm definately going to fail. Also it's on the same day as my Psychology exam, the really tough one! so i'm not even going to revise for English and will most probably fail!

lol I'm in the exact same situation as you! Im going to try and juggle revising for paper 2 psychology and paper 1 english but i dont think it will be easy ahah

Yeah! Paper 2 for Psychology is extremely hard and especially I found the paper 1 quite challenging too, so I really need to get a good grade for paper 2

How does everyone structure their question 1 and 2 on paper 1 ? My teacher says to do a mode, field, function, tenor introduction then go into paragraphs identifying language features which represent the text subject matter, writer and implied audience ??

Our teacher says to do FAP (heh) in the introduction:
FORM - is it a newspaper? a twitter feed?
AUDIENCE - who is the target audience?
PURPOSE - what is its primary/secondary purpose?

You can then refer to these three things throughout the text - remember you have to link back to representation! (it's the keyword of the question)

E.g Person A uses [this grammatical feature you have just explained] to represent themself as similiar to their audience

E.g Person B uses [phonology in way you have just explained] to fulfil their secondary purpose of entertaining the reader, and to represent themself as amusing and charming.

Use a PEE structure -
Point (outline what you are about to say e.g "Person A appeals to their audience through use of grammar)
Evidence (talk about their use of grammar, e.g "the use of elision in the verb "gonna"
Explain (explain how it links back to representation e.g "this represents person A has cool, casual and relaxed)

You could go even further and explain how that links to their audience / primary / secondary purpose.

The best points to go for are grammar, lexis/semantics or phonology. Those will get you the best marks!!

Message me if you need further help

That has helped so much thank you!! Also, how many language features would you comment on and would you mainly focus on grammar? Would you also advice highlighting the text and making a quick plan?

Thanks,

Well, you only have a limited amount of time, so I'd say as many features as you can (but they must be in depth. I usually cover 2-3 of the frameworks (e.g grammar, phonology, lexis/semantics) in lots of detail).

Personally, grammar is the one I'm best at, but the ones where you can get the most marks are the ones i've mentioned: phonology, grammar, lexis/semantics. There are other frameworks, too! (Discourse, graphology, pragmatics). You just need to have in depth analysis - don't just feature spot. e.g "This is called elision" and not much else. Talk about the impact of the feature and how it relates back to representation (or FAP).

DEFINITELY annotate the text! It really helps me to do a plan, but you don't have to if it doesn't help you.

Thank you! Defiantly feeling better for Tuesday now, I'll probably have more questions for paper 2 hahaha as i find that a lot harder!!

Hey guys my teacher said to spend only fifteen minutes writing my essays but I feel that isn't sufficient enough. How much time would you spend reading and writing?

From the front of the specimen paper:

Advice• It is recommended that you spend 20 minutes reading and preparing the texts. It is recommended that you spend 25 minutes writing your Question 1 answer, 25 minutes writing your Question 2 answer and 20 minutes writing your Question 3 answer.

So I think you're right - 15 minutes wouldn't be enough!

Ah thanks, cheers! What paper do you feel most confident on? For it's paper 1 but in paper 2, I got a B in question 3 when we had to write an article on accents.

Paper 1 is the most simple, and you don't have to revise loads like for paper 2! It's a clear winner.

Any predictions on what will come up? Any exam tips?

My teacher is CONVINCED that both texts will be on technology. If they are, you could talk about:

Mimicking of prosodic features lost in written communication (e.g LOUD, happy!!!, emojis/emoticons to mimic paralinguistic features, you may not be able to tell if someone is being sarcastic)
Is it multimodal? (it most likely is)
How interactive is it? Is it a forum or an online newspaper?

Any other features of language & technology you guys can think of?

Good luck for (next) Monday!

I have this exam next Monday too, i was wondering if any of you guys know where i can find past sources to analyse. Ive looked on the AQA site but its difficult to find anything relevant because its a new specification *cries*. Good luck to you all!

Hey! I've been analysing with news and article websites such as The Mirror/Daily Mail and I've chosen articles and analysed them. I'd maybe recommend choosing a forum discussion board for the second one, maybe even choosing a thread on here and analysing it?