AS English Language AQA B Re-Sit May 23rd 2016 - Categorising texts

I'm sure you did really well
What were your groupings?

My groupings were:
- 3 childrens texts to entertain however written by adult text producer. Compared discourse structures.
- sub grouping of declarative sentences, compared why they were used and difference in sentence types between text.
- grouping on politeness between the a level spoken text and note to thief.
- yeo valley advert and another one but can't write remember haha.

Can't remember the rest but know I discussed 5/6 texts although i cant remember all of them.

I didn't have time to do the greeting card which was annoying cause i had points on humour and stereotypes that i could have made.

@Hannah3105 @hlaff What points did you make for power?

I think the power text this year was harder because the text didn't seem to allow you to use as many theorys

My groupings were:
- 3 childrens texts to entertain however written by adult text producer. Compared discourse structures.
- sub grouping of declarative sentences, compared why they were used and difference in sentence types between text.
- grouping on politeness between the a level spoken text and note to thief.
- yeo valley advert and another one but can't write remember haha.

Can't remember the rest but know I discussed 5/6 texts although i cant remember all of them.

I didn't have time to do the greeting card which was annoying cause i had points on humour and stereotypes that i could have made.

@Hannah3105 @hlaff What points did you make for power?

I think the power text this year was harder because the text didn't seem to allow you to use as many theorys

-I basically just began stating the obvious GAP, register, etc.
-I began by talking about power behind discourse which is represented through the authority that the teacher holes due to her role and also mentioned hierarchy, as the teacher is placed under constraints by people above her to teach a certain syllabus which is not within her control.
-I then done a paragraph about instrumental power which I kinda linked with power in discourse and began talking about the subtleties of her discourse which allows instrumental power to be excercised e.g. IRF modal, imperatives and repressive discourse strategies.
-Then I started talking about power in discourse which was highlighted by the use of modal auxiliary verbs and a the use of 'objective', shows clear goals for the lessons and rambled about that for a bit.
-I then compared the personal power of the teacher with the personal power of the students such as Aisha, and then went on about htat for a bit.
-The next paragraph I done focused on infliencial power, which I linked to knowledge power and field-specific lexis and also synthetic personalisation as she is addressing a whole class, not just one individual and then said about how this is linked to the instructional purpose of the text.
-Somewhere within the essay I also mentioned about Face but cant remember where lol.
-I then spoke a small bit about politeness and finished with a bit on Grice's Maxims and was done. Phew.

Your groupings seem varied which is good and fairly uncommon which is good!
I basically said the teacher holds power in three ways - age, occupation and knowledge
I did use synthetic personalisation as I said she uses direct address to the whole class and she may not have a relationship with some of them (it's a bit far-fetched but this was near enough my last paragraph cos I panicked lol)
I said she had the longest mean length utterance
She used lots of imperatives and deiontic modal auxiliary verbs
I said some stuff about face
I tried to be a bit controversial as one participant I think her name was Aisha said something like "If I knew where it was I wouldn't be asking" (that's not the real quote but it was something on the lines of that)
I also pointed out that the pupils use honorifics when speaking to her whereas she uses their names and that shows asymmetry

Ah, should have done synthetic personalisation! Somehow got it into my head that it was only written text.

I like the power behind discourse idea and am annoyed cause i was reading about repressive discourse strategies last night but forgot in the thing.

You guys will have done well

And yeah, Hannah I went for varied groupings cause of A02! I decided that in my head I would come up with general groupings (ie inform, persuade) and then I'd look for language features shared between all and make that the initial grouping instead!

I wrote about:
- Face theory with the constraint 'QUIET PLEASE' being used to block their negative face.
- Politeness of 'please'
- Imperatives
- Deontic/Epistemic modality
- Context behind the encounter
- Students use of 'miss' shows her authority
- IRF
- Grice's Maxims
- Non fluency features: hedging/hesitation from student show teachers power as shes nervous and teacher using pauses to get attention and back-channelling as a discourse marker
- Unequal encounter
- Personal power from being a teacher
- Rhetoric/direct address with pronouns

Does that sound like it would get me a decent mark?

I'm sure you did really well
What were your groupings?

Think this was mine:

1: Audience of Children, sub group use of pre-modifiers
2: Use of interrogative syntax, with some texts being strong/weak inclusions
3. Modal verbs and a sub group that i can't remember!!

I think power went okay but i definitely didn't mention enough. I said about influential/instrumental, Sinclair and Coulthard's IRF, Brown and Levinson politeness and Face, Giles Accommodation Theory convergence etc...
I also said about the address terms 'miss' and pronouns 'you' and 'we', imperatives, use of discourse markers and so on... just not confident completely about how much i wrote...

At least it's over with!!!! What about you?

Did anyone do the section on gender for the exam?
I spent an hour and 20min on section A which meant that I had less time for the second time.
Btw can u retake this paper again?

Did anyone do the section on gender for the exam?
I spent an hour and 20min on section A which meant that I had less time for the second section
Btw can u retake this paper again?

Hey, you can't retake again as it was the last paper for this spec. Don't worry I spent 1hr 30 mins on section A I did a mock on it last year and only wrote 6 pages in the whole exam and managed to get an A, in the exam this year i wrote about 7-8 pages for section A and 3 and a half for power. Honestly don't worry about it, the grade boundaries last year for a B was 63/96 and for an A 72/96 so you will be fine

Thank you for the encouragement. What section did u choose to do: gender, power or technology? I am really scared about the exam results because I feel as though I could have done so much more better.

I did gender and wrote roughly the same amount as you. The timing is a huge problem for a lot of people including myself. Are you doing language change and acquisition?

I feel the same about it too. Langauge change is harder as the texts are older and hard to understand... btw how are you revising for the exam?

feeling good for the a2 exam.

Just wondering what you guys think of my AS resit .

I done 3 groupings of 3 , 2 and 2 .
multimodality,audience and nouns

contextual factors i included things like globalisation/international trade, cultural/social changes, history, education , context of reception ( SETTING ETC ) CONTEXT OF PRODUCTION . I included GAP mode formality .


language and gender :
covered many theories and talked about stereotypes of women . a03 i included the relationship between the interlocutors , context of reception / production . The contextual factors of technology ( beauty industry ) , marriage and holidays etc.

That should be fine, some great points that you have made.
What did u say about the interlocuters relationship in language and gender?

Much appreciated . thanks man .


talked about how it conveyed a co-operate relationship and is between the customer and beautician and then referred this to pilkington's theory and a01 regarding adjacency pairs and turn taking