Language change A2

it depends on your exam board but go onto getrevising.co.uk for tips on this

My exam board is AQA and I did but it still doesn't seem to answer my questions

Have you looked at past paper answers?

No do you you know any website where I can get it from?

I'm not too sure but maybe ask your teacher to print some out or find some? They usually have access to that sort of thing.

Hey guys I'm really struggling with the language change section of the exam. I don't understand how to approach the question and structure it. What do we analyse, and ho do we know that a term is obsolete? Also in the exam would we get two texts two compare or just a single to analyse? I'm really confused so a model answer or tips of any sort would be really helpful! Thank you

I did this exam last year. It was hard, but really enjoyed English Language.

So, in the exam you will get two sections: Section A and Section B. Section A will give you two choices; one from Language Diversity (Sexuality, Gender, Social Class, Occupation, etc) and the other from Language Change (Printing Press, Education Act, Grammarians, Bible, etc). Section B will have only one compulsory question from the topic of Language Discourses (Global English, Social Class, Political Correctness, etc).

In both Sections, you will always get "texts" that you must analyse. In order to know what to analyse in the texts, you must understand what was happening at the time of its publication. For instance, a few years back, Language Change had one text that was from the early 18th century advertising coffee, whilst the other text had an online menu of coffee from Cafe Nero. In Section A you will get two texts to analyse and compare. However, it's not uncommon for them to get you to analyse a graph "figure" and compare that with a text. This only occurs if it's something like social class or gender. In Section B you can get a mix of things. Usually it will be a few texts like 2 and then possibly 3 figures like graphs, or charts, etc. Which you will need to analyse in order to answer the question.

If you were to answer a Language Change question, you must analyse how language has changed over time. So perhaps the use of italics, non-standard capitalization, the use of substitution and etc. You will know if something is obsolete when you see a word. You will automatically think "no one ever says this anymore" and you can easily compare that to more common words in comparison. As long as you know your linguistic framework and are able to recognise examples, then you will be fine.

How we were taught was like:

Section A -
Paragraph 1: Talk about text A
Paragraph 2: Talk about text B
Paragraph 3: Compare text A and B (linguistic basis; morphology, semantics, lexis)
Paragraph 4: Compare text A and B (theory basis; Crumbling Castle, gender theories, social class theories, etc)
Conclusion.

Unfortunately I can't really give you any sound advice on how to answer Section B as it all depends on what type of question it is. For example, we had a horrible one last year where it asked us to discuss BOTH Language Change and Diversity (they NEVER had done that before. In previous years it was either Language Change or Language Diversity). So it threw a lot of us (who took the exam in June 2014) off that Section. It also gave us a really long text and then the second one in that section was just a quote: legit, just one sentence we had to use to compare it with the long text.

Bare in mind Section A is usually written or blended text. So you'd be asked to compare two written texts or two blended texts. It will never be different. However, in Sec B it will always change. So last year we got one spoken and then just one quote. Spoken mode will only come up if it's a gender question on Section A. But if it's Language Change, it's always written text.

I hope I've helped!

Hi, thank you for the detailed reply
I'm doing AQA english language B, which i think might be different to your english language exam

Right, well next time I would strongly recommend that you state what exam board, and option you are with i.e English Language A or English Language B, etc. in future.