English language a level ~(Paper 1 advice)

(Original post by zakramsey)
Hi! A-level English Language student here. I take it you're in year 13?

When you're looking at meanings and representations, think about the GAP. Genre, Audience and Purpose of the text, and the context. Naturally you've got your language levels like lexis but make sure, when you're picking up on lexis, to write specifically what kind of word it is for those extra marks. Is it an abstract noun or a concrete noun? I believe we're getting cookbooks as a text for AQA this year so make sure to look at the context of the old text (Text B) as in the 1800s people had servants, slaves and housewives so the cookbook will be made predominantly for women and working class people but then as well, the publisher of the text will have been wealthy and so how does that have an effect on the text? If we get an online article for Text A, take a look at the choice of words - if it's simple then that would indicate a lower reading age and perhaps intended for the general public, like The Mirror as opposed to something from The Guardian. Also look at the layout of the words between the two texts. With old cookbooks, the graphology of them are particularly basic because of technological limitations, such as no pictures and simply a large, spaced out text to represent the title than something one would see on an article. We had an article about Jamie Oliver but you could tell it was written for the general public and to assure them because of the basic terminology and words which made them relate to the pandemic, the pandemic also being the context.

For CLA, make sure you know how to relate each theorist to the transcript. I'll list a few:

Chomsky - children resisting or not responding to correction from adults, usage of underextension and overextension.
Bruner - children clearly enjoying their interaction, parents encouraging children that are attempting to speak positively/properly, adult caregivers using features of CDS.
Skinner - children imitating/repeating adults' speech, children learning or repairing mistakes after adults' correction, adults explicitly modelling/teaching language and children responding.
Piaget - children talking to themselves whilst playing (which leads to egocentrism) or working at a task which suggests helping themselves, failing to use or understand language because they haven't yet grasped the concept expressed by the language.
Vygotsky - children adapting to the environment in terms of their language use, children responding with parents through scaffolding, parents helping the child problem solve.

Also, take note of the child's virtuous errors (grammatical mistakes and the like) and their age because you can apply that to their understanding of grammatical constructs (e.g. being in post-telegraphic stage and understanding grammar). You may well want to briefly talk about the problems with the theorists too as chomsky didn't even carry out his theories on children, piaget didn't consider disabled children in his research, Skinner tested his theories of positive and negative reinforcement on rats, and Vygotsky died before his research was complete.

And lastly, talk about child directed speech in the transcript.

Hope this helps,
- Zak.

(Original post by zakramsey)
I'm unaware of those theorists except Bellugi who did negation. If you can really find things to link to those extra theorists then fine but the ones I've listed are priority as they cover the main themes of cognitive development, social interaction and nativism.

(Original post by harrisonhaine)
Hi, I just wanted to say thank you for writing this it really helped me before my exam!