how are people revising for A-Level Edexcel English Language

first exam on 21st of may!!!!
how is eveyone revising for Variation Over Time (VOT)
and Individual Variation (IV)
and how many features do you include per framework paragraph ??

Reply 1

TSR Jessica

Sorry you've not had any responses about this. :frown:

Are you sure you've posted in the right place? :smile:

Here's a link to our subject forum which should help get you more responses if you post there. :redface:

Reply 2

ItsJarrell

Original post

by ele.slx

first exam on 21st of may!!!!
how is eveyone revising for Variation Over Time (VOT)
and Individual Variation (IV)
and how many features do you include per framework paragraph ??

Hi! I am revising VOT with active recall to remember AO1 and 2 points, what I like to do is facetime my classmates and turn revision into a game: we take specific frameworks and take it in turns to say an AO1 point about them, we keep going in turns until one of us can't think of anything else- in that case the opponent wins and gets a point. We do this for all frameworks + theories and the winner is the one who has the most points.

Another more long winded revision method is just practising essays, I don't go through and write entire essays but instead just do 1 or 2 paragraphs with another intro paragraph (which has mostly AO3 and reasons why). If I don't have as much time (or lazy) I take texts, either past papers or randoms, and analyse them for AO3 and plan essays, this is even better when you do it with a friend as you can practically plan an entire essay ready to write in a short time frame, it also means you can explain the reasoning behind your comparison points- it even helps if you can be the more knowledgeable other in that scenario as it is proven that teaching the content to your peers helps your retention significantly.

For features, I would base it off the comparison point- if i take a quote then as much as you can analyse from that quote. Then contrast with A04 and explain. E.g. 'The text producer of text A makes use of the 2nd person personal pronoun 'you' to directly address the text receiver, who may be an audience of 20 year old women, to upwardly converge towards their interests of basketball by presenting themselves as inclusive. This is purposeful to accommodate for their needs while further more creating synthetic personalisation (fairclough) to perhaps maintain their function of persuasion while also showing support according to Deborah Tannen's difference theory, as a result, the text producer equals the footing towards the text receiver, though this is to be expected from the genre of the text which is an inspirational poster. This contrasts with Text B where we see a lack of direct address which is likely due to the genre of the text being a printed etc etc etc'

My paragraph isn't perfect but I have included multiple theorists, AO1 features, linked back to AO3 and explained why it affects the text producer's word choices and embedded a direct comparison to this hypothetical text B. If you can replicate this for each text with a good comparison point for each and aim for around 3-4 paragraphs then you can definitely score in band 4 or even 5! If there is anything that I could add to my paragraph to make it even better then lmk, any constructive criticism would be highly appreciated!