1. AQA English Language: A Level Paper 1

2. What does Paper 1 test? Section A (do all 3 questions)
Questions 1 and 2
Analysis of language and contexts of 2 unseen texts linked by topic or theme
Text A = newer (post 1950s/60s)
Text B = older (1600-pre 1950s/60s)
Question 3
Ability to compare them – meaningfully

3. What does Paper 1 test? Section B (choose 1 of 2 questions)
Question 4 or 5
Child language development (CLD)
Choice of spoken or literacy (inc. reading and/or writing)
Critical comments: essay response to unseen data and evaluation of the critical comment (with reference to data and own examples)

4. From the horse’s mouth Section B: Child language development (CLD)
Always one spoken question, one literacy
Always a critical comment in the question
Critical comment will have loose link to theory
Data is never more than 2 pages long
There is no required balance, e.g. 50:50 between analysis of the data, and evaluation of the critical comment
AQA recommend doing Section B first (get all the theory down – self-contained – worth least)

5. From the horse’s mouth Section B: Child language development (CLD)
Whole response can hang on the unseen data
Candidates can import own examples too
Once the data is used, candidates have hit Level 2
For AO2 (theories and concepts):
Level 3 “learned” essays may feature here
Level 4 students manipulate what they’ve learned to fit new question
Level 5 evaluate and link back to question

6. From the horse’s mouth Section A: meanings and representations
Text A is always the newer text
Text B is always the older text
Question: how has the text shaped the topic (content)

7. From the horse’s mouth Section A: meanings and representations
You can repeat materials from Questions 1 and 2 in Question 3
Level 5 mark does not necessitate clause analysis (in contradiction of the specimen mark scheme) – but it can be useful if you are confident you can do it accurately
AQA advise students ‘start with meaning/representation’ – and then find a feature, e.g. ‘Text A represents teenage drivers as potentially dangerous in a humorous way’.
Cover 3-4 representations, e.g. writer,
audience, topic, publication

8. From the horse’s mouth Section A: meanings and representations
Questions 1 and 2 (single text) should deal with meaning (content) and representations (construction)
Question 3 should focus on audience, mode, purpose, genre, i.e. contextual differences (these can also be present in Questions 1 and 2, but are specifically credited in Question 3’s mark scheme)

9. From the horse’s mouth Section A: meanings and representations
Examples of responses:
Level 2 labels ‘pronoun’
Level 3 describes ‘relative pronoun’
Level 4 analyses ‘relative pronoun has this effect’
Level 5 patterns ‘relative pronouns are used throughout the text for these
effects’

10. From the horse’s mouth: grade boundaries out of 500??
A* 426 A* 433
A A
B B
C C
D D
E E