Topic: 'A' level

Relevant for England and Wales National Curriculum at 'A' level (Key Stage 5).

A framework for language analysis

This page includes a handout on which you will find a framework for language analysis, developed over time through our Teaching English Grammar in Context course.

Starting to analyse a text can be a rather intimidating task. Where to start? What to include/not include? And how to do this systematically, rather than simply pulling out grammatical features at random and trying to write some kind of cohesive analysis?

The second-person pronoun and textual effects

Exploring the use of you in different texts

In this lesson, students explore the potential readerly 'effects' of the second-person pronoun you.

Deixis in drama

Exploring how deixis works in dramatic texts

Deixis is a word of Greek origin meaning 'pointing'. Thus, words which are deictic 'point' to different times, spaces and people. The meaning of these words is dependent upon the context in which they are used.

For example: if a teacher stands at the front of a room, at 9.13am on Wednesday 28 June and says to a student 'I want you to come here now', then the following deictic words mean:

Investigating language: project ideas

This page includes a numbers of ideas and suggestions for your students' independent language study. We have categorised them by 'language levels', but only for navigation purposes - don't let the categories limit your students' creativity!

Meaning

Attitudes to language use, variation and change

In this lesson, students will explore some of the different attitudes that people have towards language use, variation and change. They will be encouraged to adopt a critical approach to language study, thinking carefully about how language is intertwined with sociocultural factors. They will also be asked to reflect on their own attitudes to language.

Form and function: Activity 2

Identify the grammatical form and the grammatical function

Now identify both the form and the function of the highlighted words in the following sentences.

Metaphors of language

Exploring the way we think and talk about language

This project asks students to explore metaphors of the English language. If you need a quick refresher, it might be useful to revisit some of the introductory pages on metaphor here before completing the project work.

Metaphor is a highly pervasive feature of any language, not only reflecting the way that we understand the world, but constituting and shaping it. In linguistics, we use the X IS Y formula to indicate a metaphor - for example:

Foregrounding

Foregrounding is a widely-used term in text analysis, literary linguistics and stylistics, referring to patterns of language that stand out in a text. The term itself is derived from art and film criticism, and is best understood by a visual analogy.

Goal

Noticing and exploring linguistic patterns in literary texts.

Here is a picture of San Francisco:

Phonetics and phonology - The sounds of poetry

Looking at the importance of sound in a literary text

Sound patterns in poetry

Here are two extracts from the poem Digging by Seamus Heaney. In the poem, a son talks openly about his perceived failures in following in his father's footsteps, namely because of his lack of skill with a spade and as a farmer.

Read them out loud:

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Phonetics and phonology - Transcribing spoken language

Transcribing sounds

In this activity, you'll be using your knowledge of articulatory phonetics to transcribe spoken language. To do so, you'll be using the phonetic alphabet - a system designed by linguists to represent speech sounds on the page.

Englicious (C) Survey of English Usage, UCL, 2012-21 | Supported by the AHRC and EPSRC. | Privacy | Cookies