Diary

Take the TAS examRSS feed

Posted: Monday 21 January, 2008

by Dan at 4:56pm in TAS Website Comments closed

We get lots of enquiries at TAS, of all sorts. Most are what you'd expect - people looking for advice, giving feedback on the site, making link requests, that sort of thing, and on one occasion recently dog's abuse (might share that story soon).

Early last year we had a somewhat unusual request: the AQA (Assessment and Qualifications Alliance) emailed us asking if they could use some of the material from articles section of the TAS website in an english examination, to be sat in summer 2007. We said yes, on the proviso they credited us and sent us a copy of the examination paper when it was all over. They sent a very formal letter confirming the arrangement, and we heard no more.

Last week we got a very nice 'thank you' letter from them a copy of the exam paper. It was the English Language (Specification B) GCE Advanced Subsidiary Examination for Unit 1, Introduction to the Study of Language, sat on 22nd May 2007. (Remember when there was just an English O'Level?!) It consisted of 8 pieces of text from very different contexts - including dialogue from a play, poetry, an advertisement a cartoon and the introduction page from our poultry articles.

The 2 part question asked:

  1. Study the texts on A-H on the next six pages. These texts illustrate different varieties of language use. Discuss various ways in which these texts can be grouped, giving reasons for your choices.
  2. Taking either Text A or Text B and any two of the remaining texts, analyse some of the language features of these texts and explain how these are affected by context.

Use some of the following language frameworks where appropriate:

  • lexis
  • grammar
  • phonology
  • semantics
  • discourse
  • pragmatics
  • graphology

Eek. I don't know about exams becoming easier - I don't know what half of those words mean!

Just goes to show some of the strange things that happen when you stick stuff on the web. Feel free to answer question 2 for the TAS article, in words of one syllable please...

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