#1 English Language A-Level Basics: The Assessment Objectives (AO1)

#1 English Language A-Level Basics: The Assessment Objectives (AO1)

Sunday, 18 August 2024

Several things have brought me to what I hope will become a relatively lengthy series of blog posts about teaching A-Level English Language. Recently I posted my resources folder on X/Bluesky and received many (many!) replies from people who were teaching it for the first time this year and were a little unsure of where to start.

Eight years ago I was also in this position - I have a degree in English Literature, and hadn't studied English Language since I did my own A-Levels. I was frightened of the grammar aspect of the course mostly, but just generally felt very overwhelmed at the thought of learning a brand new course from scratch. I had no real resources whatsoever to work with and was feeling a little intimidated to say the least. One thing I was able to do during my first year of teaching the course however was sit down with another teacher from a Sixth Form that was part of our Academy, and nothing else I've done since was as impactful as this. Whilst I can't sit down and meet every single person who asked for help over on X, I am finally at a point where I might be able to start sharing some wisdom after a fairly sparkly set of 2024 results.

So, I will try my best to put together a decent series of blogs that cover what I think are the most important aspects of the course. I will caveat this by saying that I teach AQA and have little to no understanding of the requirements of any other exam board. I will also caveat this by saying that there will be many, many people out there who would be far more qualified than me to provide this information to you. I am not an English Language A-Level examiner. I know one very well and regularly send my essays to her because I'm not 100% sure I'm right! I am also sure your exam board themselves will have many videos and resources that would be helpful to you in starting your journey - but I offer you my interpretation of what I think I do well in the classroom for my pupils.

I want to start with the Assessment Objectives. A good understanding of these was the foundation for me, and was the first place that my very kind Sixth Form friend started with when she was trying to teach me about the course. Knowing which assessment objective goes with which question is vital. 

In this post I am just going to talk you through AO1. I will aim to do all the other AOs all in a row in as quick succession as my schedule will allow!

Assessment Objective One:

Apply appropriate methods of language analysis, using associated terminology and coherent written expression.

This is your terminology and your essay organisation. For AQA this applies to Paper 1 Questions 1, 2 and 4, and Paper 2 Questions 1, 2 and 3 and is always worth 10 marks. 

Terminology really is key in this course, which is a far-cry from the expectation at GCSE. There are some nice, quick adjustments you need your pupils to make in the first instance.

• 'Writer' becomes text producer
• 'Reader' becomes text receiver
• 'Presented as...' (as in like 'Macbeth is presented as') becomes 'represented as' when writing a meanings and representations essay.

But there are several high-leverage things that I do with this assessment objective to get pupils to the top bands of the AO1 mark scheme. 

1. Insist that every time the pupil refers to part of the text, they provide a term to go with it. We ban the words 'word', 'quote', 'line' etc. and refer instead to the very specific grammatical term that best describes the element of the text they are referring to. It feels alien and wrong to us  because we have been taught that this is just 'feature spotting' - but all it has to be is 'relevant to the task', and if the task is to discuss the meanings and representations in a text, and you have picked a relevant part of the text to discuss and tied this to a representation, then it isn't feature spotting, it's just aiding their explanation of the representation.

2. Try to spot a pattern. Are there tons of dynamic verbs in the text? If so, what are they doing? Do they help create a sense of energy and dynamism? Is there an interesting clause pattern that runs throughout? Again, if so, what is it doing? Is it helping to represent the issue at hand as urgent and necessary? We are avoiding just plain feature spotting by doing this, and actually making a meaningful comment about the whole text. 

3. Hit multiple levels of language. It isn't enough for them to just say 'the noun phrase' over and over again, although it is so tempting because they find these easy to identify. They need to hit lexis (your word-level analysis e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.) of course, but they also need to be hitting the syntax (clause, phrase, sentence-level analysis), phonology (sounds e.g. sibilance, plosives etc.), semantics (things like connotations are good here, but also anything metaphorical etc.), graphology (although I ask them to avoid this mostly unless it's staring them right in the face), pragmatics (the situational context of the text, including things like audience positioning) - I could go on (and I will in another blog post if you want me to!). But essentially, they need to hit as many of these different areas as they can as opposed to sticking to just one.

4. Explore the layers of the levels of language. For the same quotation there might be several of the levels of language at play. We need to help pupils to recognise how these are connected. Are the dynamic verbs very violent and aggressive? And do the plosive P sounds help to add to this level of anger? And does the anaphoric repetition help to reinforce the anger and emphasise the urgency? If so, you've hit three levels of language and analysed the way they are all connected, and as a result you've hit a band 5 element of the AQA mark scheme.

5. An essay structure helps them, even at KS5. It is tempting to believe that, because they have sat their GCSEs, they all know how to structure an essay. One of the aspects of the AO1 mark scheme is to guide the reader. You need an introduction, topic sentences, a conclusion, to be able to guide a reader properly. Teach them these things explicitly. My favoured method specifically of topic sentences when doing a meanings and representations style question is to put the representation in the topic sentence. For example, 'Throughout the text, X is represented as Y and Z in order to/because they aim to [insert purpose].' This way, we are certain we are focusing the paragraph on a specific representation. 

6. Practice, practice, practice those terms. For Band 5 on the mark scheme they need there to be 'rare errors'. They need to be right. If they don't feel 100% confident with various levels of language, they will revert back to that default position of 'the noun phrase...' and we need that all important variety. I do drills with my pupils almost every day. I show them virtually anything (a greetings card, an advertisement, the front of an Amazon package, the blurb of a book, literally anything short!) and they have to identify every piece of lexis, and then two other language levels of their choice. I do this every single day until I am confident they can do it.

I hope that this helps a bit. I will aim to share my wisdom on Assessment Objective 2 as soon as I can. If you have read anything in here that you think is incorrect, and are more qualified than I am to pass judgement, then please please let me know. I am still constantly learning and would love you to teach me something.

Andie x

Why we're switching to the Worlds and Lives Anthology...

Why we're switching to the Worlds and Lives Anthology...

Monday, 10 July 2023

 

I’m not one to shun change in education, in fact often I love it. New curriculums make me excited, not exhausted, and I’ve loved adapting and changing what I teach as times have shifted. I am also, however, a huge fan of the Power & Conflict AQA anthology - so when the new Worlds and Lives poetry anthology was released, I was dubious. Teaching Checking Out Me History has always been a highlight of my academic calendar - it is so linguistically rich, lets me use my A-Level Language knowledge about creole, and watching That BBC Video of Agard read-singing it aloud as he walks along a slightly ill-cared for school football pitch is what I live for. Ozymandias is so fantastically accessible; London so relevant to society today; Remains such an enlightening exploration of post traumatic stress and the masculine experience. I even quite like Tissue. I’m a Power & Conflict girlie through and through - or at least, I was.

I read the Worlds and Lives poetry anthology when it came out, obviously. I liked it - the poems seemed well-selected and perhaps more pertinent to society in 2023. There was greater diversity and the pull of there being far more living poets on there than the other two anthologies offer. There was no denying it did everything I’d want a new anthology to do, but I couldn’t shake the idea that it would take a lot for me to love these 15 new poems as much as I love the old set. 

Our curriculum intention is, as I’m sure many of yours is, to expose students to the wider world around them, create empathy for their fellow citizens, and broaden their world views beyond the little town we teach in. We carefully select our Key Stage Three novels, books, plays and extracts so that they align with this intention. Our KS3 is bursting with literature that exposes our children to other cultures, places, spaces, and faces - and we pride ourselves on the ability of our curriculum to create well rounded citizens. And then at KS4 we study A Christmas Carol, An Inspector Calls, Macbeth. Each of these are rich with merit - I love them all. They teach empathy, love, the importance of family, of caring about one another, and of defending your father when he dies by allowing murderers to call you an egg. What they don’t teach much of, however, is what it’s like to not be white and wealthy. 

 Why, then, is our Key Stage Four so disconnected, when it really needn’t be? AQA were finally offering me a way to teach poetry that perfectly aligned with my Key Stage Three curriculum  - that teaches about life in other countries, about the power of protecting our Earth, about our own identities and how they fit within a wider society. I knew, really, that Power and Conflict poetry wasn’t serving our students as well as Worlds and Lives would - that it didn’t align quite right with the rest of what we taught. Turns out - perhaps I don’t like change as much as I thought I did.

It’s the end of the year, I’m exhausted, and the mental capacity of learning 15 new poems, planning at least 15 new lessons, redesigning the Year 10 curriculum to fit them in, creating resources from scratch, new knowledge organisers, deciding the explicit vocabulary, and trying to convince the rest of my department that it was a good idea is a lot - and there’s no getting away from it. Thankfully, I work with a team of incredible forward thinkers, who in the end were the ones to convince me it was the right thing to do. But, when I was honest with myself - this was why. Planning fatigue comes for all of us - and it had come for me good and proper.

We vowed to give it a go. Each of us took one or two poems each (our favourites, obviously) and researched, annotated, and created resources about our poems. Two poems felt far more doable than 15. I had a fantastic time - I was a student again, forming new ideas on new poetry. I spent several hours researching my poems and I genuinely viewed it as a treat. Time for being a nerd - the best time of them all. I got my highlighters out and I annotated to my heart's content. 

We each presented back our findings during CPD time. We’ve managed ten of the fifteen so far. And what I saw and heard was that these poems are richer, more varied - they are genuinely moving and reflective of what is actually happening in our world right now. We learned about Hindu Gods and the black country accent. We learned about the Kauri tree and Maori women. Mormons and an incarcerated Nigeran pot. We even listened to a video of the birdsong of the Tui bird - but that's just because we're utterly crackers.

There is so very much to go at in these poems - and it's all so very interesting. I love learning - I’m a teacher, it’s part of who I am and what I do. Learning these poems made me love poetry again - even more than I already do. I am my best teacher self when I love what I am teaching - and my passion for these poems, and for having something new to teach at GCSE is going to make teaching Year 10 next year exciting. And what we said to one another all the way through was “this reminds me of X poem that we do in Year 7”. It slots in perfectly for us - and so, I imagine, it would for many of you too. 

Much of what I have said there relies on several things: CPD time, a department who is interested, time at home to learn about your poems - there are endless reasons why this is, perhaps, easier for us than it may be for you. We are lucky to have so much time together as a department, and the freedom to choose what we do with it. There's a whole other blog post in here, about the importance of CPD being centred around subject knowledge - and I know that we are so lucky to be able to indulge ourselves in sitting around talking about poetry after school for several hours. What it has meant for us, though, is some curriculum cohesion. Some clear progression into KS4. Some actual rationale as to why we have chosen the anthology we have chosen - as opposed to 'this is just what we've always done'. There was a disconnect for us previously, and I'd imagine we aren't the only ones.

So, take this as a call to arms. If the only reason you aren’t making the switch is - like it was for me - planning fatigue - get going on those poems. Or at least, if you haven’t already, give them a read.

  (https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/vmbppezdgk6hsazcg9j00/8702-GCSE-English-Literature-Poetry-Anthology-Worlds-and-lives-v1.0-1.pdf?rlkey=jh3emall2hjrfpeu5dhioigwe&dl=0)

Over the next few months what I would like to do is write 15 blog posts - one about each poem. I’m not making a habit of blogging - I’ve not got much to say worth listening to - but if our departmental research into these poems helps someone then it’s worth sharing. I will attempt to put something together and share the first one soon, and if they prove helpful you’ll have to let me know. 

Andie x