AQA A-Level English Language 7702

Complete Specification — A/A* Revision Notes

Assessment Map

Paper 1 — Language, the Individual and Society

• 2h30
• 100 marks
• 40%

Section A — Textual Variations and Representations

• analyse Text A — 25
• analyse Text B — 25
• compare — 20

Section B — Children's Language Development

• one discursive essay from two — 30
• data may be spoken, written or multimodal
• ages 0–11

Paper 2 — Language Diversity and Change

• 2h30
• 100 marks
• 40%

Content:

• language diversity;
• language change;
• language discourses;
• writing skills;
• integrated language analysis.

NEA — Language in Action

• 20%

Language Investigation

• 2,000 words excluding data

Original Writing

• one piece, 750 words
• accompanying commentary, 750 words

CORE LANGUAGE FRAMEWORKS

These frameworks underpin every component.

Lexis and Semantics

Lexis

Vocabulary choices.

Useful terminology:

• concrete noun;
• abstract noun;
• proper noun;
• common noun;
• adjective;
• adverb;
• verb;
• dynamic verb;
• stative verb;
• modal verb;
• semantic field;
• collocation;
• idiom;
• euphemism;
• dysphemism;
• jargon;
• slang;
• taboo;
• neologism;
• archaism.

Semantics

Meaning.

Concepts:

• denotation;
• connotation;
• semantic broadening;
• semantic narrowing;
• amelioration;
• pejoration;
• metaphor;
• metonymy;
• irony;
• ambiguity.

A* analysis: Do not write:

“The writer uses an adjective.”

Write:

“The evaluative adjective ‘reckless’ encodes a negative judgement and positions the referent as socially irresponsible, supporting the text's broader representation of…”

Grammar

Word Classes

• nouns;
• verbs;
• adjectives;
• adverbs;
• pronouns;
• determiners;
• prepositions;
• conjunctions;
• interjections.

Noun Phrases

Head noun plus modifiers.

Pre-modification:

“the controversial new government policy”

Post-modification:

“the policy introduced last year”

Verb Phrases

Tense:

• present;
• past.

Aspect:

• progressive;
• perfect.

Voice:

• active;
• passive.

Passive can:

• foreground affected participant;
• obscure agent;
• create impersonal tone.

Modality

Epistemic: certainty/probability.

Deontic: permission/obligation.

Examples:

• must;
• should;
• may;
• might;
• certainly;
• perhaps.

Clause Types

• declarative;
• interrogative;
• imperative;
• exclamative.

Sentence Structures

• simple;
• compound;
• complex;
• compound-complex.

Subordination

Can:

• foreground/background information;
• create hypotaxis;
• encode logical relations.

Morphology

Morpheme: smallest meaningful grammatical unit.

Free Morpheme

Can stand alone: play

Bound Morpheme

Cannot: -ed, un-, -s.

Inflectional Morphology

Changes grammatical form:

• plural;
• tense;
• comparison.

Derivational Morphology

Creates new lexical item/class: happy → happiness

Child-language analysis should distinguish morphological development from syntax.

Phonetics, Phonology and Prosodics

Phoneme

Smallest contrastive sound unit.

IPA

Use phonemic transcription when relevant.

Accent

Pronunciation variety.

Dialect

Variety involving grammar/lexis as well as pronunciation.

Prosody

• intonation;
• stress;
• pitch;
• tempo;
• rhythm;
• volume.

Spoken data:

• pauses;
• fillers;
• overlaps;
• false starts;
• repairs;
• non-fluency;
• backchannels.

A*: Spoken language is not “incorrect writing”. Analyse it as a mode with its own norms.

Pragmatics

Meaning in context.

Key concepts:

• inference;
• implicature;
• deixis;
• presupposition;
• politeness;
• face;
• speech acts.

Grice

Cooperative Principle and maxims:

• quality;
• quantity;
• relation;
• manner.

Flouting can create:

• humour;
• irony;
• implied criticism.

Brown and Levinson

Positive face: desire for approval.

Negative face: desire for freedom from imposition.

Face-threatening acts may be mitigated through politeness.

Discourse

How texts are structured beyond sentence level.

Terms:

• cohesion;
• coherence;
• adjacency pairs;
• turn-taking;
• topic management;
• discourse markers;
• anaphoric reference;
• cataphoric reference;
• substitution;
• ellipsis;
• lexical cohesion.

Graphology

Visual design.

Analyse:

• layout;
• font;
• headings;
• images;
• colour;
• spacing;
• punctuation;
• emojis;
• hyperlinks;
• multimodal composition.

Do not treat graphology as decoration: connect to audience and function.

TEXTUAL VARIATIONS AND REPRESENTATIONS

AQA expects analysis of language as representation.

Context Variables

Audience

Who is addressed?

Consider:

• expert/non-expert;
• individual/mass;
• age;
• ideology;
• relationship with producer.

Purpose

Possible:

• inform;
• persuade;
• entertain;
• instruct;
• advise;
• complain;
• narrate;
• construct identity.

Texts usually have multiple purposes.

Genre

Socially recognised text type with conventions.

Mode

• spoken;
• written;
• multimodal;
• computer-mediated.

Avoid binary spoken/written stereotypes.

Field

Subject/activity.

Tenor

Relationship between participants.

Representation

Language constructs rather than simply reflects reality.

Texts represent:

• individuals;
• social groups;
• places;
• events;
• institutions;
• ideas.

Questions:

1. What lexical field labels the subject?
2. Who has agency in clauses?
3. Who is passive/deleted?
4. What modality presents certainty?
5. What presuppositions are taken for granted?
6. What voices are included/excluded?
7. How is reader positioned?

Transitivity

Useful Hallidayan concepts:

• material processes;
• mental processes;
• relational processes;
• verbal processes.

Agency: Who acts?

Passive constructions may conceal agency.

Older Texts

Paper 1 includes older and contemporary texts.

Analyse historically:

• orthography;
• punctuation;
• syntax;
• lexis;
• semantic shift;
• genre conventions;
• audience assumptions;
• print technology;
• standardisation.

Do not merely list “old-fashioned words”.

CHILDREN'S LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Spoken Acquisition

Pre-Linguistic Development

Features:

• crying;
• cooing;
• babbling;
• proto-words;
• gesture;
• joint attention.

One-Word / Holophrastic Stage

Single word expresses larger meaning.

Examples may function as:

• request;
• label;
• protest.

Two-Word Stage

Early combinations:

• agent + action;
• possession;
• recurrence.

Telegraphic Stage

Content words dominate; function words may be omitted.

Avoid rigid stage ages: development is variable.

Phonological Development

Processes may include:

• substitution;
• deletion;
• consonant-cluster reduction;
• assimilation;
• reduplication.

A*: State the exact phonological process rather than “child says it wrong”.

Lexical Development

Overextension

Word used too broadly.

Underextension

Word used too narrowly.

Overgeneralisation

Rule applied too widely.

Example: goed

Shows rule formation, not mere imitation.

Grammar Development

Brown's Morphemes

Development of:

• progressive -ing;
• plural;
• irregular past;
• possessive;
• articles;
• regular past;
• third person;
• auxiliaries.

Negatives

Progress from simple external “no” toward internal auxiliary constructions.

Interrogatives

Development toward inversion and auxiliary use.

Functions of Child Language — Halliday

Functions:

• instrumental;
• regulatory;
• interactional;
• personal;
• heuristic;
• imaginative;
• representational.

Useful for data but do not force every utterance into a label.

Theories of Acquisition

Behaviourism — Skinner

Language learned through:

• imitation;
• reinforcement;
• conditioning.

Strength: explains some lexical/social learning.

Weakness: children produce novel forms and overgeneralisations adults do not model.

Nativism — Chomsky

Humans have innate linguistic capacity.

Concepts:

• language acquisition device historically;
• universal grammatical predisposition;
• poverty of stimulus.

Strength: accounts for rapid rule-based creativity.

Weakness: underplays interaction and usage.

Cognitive — Piaget

Language development depends on wider cognitive development.

Concept formation precedes some linguistic structures.

Criticism: language and cognition may influence each other bidirectionally.

Interactionism — Bruner

Language Acquisition Support System.

Caregiver interaction:

• scaffolding;
• routines;
• joint attention.

Vygotsky

Social interaction and Zone of Proximal Development.

Child-Directed Speech

Common features:

• higher pitch;
• exaggerated intonation;
• repetition;
• simplified syntax;
• concrete vocabulary;
• questions;
• recasts;
• expansions.

Functions:

• attract attention;
• structure interaction;
• support vocabulary/grammar.

Not universal across cultures.

Written Development

Analyse:

• spelling;
• punctuation;
• graphology;
• sentence structure;
• genre awareness;
• audience;
• cohesion.

Spelling Strategies

• phonetic;
• visual;
• morphological.

Development may include invented spelling.

Avoid deficit model.

LANGUAGE DIVERSITY

Accent and Dialect

Regional Variation

Features can involve:

• phonology;
• lexis;
• grammar;
• discourse.

Concepts:

• dialect levelling;
• regional dialect levelling;
• diffusion;
• mobility;
• accommodation.

Trudgill

Norwich research: social class and gender correlated with pronunciation variants.

Use cautiously: historical study and locality-specific.

Labov

Martha's Vineyard: centralisation related to island identity.

New York department stores: post-vocalic /r/ associated with social stratification/style shifting.

A* point: Variation indexes social identity rather than simply “correctness”.

Sociolect

Language variation associated with social group/class.

Avoid deterministic claims: speaker style shifts according to context.

Ethnolect / Multicultural Varieties

Language can index ethnic/community identity.

Multicultural London English:

• contact variety;
• influenced by multiple language communities;
• used beyond a single ethnicity.

Avoid describing it as “broken English”.

Gender and Language

Deficit — Lakoff

Features historically associated with women:

• hedges;
• tag questions;
• intensifiers;
• polite forms.

Criticism: based on intuition/limited evidence and assumes male norm.

Dominance — Zimmerman and West

Interruptions linked to male conversational dominance in some contexts.

Difference — Tannen

Different conversational subcultures:

• status/support;
• report/rapport;
• independence/intimacy.

Criticism: overgeneralises binary gender.

Diversity / Performativity

Gender is performed/contextual rather than fixed speech style.

Use:

• Butler conceptually;
• Coates;
• Cameron's critique of myths.

A*: gender interacts with class, age, sexuality, context and community of practice.

Age

Age-grading: speaker changes language across life stages.

Generational change: different cohorts preserve different forms.

Teen language:

• innovation;
• identity;
• intensifiers;
• slang.

Avoid saying slang proves language deterioration.

Occupation

Occupational varieties:

• jargon;
• abbreviations;
• specialist discourse;
• power asymmetry.

Institutional talk may constrain turn-taking.

LANGUAGE CHANGE

Causes

• technology;
• language contact;
• migration;
• social change;
• cultural innovation;
• economy;
• identity;
• prestige;
• analogy;
• simplification;
• random variation.

Lexical Change

Processes:

• borrowing;
• compounding;
• blending;
• clipping;
• acronym;
• initialism;
• conversion;
• affixation;
• eponyms;
• back-formation.

Semantic Change

• broadening;
• narrowing;
• amelioration;
• pejoration;
• metaphorical extension.

Grammatical Change

Examples:

• pronoun systems;
• auxiliary use;
• progressive;
• modal changes;
• syntactic regularisation.

Phonological Change

• Great Vowel Shift;
• rhoticity changes;
• sound loss;
• assimilation.

Standardisation

Stages often described as:

• selection;
• codification;
• elaboration;
• acceptance.

Influences:

• printing;
• dictionaries;
• grammar books;
• education;
• state/administration.

Johnson

Dictionary contributed to codification but did not single-handedly “fix” English.

Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism

Prescriptivism

Language should follow rules of correctness.

Descriptivism

Linguists describe actual usage.

Aitchison

Challenges decay metaphors:

• damp spoon;
• crumbling castle;
• infectious disease.

Use as discourse framework, not as universal proof.

Jean Aitchison

Language change is natural and systematic.

David Crystal

Often advocates descriptive recognition of variation/change.

A*: Evaluate language attitudes as social ideology, not just linguistic fact.

LANGUAGE DISCOURSES

Paper 2 asks students to analyse how people discuss language.

Discourses may frame language as:

• declining;
• improving;
• threatened;
• identity marker;
• moral issue;
• political issue.

Common Discursive Strategies

• anecdote;
• nostalgia;
• authority claims;
• statistics;
• metaphor;
• polarisation;
• moral panic;
• appeals to tradition;
• presupposition.

Questions:

• who has authority?
• whose variety is privileged?
• what ideology is constructed?
• what linguistic evidence supports/challenges claim?

DIRECTED WRITING

AQA requires adaptation for:

• audience;
• purpose;
• genre.

Potential forms:

• article;
• opinion piece;
• speech;
• blog;
• letter;
• information text.

A* writing:

• controls register;
• uses genre conventions;
• deploys linguistic ideas accurately;
• creates clear line of argument;
• avoids sounding like an essay with a fake heading.

NEA — LANGUAGE INVESTIGATION

Strong Research Questions

Specific and data-led.

Weak:

“How does gender affect language?”

Better:

“How do male and female presenters differ in the use of mitigated directives in three episodes of…?”

Investigation Structure

1. introduction;
2. research question/hypothesis;
3. methodology;
4. data rationale;
5. analysis;
6. interpretation;
7. evaluation;
8. conclusion;
9. bibliography/data appendix.

Methodology

Discuss:

• sample;
• representativeness;
• ethics;
• transcription;
• coding;
• reliability;
• variables.

Quantification

Use counts/percentages where useful, but integrate qualitative analysis.

Correlation does not prove cause.

ORIGINAL WRITING

Possible purposes:

• persuade;
• inform;
• entertain;
• narrate.

Possible genres:

• journalism;
• travel writing;
• memoir;
• speeches;
• fiction;
• opinion.

Commentary

Explain deliberate choices using linguistic terminology.

Commentary structure:

• audience/purpose;
• genre models;
• structure/discourse;
• lexis;
• grammar;
• graphology;
• intended effects.

Do not simply paraphrase what you wrote.

A* ANALYSIS PARAGRAPH

Use: Feature → Evidence → Technical Analysis → Context → Meaning/Representation → Link

Example:

“The modal auxiliary ‘must’ expresses high deontic modality, constructing the writer as institutionally authoritative. Because the text addresses novice employees, this asymmetry of expertise legitimises a directive relationship…”

COMMON LOST MARKS

• feature spotting;
• inaccurate terminology;
• saying “formal language” with no evidence;
• treating mode as binary;
• ignoring representations;
• theorist dumping;
• applying obsolete gender theory as universal truth;
• confusing accent and dialect;
• treating child forms as errors rather than development;
• stating stages as rigid age boundaries;
• describing all caregiver speech as simplified;
• prescriptivism presented as linguistically factual;
• language-change essay with no data;
• investigation with huge uncontrolled corpus;
• commentary explaining content instead of language choices.