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English LanguageQ&A by dot point
A short Q&A bank for every England English Language syllabus dot point. Each question and answer is drawn directly from our worked dot-point page, so you can scan key concepts before opening the long-form answer.
Children's language development
- Reading development: phonics and the alphabetic principle, whole-word and psycholinguistic approaches, the role of caregivers and the debate over how reading is best taught.0Q&A pairs
- Spoken language development: the stages of phonological, lexical, grammatical and pragmatic development from babbling through holophrastic, two-word and telegraphic stages.0Q&A pairs
- Theories of language acquisition: behaviourism (Skinner), nativism (Chomsky), cognitivism (Piaget), social interactionism (Bruner and Vygotsky) and the evidence for each.0Q&A pairs
- Written language development: Kroll's stages, spelling development, the move from speech-like to written forms, and the development of genre and organisation in children's writing.0Q&A pairs
Language diversity and change
- Attitudes to language diversity: prescriptivism and descriptivism, standardisation, language attitudes and prejudice, and public debate about correctness and change.0Q&A pairs
- Language and occupation: occupational register and jargon, professional discourse communities, the language of the workplace and how occupation shapes identity and power.0Q&A pairs
- Language change over time: lexical and semantic change, borrowing, neologisms, grammatical and orthographic change, and the historical phases of English from Old English to the present.1Q&A pairs
- Social and regional variation: dialect, accent, sociolect, idiolect, Received Pronunciation, Standard English and the social meanings carried by linguistic variation.0Q&A pairs
- Theories of language change: the wave and S-curve models, functional and random-fluctuation theories, lexical gaps, the substratum theory and named models of how change spreads.0Q&A pairs
Language, gender, power and the individual
- Language and gender: deficit, dominance and difference models, Lakoff's women's language, Zimmerman and West, Tannen and critiques of binary gender approaches.0Q&A pairs
- Language and power: instrumental and influential power, Fairclough's synthetic personalisation and unequal encounters, power in discourse and behind discourse, and persuasive techniques.0Q&A pairs
- Language and social groups: class, ethnicity and age varieties, slang and Multicultural London English, social networks, accommodation theory and group identity.0Q&A pairs
- Language and the self: idiolect and identity, code-switching, style-shifting, the performance of identity and how individuals construct a sense of self through language.0Q&A pairs
Language in action (non-exam assessment)
- Methods of language analysis: applying the language levels, quantitative and qualitative analysis, using theory and concepts, and presenting findings with terminology and data.0Q&A pairs
- Original writing and commentary: producing a crafted text from a style model and writing an analytical reflective commentary on the linguistic choices and their effects.0Q&A pairs
- Planning a language investigation: choosing a topic and research question, forming a hypothesis or aim, ethics and data collection, and applying a theoretical framework.0Q&A pairs
- Writing for an audience: matching register, genre and form to audience and purpose, the craft of persuasive and informative writing, and conventions of different text types.0Q&A pairs
Language levels and methods of analysis
- Discourse: text structure, cohesion and coherence, discourse markers, turn-taking and adjacency pairs in spoken interaction, and genre conventions.1Q&A pairs
- Grammar and morphology: word structure, inflection and derivation, phrases and clauses, sentence types and functions, and how syntactic choices shape meaning.0Q&A pairs
- Graphology: layout, typography, images, colour, font and other visual features, and how the visual presentation of a text creates meaning and effect.0Q&A pairs
- Lexis and semantics: vocabulary choice, word classes, semantic fields, connotation and denotation, figurative language and how word meaning creates effects.0Q&A pairs
- Phonetics, phonology and prosodics: how speech sounds are produced and patterned, and how stress, rhythm, intonation and pace carry meaning in spoken language.0Q&A pairs
- Pragmatics: implicature, the cooperative principle and Grice's maxims, politeness theory, deixis, speech acts and how context shapes meaning.0Q&A pairs