England · AQASyllabus
English Language syllabus, dot point by dot point
Every dot point in the England English Languagesyllabus, with a focused answer for each one. Click any dot point for a worked explainer, past exam questions, and links to related dot points. Written by Claude Opus 4.8, Anthropic's latest AI.
Children's language development
Module overview →- How do children learn to read and make sense of print?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.10 min answer →
- How do children learn to speak from babbling to full sentences?Spoken language development: the stages of phonological, lexical, grammatical and pragmatic development from babbling through holophrastic, two-word and telegraphic stages.11 min answer →
- How do children acquire language so quickly and what explains it?Theories of language acquisition: behaviourism (Skinner), nativism (Chomsky), cognitivism (Piaget), social interactionism (Bruner and Vygotsky) and the evidence for each.12 min answer →
- How do children learn to write, from first marks to organised text?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.10 min answer →
Language diversity and change
Module overview →- Why do people judge some ways of using English as better than others?Attitudes to language diversity: prescriptivism and descriptivism, standardisation, language attitudes and prejudice, and public debate about correctness and change.11 min answer →
- How does the work people do shape the way they use language?Language and occupation: occupational register and jargon, professional discourse communities, the language of the workplace and how occupation shapes identity and power.11 min answer →
- How and why has the English language changed over time?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.11 min answer →
- Why does English vary by region, class and social group?Social and regional variation: dialect, accent, sociolect, idiolect, Received Pronunciation, Standard English and the social meanings carried by linguistic variation.11 min answer →
- What models explain how and why language changes spread?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.11 min answer →
Language, gender, power and the individual
Module overview →- Do men and women use language differently, and why?Language and gender: deficit, dominance and difference models, Lakoff's women's language, Zimmerman and West, Tannen and critiques of binary gender approaches.11 min answer →
- How is power created, maintained and resisted through language?Language and power: instrumental and influential power, Fairclough's synthetic personalisation and unequal encounters, power in discourse and behind discourse, and persuasive techniques.11 min answer →
- How does the way we speak signal the social groups we belong to?Language and social groups: class, ethnicity and age varieties, slang and Multicultural London English, social networks, accommodation theory and group identity.11 min answer →
- How do we use language to build and present our own identity?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.10 min answer →
Language in action (non-exam assessment)
Module overview →- How do you analyse language data systematically and rigorously?Methods of language analysis: applying the language levels, quantitative and qualitative analysis, using theory and concepts, and presenting findings with terminology and data.11 min answer →
- How do you write a reflective commentary on your own original writing?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.11 min answer →
- How do you plan a focused, original language investigation?Planning a language investigation: choosing a topic and research question, forming a hypothesis or aim, ethics and data collection, and applying a theoretical framework.11 min answer →
- How do you shape a piece of writing for a specific audience and purpose?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.10 min answer →
Language levels and methods of analysis
Module overview →- How is a whole text organised so that it holds together and flows?Discourse: text structure, cohesion and coherence, discourse markers, turn-taking and adjacency pairs in spoken interaction, and genre conventions.11 min answer →
- How are words built and arranged into phrases, clauses and sentences to make meaning?Grammar and morphology: word structure, inflection and derivation, phrases and clauses, sentence types and functions, and how syntactic choices shape meaning.11 min answer →
- How do the visual and layout choices of a text shape how we read it?Graphology: layout, typography, images, colour, font and other visual features, and how the visual presentation of a text creates meaning and effect.10 min answer →
- How do the words a text chooses and the meanings they carry shape its message?Lexis and semantics: vocabulary choice, word classes, semantic fields, connotation and denotation, figurative language and how word meaning creates effects.11 min answer →
- How do we describe the sounds of speech and the way they are organised and delivered?Phonetics, phonology and prosodics: how speech sounds are produced and patterned, and how stress, rhythm, intonation and pace carry meaning in spoken language.10 min answer →
- How do speakers and writers mean more than they literally say?Pragmatics: implicature, the cooperative principle and Grice's maxims, politeness theory, deixis, speech acts and how context shapes meaning.11 min answer →