Discourse: text structure, cohesion and coherence, discourse markers, turn-taking and adjacency pairs in spoken interaction, and genre conventions.

What this language level is asking

AQA wants you to analyse texts above the sentence (discourse): how a whole text is structured, how it is held together by cohesion, and, in spoken data, how speakers manage interaction through turn-taking and other conversational features. This is the level that captures organisation and flow, the dimension that word-level analysis alone misses.

Cohesion and coherence

The distinction is a frequent marker target. A text can be cohesive yet incoherent (full of connectives that do not add up to a sensible whole) or coherent with few explicit links (a list of instructions that makes obvious sense without conjunctions), so the two terms are not interchangeable. Discourse markers such as "right", "anyway", "so" and "well" do organisational work: they signal a shift of topic, manage the flow, and, in speech, mark the boundaries of a speaker's structure. When you spot a cohesive device, do not just name it; explain how it guides the reader (a chain of pronoun reference keeping a single subject in focus, or a semantic field building a sustained theme).

Text structure and genre

For written texts, analyse the structural choices and the genre conventions together. How does the text open (a hook, a headline, an orientation that sets the scene)? How is the middle sequenced (chronologically, by argument, by importance)? How does it close (a call to action, a resolution, a return to the opening)? A news report front-loads the most important information (the inverted pyramid), while a narrative withholds it to build tension, and recognising the genre's expected shape lets you analyse where a text conforms or departs from it for effect. Comment on the overall mode (written, spoken, or a blend such as text messaging and instant messaging, which borrow spoken features into writing) and show how the structure serves audience and purpose.

Spoken interaction

Spoken data demands its own toolkit, and forgetting it is a common way to lose marks. Beyond turn-taking and adjacency pairs, look for overlaps and interruptions (which can signal competition for the floor or supportive engagement), insertion sequences (a question answered by another question before the first is resolved), and how openings and closings are negotiated rather than simply happening. These features reveal the relationship and power between speakers: who controls the floor, who supports whom, and how the interaction is collaboratively managed. Always tie a spoken-discourse feature back to what it shows about the participants and the purpose of the talk.

Try this

• Take a short text and label its opening, development and closing, then name the genre's expected shape.
• Find one referencing chain and one example of lexical cohesion and explain what each does.
• In a transcript, identify an adjacency pair, an overlap and a piece of back-channelling.