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England · Pearson EdexcelQ&A
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.
Analysis and Investigation
- Exam text analysis: analysing and comparing unseen texts using the discourse framework, building a comparative argument, and writing to time.6Q&A pairs
- Methods of language analysis: the language levels of phonology, lexis and semantics, grammar, pragmatics, discourse and graphology, and moving from feature to effect.13Q&A pairs
- Original writing and commentary: writing for a chosen genre, audience and purpose using a style model, and reflecting analytically on linguistic choices in a commentary.7Q&A pairs
- The language investigation: framing a focused research question, collecting and handling data ethically, applying analytical methods, and writing up findings.8Q&A pairs
Child Language Development
- Spoken language acquisition: the phonological, lexical, grammatical and pragmatic stages of spoken development and the features that mark each.7Q&A pairs
- Theories of language acquisition: behaviourism (Skinner), nativism (Chomsky), cognitivism (Piaget) and social interactionism (Bruner and Vygotsky), with the evidence for each.5Q&A pairs
- Written language development: Kroll's stages of writing, the development of spelling, and how children learn to read.8Q&A pairs
Language Change
- Attitudes to language change: prescriptivism and descriptivism, the metaphors used to describe change, and the debate over decline versus evolution.7Q&A pairs
- Historical language change: lexical, semantic, grammatical, phonological and orthographic change in English from Early Modern English to the present.5Q&A pairs
- Theories and processes of change: the wave, S-curve and random fluctuation models, the influence of technology and society, and the functional and lexical processes of change.5Q&A pairs
Language variation
- Global English and World Englishes: Kachru's three circles, English as a lingua franca, nativised varieties, linguistic imperialism, and attitudes to global English as opportunity or threat.7Q&A pairs
- Language and gender, power and occupation: deficit, dominance and difference models, instrumental and influential power, and occupational register, with Lakoff, Tannen, Zimmerman and West, Fairclough and Drew and Heritage.7Q&A pairs
- Language and journalism: representation and bias, journalistic register and headlines, tabloid versus broadsheet style, and critical discourse analysis of transitivity, nominalisation and synthetic personalisation.6Q&A pairs
- Language and the individual: idiolect, sociolect, accent and dialect, code-switching and the construction of identity through language choices.5Q&A pairs
- Social and regional variation: regional dialects, sociolinguistic studies of class, social networks and the named research of Labov, Trudgill and Milroy.7Q&A pairs
- Standard and non-standard English: the nature and status of Standard English, prescriptivism and descriptivism, and attitudes to non-standard varieties.6Q&A pairs