🔤 ENGLISH LANGUAGE – Relevant Topics & Tips
1. Text Analysis (Fiction & Non-Fiction)
Tips:
- Identify audience, purpose, genre, and tone (APGT).
- Annotate with language features: simile, metaphor, repetition, juxtaposition, tone.
- Comment on structure (e.g., contrast, shifts in focus, sentence lengths).
2. Creative Writing
Tips:
- Use varied sentence lengths for effect.
- Plan a clear beginning, middle, and end.
- Use figurative language but avoid clichés.
- Show, don’t tell: let emotion/actions describe the mood.
3. Transactional Writing (IGCSE & AS)
Forms: Letters, speeches, articles, leaflets, reviews.
Tips:
- Match formality to the task.
- Use clear paragraphs and headings (if appropriate).
- Persuasive language devices: triples, rhetorical questions, emotive language, facts/statistics.
4. Spoken Texts / Transcripts (AS-Level)
Tips:
- Spot features like fillers, false starts, hedging, adjacency pairs, overlaps.
- Link to power dynamics, social purpose, or context (e.g., job interview vs. casual chat).
5. Language Change & Diversity (A-Level)
Tips:
- Know examples of archaic words and grammar change (e.g., “thou”).
- Understand attitudes to regional dialects, gendered language, code-switching.
- Reference theorists (e.g., Jean Aitchison, David Crystal, Labov, Tannen).