English Language

The first half of this video focuses on GCSE Language and looks at the benefits of having a single assessment objective per question and how those assessment objectives work.

It also looks into mark scheme design and the importance of careful selection of unseen sources. The second part of the video shifts the focus to A-level Language and looks at how the assessment objectives, mark schemes and questions contribute to the overall assessment design.

Transcript

The purpose of this video is to explain how assessment objectives are applied on the AQA GCSE English Language specification. Once I've run through the assessment objectives themselves, I'll show you how these are then tested across our two papers, including examples at question-level. Hopefully, this will allow you to understand how the question papers and mark schemes are designed to achieve valid assessments in GCSE English Language. The assessment   objectives themselves are not unique to AQA – they are shared by each exam board who offer a GCSE in English Language. These pre-date the specification itself and were agreed by each exam board under the approval of Ofqual. There are nine in total, although three of these apply to the spoken component which I will not be covering in this video. Let's start by having a look at the six assessment objectives that cover reading and writing.

AO1 is broken down into two sub-points, but essentially concerns the identification and then interpretation of information and ideas. The second point about selecting information from different texts is only relevant to Paper Two, when candidates are asked to select information from both sources – Paper One, of course, having just one source. AO2 is then focused on analysis, namely the effects achieved by writers through their choices of language or structure. This becomes important on Paper One, where language and structure are tackled in different questions, but via the same assessment objective, as we will see later on. AO3 assesses comparison and, as we are dealing with two texts, is only relevant to Paper Two. Note how comparison here includes how ideas are conveyed, as well as the ideas themselves.

AO4 encourages candidates to evaluate texts critically, supported with references from the text. This is the last of the reading assessment objectives. The first writing assessment objective is AO5. This covers elements of content and organisation. The fact that this writing will be varied for different forms, purposes and audiences signals that it is assessed across both papers, for creative writing on Paper One and writing from a specific viewpoint on Paper Two. The final assessment objective is AO6, and whilst we are still concerned with writing here, the focus now moves to technical accuracy. A compulsory element of this assessment objective, agreed across all exam boards, was that it needed to form 20% of the marks for the whole specification – hence the specific weighting that it has in each writing task. These assessment objectives, together with the three for the spoken component, therefore make up the backbone on which our specification was built. From this point forward, exam boards had the autonomy to apply these agreed assessment objectives through their specifications in the way that they thought best.

At AQA, the priority was to make the application of these assessment objectives as clear and specific as possible. This means that the papers are designed to only ever test one assessment   objective per question, with these assessment objectives building on each other logically and coherently as candidates move through both papers. As well as supporting student performance, this also makes it more straightforward to teach and more intuitive to examine. Before we look at the questions, it's useful to consider the unseen sources that the questions are centered around. Obviously, if our questions are to hit the agreed assessment objectives, the sources themselves have to provide the raw material for this to be achieved, both in terms of content and level of difficulty. We know that we will be assessing three unseen sources across the 19th, 20th and 21st century, with the 19th-century text always appearing as one of the two texts in Paper Two, allowing for that crucial element of comparison. The sources are carefully chosen from high-quality, substantial pieces of writing, and they are also structured in a way to support the questions – something that is particularly important given the structure of Paper One, as we will see when we look at the questions themselves.

Behind all this, the mark scheme is designed to recognise that students will be offering different levels of sophistication, depth, and insight. The mark scheme and the assessment objectives are there to help examiners and teachers discriminate between different levels of achievement. Now, let's see how the assessment objectives are weighted and then mapped across the specification.

This first table shows you how the assessment objectives are distributed across the two papers. The first thing to notice is the 50/50 split between the reading and writing sections. For the writing assessment objectives, AO5 and AO6, you can see how the initial guidance has been applied, with 20% of the specification total resting on AO6. There are implications for teaching also to be found in the relative weightings of the assessment objectives for reading. For example, AO2 – the ability to analyse methods used by the writer – makes up 17.5% of the marks for the specification as a whole, underlining the importance of developing this throughout the Key Stage Three and Key Stage Four curriculums in school.

We now move to the symmetry grid for the specification, and this is where you can really see the approach that AQA have used to make the assessment objectives clear, logical and coherent. The colour coding here tells you which assessment objective is being tested in which question, and as you can see, there is only one assessment objective at a time, to make navigating the paper as straightforward as possible. Each paper then starts with AO1: Identifying information that serves as a gateway to each source and provides information that could be relevant to later questions. It's worth noting here that Paper Two, Question Two is still testing AO1, just through the skill of summary. A common misconception is that this question is looking for ideas and perspectives, but that would be AO3, and this is not required until Question Four, as can be seen here.

Having secured AO1, both papers then move to AO2: Analysing writers' methods – again, providing a stepping stone for later questions. The reading sections will then culminate with higher-mark questions that use unique assessment objectives. AO4 – Evaluation, for Paper One – and AO3 – Comparison, for Paper Two. This means that these skills can be developed through teaching the right assessment objective alongside the relevant types of text. So, evaluation for fiction, and comparison for non-fiction – something that should be noted when planning a curriculum.

Having worked logically through the assessment objectives for reading, the candidates then face a writing task where they can bring what they have learned in the reading section to formulate their own writing – potentially using the same techniques that they have just been identifying, analysing, evaluating and comparing. This symmetry grid, therefore, acts as a clear and coherent map through the specification, allowing you to see exactly what needs teaching for which section.

So, now that we understand where the assessment objectives have come from and how they are applied across the two papers on our specification, we can start to see how they actually work at question-level. This is crucial in determining how to teach candidates how to be successful. To answer the questions, it is vital they can see which assessment  objective they need to hit at which time. As mentioned before, this is as simple as it can possibly be, on a specification that only looks at one assessment objective at one time. Let's have a look at how this works using some past paper questions.

I'm going to start with AO2, as this is an excellent example of how the same assessment   objective is tested in different ways, and with an increasing level of challenge across the two papers. The first time this assessment objective is encountered by candidates is on Paper One, with Question Two. The word 'How' at the beginning of this question should immediately signal that this is an analysis question. It will be testing how well candidates can explain the effects of the writer's methods. In this particular case they’re analysing language, and to help them, there are bullet point suggestions of what this could include. As this is their first experience of analysis, the specific section is also given to them, assisting them with locating material to help answer this question. At this point, it is worth comparing this with a similar question on Paper Two, which is Question Three. Again, the focus here is language analysis, signalled once again with that word 'How', and the same assessment objective is therefore being tested. But there are some key differences. The mark tariff moves from 8 to 12, and gone are the bullet points and the sectioned-off box of text. This is, therefore, a perfect illustration of how the same assessment objective is first scaffolded, and then tested with more rigour as it becomes more familiar.

Still looking at AO2, it is not only language, of course, that is being analysed. Paper One, Question Three is also testing the same assessment objective, just a different set of methods used by writers – this time structural devices. The question still starts with that word 'How', once again indicating to the candidates it is AO2 we are interested in. Some students may find structural analysis less familiar than language analysis, so once again bullet points are given to help them. While the responses to the question will be very different to Question Two, it is the same assessment objective that is being tested, and this can be helpful when teaching students how to approach this. As long as they are analysing the effects of the writer's methods, they will be answering these questions.

As mentioned when we looked at the symmetry grid, both papers work through AO1 and then AO2 before arriving at assessment  objectives that are unique to each paper, tested through higher-tariff questions. AO3 is assessed through Question Four on Paper Two. By this stage, students have identified relevant information and analysed some use of language, so this question brings that together by comparing the writer's overall viewpoints and perspectives – the title of the paper. Notice how methods are still relevant to the second bullet point here, but through the overall objective of comparison, rather than as AO2, for Question Three. Similarly, Paper One also builds to a high-tariff question, but this time via AO4, as the students are asked to evaluate a statement. The key question here, 'To what extent do you agree?', is evaluative, and once again students can use some of the ideas and methods identified in previous questions to help them. Like with Question Four on Paper Two, methods are incorporated through the middle bullet point, but this time they are part of evaluation rather than comparison as that is the assessment objective being tested in this instance.

Finally, let's have a quick look at how the writing assessment objectives are applied at question-level. This question from Paper Two is out of 40 marks, but you can see that these marks are split – 24 for content and organisation, 16 for technical accuracy. Those words exactly mirror our assessment objectives, signalling the weighting between AO5 and AO6 for this question. Once again, for candidates, it is clear which assessment objectives are being tested.

We have talked through the assessment objectives themselves, what they are, and where they came from. We have also seen how they are distributed across our specification, to help candidates navigate the papers by only focusing on one assessment objective at any one given time. Finally, we have looked at how this works in practice, by unpicking the way the assessment   objectives are applied to different types of question. So, what implications does this have for students and for teachers? Well, it is clear that understanding assessment objectives is crucial to helping students succeed in these exams, ensuring they know which assessment objective is being tested at which time. For teachers, how the necessary skills are developed in order to hit these assessment objectives needs careful consideration, not just at GCSE but at Key Stage Three as well. If a curriculum can be organised to develop the skills around these assessment   objectives effectively, you'll be setting students up for success in this specification. Thank you for watching, and good luck.

Dan Clayton

The AQA English Language A-level is a varied and richly diverse course that offers students a chance to explore many facets of the English language, in ways that will open up their understanding of how we use language in different forms, different modes, in different contexts and for different purposes and audiences. It also takes students into territory they probably won't have encountered before, such as children's language development, accent and dialect, English around the world and studying how technology influences language change, as well as project work that involves students devising their own questions, collecting their own data and analysing it using linguistic methods. There's a lot to this course, so given this huge range, how do we actually assess it? How are the questions created?

The assessment principles behind the AQA A-level are constructed around some core ideas that mean they're applicable to all kinds of work that students might produce, and all kinds of language that they might come across. For example, with more traditional essay writing tasks such as 'Evaluate the idea' questions on language change or language diversity, the assessment   is designed to be open enough to allow for students to reference any relevant ideas from language study that they've encountered on their course – for example, linguistic studies, research papers, key concepts and different examples of language – while recognising that there will be different levels of achievement in dealing with these ideas.

At the same time, a different assessment objective will be used to credit the student for their ability to construct an argument, write clearly and guide the reader through those ideas. Language analysis is central to much of this course too, so the assessment objectives are designed to recognise students' ability to identify relevant language features and to describe those features using their understanding of linguistic methods – methods such as grammar, graphology or visual design, and vocabulary. But language also means something – sometimes many different things to different people – and its meanings vary depending on where and how it's read or heard. So, the assessment needs to recognise that too.

We also know that texts don't exist in isolation, or in a vacuum, so we also have to recognise links between them, and links between the texts, and the real world that they exist in. And if that sounds like it could be a bit complicated sometimes, then you might be right. This is English after all, and there's a lot of language out there. But the assessment principles behind the specification help to make sense of all this. The assessment objectives, informed by Ofqual, are the same across all awarding bodies and exam boards, and ensure consistency in all A-level English language qualifications no matter which board a student is enrolled with.

Let's start properly by looking at the assessment objectives themselves, and how they're described in the specification. The five assessment objectives used for the subject as a whole are outlined in the specification as follows. You've got AO1, which is about applying appropriate methods of language analysis using associated terminology and coherent written expression. You have AO2, which is about demonstrating critical understanding of concepts and issues relevant to languages. AO3 is about analysing and evaluating how contextual factors and language features are associated with how meaning is constructed. AO4 is about exploring connections across texts, informed by linguistic concepts and methods. And AO5 demonstrates expertise and creativity, and the use of English to communicate in different ways.

What might these look like in practice? Well, let's take a couple of examples from the specification to illustrate this. In a language analysis question, such as those that we might find in Section A of Paper One, or Question Three of Paper Two, the AO1 and the AO3 would come into play. For AO3, students would be expected to interpret the ways in which language is being used in a text or a pair of texts, analysing how the text producer – so, often a conventional writer, but also potentially a speaker or someone communicating online – uses language to communicate and represent ideas about their subject matter, but also about themselves. After all, when we use language, we aren't just telling people things about the world around us; we’re also telling them something about us and our identities too. They would also be expected to identify and describe the language being used for the AO1 marks, and this would involve them selecting the most useful language methods, using them to discuss the features, the patterns, the styles, the strategies being used by the text producer. And that inevitably varies depending on the type of text under scrutiny.

So, a conventional written text might be analysed by describing some of the visual design choices – the graphology; the vocabulary choices – the lexis and the semantics, for example, and what those might mean; how the text has been structured to convey particular meanings – so, that would be the syntax and the discourse structure. Maybe, with a spoken or online text, students might start to draw on their understanding of aspects such as sounds – so, phonology – and interactive strategies – which might be termed pragmatics and discourse structure. Analysing a piece of 20th-century prose from a newspaper is probably going to be quite different to analysing a series of WhatsApp messages in a group chat. But the same assessment   principles will be at work.

So, behind all of this, the mark scheme is designed to recognise that students will be offering different levels of sophistication, depth and insight, and the mark scheme and the assessment   objectives are there to help examiners and teachers discriminate between those different levels of achievement. This might mean that a student who’s able to identify a few isolated features of language, perhaps label a few of those accurately, but then be a bit more hit and miss with others, will be able to gain credit for what they have done – while another student who identifies and labels a range of features and also starts to notice that some of those features are appearing at different points in a text, or following a certain structure, might be rewarded more highly for this more holistic approach.

So, why does this work? Well, this approach works because it allows a teacher or examiner to separate the different strands of a student answer into the relevant AOs,  and it works with the kinds of approach that students often take in answers like this. If a student is good at the bigger picture stuff – for example, reading the texts well for meaning, maybe they've got a good grasp of what they're about as well – but they don't always describe the language choices with accuracy or a suitable linguistic label, they might score well for AO3 but lower on AO1. On the other hand, if a student is great at identifying features, labelling second-person pronouns, modal auxiliary verbs, describing interactional strategies, commenting on discourse structure, but not always good on actually explaining what the effects of these choices are or what the texts are actually about, they might do well on AO1 but less so on AO3. And then of course there will be students who do both with real skill; they will weave together an overall grasp of the texts – getting to grips with things like how text producers represent their ideas, how they position themselves in relation to their audiences – while also describing a range of relevant language features with skill and detail. They'll score highly on both AO1 and AO3, particularly if they show that they are genuinely evaluating how a text or a pair of texts is working.

And it's this evaluation which is key to doing well on AO2, as well. This AO has to be quite broad because, as we've alluded to previously, the scope of the course is very broad. In one lesson, you might be teaching something to do with attitudes to accents, while a teaching partner might be covering ideas of nature and nurture in child language development and looking at studies about, for example, the role of infant-directed speech in early vocabulary development. Then the next week you might be teaching something on social networks in working-class communities, while your students research some of the ways in which the ‘i-n-g’, or the 'ing' or 'in' sound, varies depending on social class and region. AO2 has to be able to assess all of those language ideas from language study – named theorists, specialist research studies, broader linguistic concepts around, for example, power and gender – across papers One and Two, and the NEA language investigation, because students often get a free choice of topic to work on there. That's why the different bands of AO2 offer a logical movement through different levels of understanding.

At Level One, there might be a basic understanding of the topics being discussed, but little genuine linguistic knowledge. At Level Two, you would expect to see broad familiarity with the ideas on the course, perhaps without the kind of detail that suggests a really firm grasp of what's been taught and what's been learned. And at Level Three and above, we see much more detail emerging. So, at Level Three, there would be evidence of detailed knowledge. This might take the form of a clear explanation of a linguistic study that's relevant to the question being set; a good selection of examples that might help to illustrate an argument; or perhaps a clear grasp of an important idea around, for example, dialect and region, or how grammar might have changed in a particular period of history. At Level Four, this detailed understanding allows students to see that there are different ways of interpreting how language works. So, this could be in the form of weighing up – evaluating – different models to explain child language, attitudes to change, or language and gender. Or, it might take the form of considering wider factors, beyond what the question could be asking them to focus on. By the time we get to Level Five we see all of this and more, perhaps in the form of a wider evaluation that draws in a range of different ideas and offers a clear direction through them. Perhaps an informed challenge to the terms of the question, or just a really impressive grasp of how different aspects of language study might be linked.

Language doesn't exist in isolation and one way in which the AQA specification recognises this is through AO4, which explores connections between texts. On a fairly straightforward level, this means that texts might be compared to identify and evaluate some of the following: How they handle the same theme or topic in similar or different ways, offering different perspectives and different uses of language; how they address different audiences, or similar audiences in different ways; how their contexts of production might lead to different approaches being taken – eg, one might be designed to be a formal historical record of events, while another text might be just a casual, transient reflection on something that's happened. Another feature might be how the mode (the spoken, the written, the online form of the text) or maybe even the form or genre (so an online news article, or printed advertisement) might have an impact on the language choices made. How the stance of the text producer – eg, the politician making the speech, the opinion writer producing the op-ed – might be handled differently through certain language choices.

On Paper One, AO4 is assessed in a single question, where, having already analysed two texts separately, students are then asked to consider the two texts together – making connections, exploring those connections and ultimately evaluating them. On Paper Two, AO4 is assessed in a question that brings together two texts from the outset, and again, alongside AO1 and AO3, is part of the range of analytical tools that a student can bring into the discussion of what the texts are representing, what they mean and how they use language to do that. Here as well, the connections between the texts can also be extended to consider the ways in which they connect to the wider world, the world in which these texts about language actually exist. In the NEA, so the non-exam assessment  , AO4 is important for the original writing commentary, as it's the part where students discuss the connections between a text that they've crafted and the style model that's inspired them.

In practical terms, the AOs are used to assess different aspects of students’ written work. They're inflected slightly differently depending on the type of question that's being set. For example, where there's data to analyse – so Paper One, Section A, Paper Two, Section B, for example – the main focus of AO1 is to assess how well a student has applied linguistic methods to analyse language. However, when there's no data to analyse, for example, one of the essay questions on Paper Two, AO1 is used to assess the written accuracy, the fluency, the structure of the essay, as well as the linguistic register being employed. Where there's both data and an essay question – so Paper One, Section B on child language, for example – AO1 is used to assess both the analysis of the data and the accuracy and structure of the answer. The mark schemes for each question, along with the lead examiner or moderator reports, can be used to clarify exactly what's assessed on which task.

I hope this has given you an insight into the AQA specification and how the assessment is rooted at the heart of its design. For the English Language A-level, as well as being an interesting and varied course, these AOs allow for the flexibility of assessing a large range of different kinds of work, from essays, to text analysis, to original writing and more. It is genuinely a rich, varied and diverse course. Many students enjoy studying it, many teachers enjoy teaching it. And I hope that this has given you a useful introduction to the course, and I hope you enjoy teaching it. Thank you very much.

Questions you may want to think about

• How can you use these insights to prepare your learners for exams?
• Do your internal assessments reflect the approach of the exam? To what extent do you want them to?
• What’s the most important or surprising thing that you’ve learned? How might it influence your teaching?