A Level English Language: Paper 4 Language Topics — Practice Questions

These are original stimulus materials and questions written for Marlbridge, for revision and practice on this content. They are not reproduced past-paper questions, and they do not replicate the exam’s exact structure, question count or mark tariffs — examination boards hold copyright in their own papers. Use these alongside the official past papers available free from your board.

Related: Paper 4 Language Topics study guide

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Section A: English in the World

Question 1

Read the following extract, adapted from a discussion on an international business forum.

“Our company’s internal reports are written in English, even though fewer than half of our staff are first-language English speakers. When the policy was introduced five years ago, management argued it was the only practical option for a business with offices in nine countries and no single shared national language among its workforce. Since then, opinion inside the company has remained sharply divided.

Some colleagues say this makes meetings faster and fairer, since everyone uses the same working language, and nobody has to wait for a translator or work from a translated document that may not capture the original meaning precisely. They point out that English has become the default language of international trade, aviation and scientific publishing more broadly, so learning to operate confidently in it is a transferable skill regardless of which company someone eventually works for. A colleague from the Warsaw office wrote that she had come to see her improving English as a form of professional investment in herself, not just a concession to head office.

Others say it puts non-native speakers at a permanent disadvantage, and that something is lost when people cannot express ideas in their strongest language. A colleague from the Tokyo office described watching capable, experienced staff hesitate in meetings, not because their ideas were weak, but because they were translating complex thoughts in real time while native speakers spoke fluently and often dominated the discussion. Several contributors also raised a subtler worry: that humour, nuance and persuasive rhetorical style — the things that make someone sound confident and credible to a room — are much harder to reproduce in a second language, so judgements about who seems ‘sharp’ or ‘senior-management material’ may quietly reward native fluency rather than the underlying quality of a person’s thinking.

A recent internal survey, circulated informally after the thread gained attention, found that just under a third of non-native English speakers in the company felt confident contributing to meetings without preparing their points in advance, compared with the vast majority of native speakers. Several respondents suggested that written follow-up summaries, sent after meetings rather than relied on as the primary record, would let quieter or less fluent colleagues correct or add to points they had struggled to make in real time.

No consensus has emerged from the thread, though several contributors suggested the company should at least provide more structured language support for staff who want it, rather than treating fluency as something employees are simply expected to arrive with. A moderator eventually pinned a reply summarising the thread as evidence that a shared corporate language solves one coordination problem while quietly creating another, subtler one around who gets heard and who gets promoted.”

Discuss what you feel are the most important issues raised in this extract relating to the spread of English as a global language of business. You should refer to specific details from the extract as well as to ideas and examples from your wider study of English in the world. [25]

Section B: Language and the self

Question 2

Read the following extract, adapted from a magazine feature on workplace communication.

“New graduates entering the office often have to learn a whole new vocabulary — not just technical jargon, but a whole way of talking that signals you belong. Career coaches describe this as one of the least discussed parts of starting a first job: nobody hands new employees a glossary, so the vocabulary and tone of a team have to be picked up by listening, imitating and occasionally getting it visibly wrong in front of colleagues.

Get it wrong, using words that are too casual or too formal for your team, and people notice, even if nobody says anything directly. One recent graduate described emailing a senior manager with the same breezy tone she used with university friends, and only later realising, from a colleague’s gently raised eyebrow, that the register had read as overly familiar. Another described the opposite problem: over-formal emails to a team that communicated almost entirely in short, casual messages, which made him seem distant and unsure of himself rather than professional.

The feature notes that this kind of linguistic conformity is rarely about correctness in any absolute sense — there is nothing objectively wrong with either a formal or a casual register — but about fitting the specific shared style of a particular team, which can vary enormously even between departments in the same building. Some workplaces prize brisk, acronym-heavy efficiency; others value a warmer, more conversational style even in formal correspondence. Learning to read which style applies, and adjusting quickly, is presented in the feature as a skill in itself, one that experienced employees perform so automatically they often no longer notice they are doing it, but that newcomers have to learn deliberately and sometimes painfully. The feature closes by suggesting that a short, informal induction conversation about a team’s communication norms would spare many graduates months of quiet anxiety over a problem nobody had thought to name for them. One engineering team quoted in the feature had developed a set of a dozen internal acronyms so routine that new hires needed a full month before they could follow a stand-up meeting without asking for a translation, while a marketing team two floors up prided itself on banning acronyms altogether, on the theory that clarity mattered more than speed. Job titles caused similar confusion: one graduate spent her first week unsure whether her manager’s actual authority matched an unfamiliar internal title, since the same role carried a different name at her previous employer. It also notes that the same adjustment happens in reverse whenever someone moves teams or changes employer, since the specific register that signals belonging is local to each workplace rather than a single, fixed standard of professional English that transfers automatically from one job to the next.”

Discuss what you feel are the most important issues raised in this extract relating to the ways in which language can shape and reflect social identity. You should refer to specific details from the extract as well as to ideas and examples from your wider study of Language and the self. [25]

Question 3

Read the following extract, adapted from a popular science article.

“Some researchers have claimed that speakers of languages with no dedicated grammatical future tense – where ‘I go tomorrow’ and ‘I go now’ use the same verb form – are more likely to save money for later, because their language does not linguistically separate the present from the future. The original study, which compared savings rates across dozens of countries, found that speakers of so-called ‘futureless’ languages retired with significantly larger savings on average than speakers of languages that grammatically mark the future tense, even after some economic factors were taken into account.

The researchers suggested a possible mechanism: if a language does not force a grammatical distinction between now and later, its speakers may experience the future as psychologically closer and more concrete, making it easier to act on behalf of a future self rather than treating saving as a sacrifice for someone who barely feels connected to the present self. Supporters of the study have pointed to it as a striking real-world illustration of linguistic relativity — the idea that the structure of the language we speak can shape aspects of how we think and behave, not merely how we describe our thoughts afterwards.

Critics argue this confuses correlation with causation, since the countries studied also differ in culture, wealth, social policy, welfare provision and religious tradition, any of which could independently explain different saving habits without language playing any causal role at all. Some linguists have also questioned whether the grammatical category used to classify languages as ‘futureless’ is as clean a distinction as the study assumes, since many of those languages mark future time clearly through other means, such as adverbs or context, even without a dedicated verb form. The debate remains unresolved, with later attempts to replicate the finding on different data producing mixed results. One frequently cited counter-example is Finnish, a language without a dedicated future tense by the study’s own classification, whose national savings rate nonetheless tracks closely with several neighbouring countries that do mark the future grammatically, a pattern the original researchers acknowledge but attribute to overlapping cultural and institutional factors that may be doing more explanatory work than grammar itself. The article ends by noting that even researchers who doubt the strong causal claim tend to agree the finding is worth taking seriously as a hypothesis, precisely because it is testable, rather than dismissing it outright as an unfalsifiable claim about language and thought. The article suggests that whatever the eventual verdict, the debate has already been useful in forcing a clearer distinction between weak and strong versions of linguistic relativity, since much of the public argument around the original study conflated the two.”

Discuss what you feel are the most important issues raised in this extract relating to the relationship between language and thought, or to how language is acquired or learned. You should refer to specific details from the extract as well as to ideas and examples from your wider study of Language and the self. [25]

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Model approach: Question 1

A strong response engages with the extract’s specific tension — efficiency and fairness of a shared working language, set against the disadvantage and loss it may create for non-native speakers — before widening out. A workable structure:

Para 1: identify the specific issue the extract raises (English as a
        shared/neutral business language: benefit vs cost)
Para 2: develop the "benefit" side with wider knowledge -- English's
        established role as a global lingua franca in business,
        science and diplomacy; efficiency and access it can provide
Para 3: develop the "cost" side -- disadvantage to non-native speakers,
        loss of nuance, questions of linguistic and cultural
        imperialism raised in wider study of English's global spread
Para 4: a considered judgement that weighs both, referring back to
        the extract's own framing of the debate

Every paragraph should refer back to the extract at least once, rather than drifting into a general essay about global English that could have been written without reading it.

Model approach: Question 2

A strong response identifies that the extract describes a sociolect (a shared, group-specific way of speaking associated with belonging to a workplace or profession), not an individual’s idiolect, even though it is framed around individual graduates’ experience. A workable structure:

Para 1: identify the specific issue -- linguistic conformity as a
        marker of belonging in a new social/occupational group
Para 2: link to wider knowledge of sociolect and identity -- how
        adopting a group's register signals membership, and how
        getting it wrong can mark someone as an outsider
Para 3: connect to a named influence from wider study -- occupation
        and workplace as a source of shared sociolect, comparable to
        the way age or social class produce their own sociolects
        (region, by contrast, produces dialects)
Para 4: a considered conclusion on what the extract reveals about the
        relationship between language choices and social identity

As with Question 1, anchor each paragraph in a specific detail from the extract (the phrase “signals you belong,” the idea that “people notice”) rather than writing a prepared answer about language and identity in general.

Model approach: Question 3

A strong response recognises this as a language-and-thought stimulus, not an identity one. A workable structure:

Para 1: identify the specific claim the extract makes -- grammatical
        tense marking correlating with saving behaviour
Para 2: develop the "relativity/determinism" side -- the Sapir-Whorf
        hypothesis, that the structure of a language can shape how its
        speakers think about or act on a concept such as time
Para 3: develop the "critics" side -- universalism's objection that
        correlation is not causation, and that culture, wealth and
        policy are confounding variables the study may not control for
Para 4: a considered judgement on how strong the extract's own evidence
        actually is, referring back to its specific wording

A stimulus that instead describes how a child’s early speech develops – rather than how adult language use might relate to thought or behaviour – calls on the innateness-and-learning strand instead: identify the specific behaviour reported, then weigh behaviourist, nativist and empiricist explanations against it, in the same four-part shape.

Practising the four-part structure on your own stimulus

Both model approaches above follow the same underlying shape: identify the specific issue the extract raises, develop one side or angle with named wider-study knowledge, develop a second side or angle the same way, then reach a considered judgement that refers back to the extract. This structure is transferable to any unseen stimulus, so a useful way to build speed before the exam is to find a short news headline or social-media comment thread on a language-related issue — global English’s spread, a workplace or generational slang trend, an accent being mocked or celebrated online — and practise sketching the same four-part plan against it, even without writing the full response. The skill being trained is not memorising content but reliably applying the same structure to material you have never seen before, which is exactly what the real exam demands.

Where marks are usually lost

• Writing a prepared, generic essay that does not engage with the specific stimulus text.
• Taking only one side of a genuinely two-sided issue when the extract itself presents both.
• Confusing idiolect (individual) with sociolect (shared, group-level) in Section B-style responses.
• Naming a relevant concept (lingua franca, cultural imperialism, sociolect) without linking it explicitly back to the extract’s own content.
• Assuming Section B is only about social identity and having no prepared examples for the innateness-and-learning or language-and-thought strands.
• Uneven development between paragraphs, with a long first point and a rushed conclusion that never reaches a genuine judgement.