AQA A-Level English Language 7702: Paper 1 — Practice Questions

These are original 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 own section 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 for practice at the exact format and tariffs the board sets.

Related: Paper 1 revision notes

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Section A – Textual Variations and Representations

1. Name the language levels you should use as a framework when analysing any text. [3]

2. Explain what is meant by representation in language analysis. [2]

3. A newspaper headline reads: “Migrant surge overwhelms coastal towns.”

(a) Analyse the representation created, referring to at least three language features. [6] (b) Rewrite the headline to create a sympathetic representation, and explain the changes you made. [4]

4. Explain how the following contribute to the representation of a group: modification, transitivity, semantic field. [6]

5. Explain three features of the language of advertising and the effect of each. [6]

6. Explain the concept of audience positioning and how a text can position its reader without stating a view explicitly. [5]

7. Explain how mode affects a text, comparing a scripted news bulletin with a live radio phone-in. [4]

8. Distinguish between idiolect and sociolect, giving an example of each, as terms for describing how identity is constructed in a text. (Sociolects are studied in more depth for Paper 2, Language diversity and change.) [4]

Section B – Children’s Language Development

9. Give the five stages of child language acquisition, in order. [5]

10. Explain how “virtuous errors” (e.g. “goed”, “sheeps”) are used as evidence for Chomsky’s nativist theory of language acquisition, and explain how this challenges a purely behaviourist account. [5]

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Answers

1. Lexis and semantics; grammar and syntax; phonology, graphology, pragmatics and discourse structure [1] [1] [1].

2. Representation is how a text portrays a person, group, place or idea through its language choices [1]; every text presents a version of reality shaped by selection and wording, rather than a neutral reflection of it [1].

3. (a) The metaphor “surge” draws on a semantic field of water and natural disaster, presenting people as an uncontrollable force rather than individuals [1] [1]. “Overwhelms” is a transitive verb placing migrants in the agent position and the towns as affected patients, so responsibility and threat are assigned to the migrants [1] [1]. The noun “migrant” is used as a modifier rather than a full noun phrase, so people are reduced to a category with no individuating detail — no ages, names or circumstances [1]. Omission of a determiner and any number makes the group seem indefinite and limitless [1]. (b) For example: “Coastal towns welcome families arriving by sea.” [1] “Families” restores human individuality and relationship in place of a category label [1]; “welcome” reverses the transitivity, making the towns the willing agent rather than the victim [1]; “arriving by sea” is neutral and descriptive, removing the disaster metaphor [1].

4. Modification — the adjectives and nouns placed before a head noun (“young offenders”, “hardworking families”) attach evaluative qualities to a group before it is even named [1] [1]. Transitivity — whether a group is the agent doing the action or the patient it is done to determines whether they appear active and responsible or passive and vulnerable [1] [1]. Semantic field — the cluster of related lexis running through a text frames how the group is understood; a field of warfare presents a debate as conflict, a field of illness presents it as something to be treated [1] [1].

5. Any three, 2 marks each: imperatives — “Discover”, “Taste the difference” — create a direct instruction that assumes compliance [1] [1]; second person address — “you” individualises a mass-market message, so the reader feels personally addressed [1] [1]; presupposition — “when you upgrade” assumes the decision is already made, so the reader is not invited to question it [1] [1]; phonological patterning — alliteration and rhythm make a slogan memorable and easily recalled at the point of purchase [1] [1]; comparative adjectives with no stated comparator — “cleaner”, “stronger” — which imply superiority without a testable claim [1] [1].

6. Audience positioning is the way a text constructs a particular role and set of assumptions for its reader [1]. It can do so without stating a view by using presupposition, which builds a claim into the structure of a sentence so accepting the sentence means accepting the claim [1]; by inclusive pronouns such as “we” and “our”, which enrol the reader in a shared position [1]; by selection and omission — deciding which voices are quoted and which are not [1]; and by naming choices, since “protester” and “activist” position the reader differently towards the same person [1].

7. A scripted news bulletin is written to be spoken: it is planned, edited and dense with information, uses complete sentences and standard grammar, and has no interaction or repair [1] [1]. A live phone-in is spontaneous speech: it contains fillers, false starts, overlaps, interruption and self-repair, and its structure is negotiated between participants in real time rather than fixed in advance [1] [1].

8. Idiolect is an individual’s own distinctive, personal way of using language [1] — e.g. a person’s characteristic catchphrases or habitual turns of phrase [1]. Sociolect is the variety of language shared by a particular social group [1] — e.g. the shared vocabulary of an occupational group, such as medical staff’s abbreviations, or of a teenage friendship group [1]. (A variety shared by people from the same region is a dialect, not a sociolect.)

9. Babbling [1], holophrastic (one-word) [1], two-word [1], telegraphic [1], post-telegraphic [1].

10. A virtuous error is a grammatically logical mistake a child could not have heard an adult produce, e.g. “goed” for went, or “sheeps” for sheep [1] [1] — the child has over-applied a regular grammatical rule to an irregular word [1]. Nativists use this as evidence for an innate language acquisition device, since the child cannot simply be imitating adult speech they have never heard [1]; this directly challenges Skinner’s behaviourist account, which explains acquisition through imitation and reinforcement alone, and cannot explain an error no adult ever modelled [1].

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Where marks are usually lost

• Identifying features without linking them to representation.
• Ignoring transitivity, which is often one of the most productive features for representation analysis.
• Describing advertising language generically rather than analysing effect.
• Treating mode as simply “spoken or written” rather than a continuum.