Advice on Module 1 Language Production
Module 1
For the language production tasks in Modules 1 for AS English Language and Literature you will:
- Always be given a springboard text which will be non-fiction
- Need to identify audience and purpose
- Plan out your own text taken into account audience and purpose
- Select appropriate vocabulary and syntax
When you have written your work you must check it over carefully for possible revisions and technical accuracy. This is very important.
TIP
- In the exam, write on alternative lines then there needs to be no rough copy and time wasted.
- Leave 25 minutes for commentary
- In the commentary, focus on how text has been constructed, using and analysing appropriate examples.
Remember that there are 100 marks for the language
production task and 50 marks for the commentary.
Here is a grid that shows what the tasks have been so far:
| Springboard Text | Task |
| 2 Guardian articles; letter about popularity of books in Internet age. | Newspaper article on importance of wide reading for young people. |
| Book review of Generation X by Douglas Coupland | Book review for e-magazine |
| Single homeless people information from Shelter, history and present info on RNLI | Text of charity leaflet |
| John Hegley article on love at the school disco from TES | Autobiographical article in magazine of own choice |
| Distant Voices extract; article on Blackpool from The Independant | Opening of short story for audience over 16 |
| Should motorists face city tolls? and Support grows for smoking restrictions. BBC News website | Speech writing on a choice of issues |
Text 1 | Text 2 | Text 3 | Text 4 | Text 5 | Text 6 | Text 7
WINE BY PAUL LEVY
We had all these in our tropical fruit salad. The brief to our wine merchants was to complement their exotic, musky perfumes and flavours. It wasn’t easy. One imaginative firm sent a smart Australian Chardonnay. Its own oaky, tropical fruit flavour ought to have married beautifully. It didn’t, though, for the same reason that the clever choice of a dry red Lambrusco di Sorbara failed: sweetness in the wine is essential. This is one case when contrasting dry with sweet just doesn’t work.
Adverbs
An adverb is a word that tells you how something is done, whether, for instance, it is done quickly, efficiently, neatly, badly or well. It adds to a verb.
There are many ways of walking: fast, slowly, backwards, stupidly, stiffly, purposefully, lightly, thoughtfully, carelessly or dangerously.
“No need to shout,” he answered coolly.
“I thought you were deaf,” she added angrily.
“No, I can hear you perfectly well,”
he said politely.
“Well, I was going to say that we need to use adverbs to be clear about the different
ways of talking or shouting,” she finished more
calmly.
| Select (jokingfully, if you like) some adverbs for different ways of eating, writing, singing or driving |
Adverbs can often be made out of adjectives: the cats played awkwardly, cheekily, and so on.
They can answer the questions When? Where? How? How often? And so on.
Adverbs may also add to adjectives or other adverbs:
very beautiful,
amazingly handsome
or unspeakably, revoltingly ugly.
Text 3
adverb(ial)
A term used in GRAMMATICAL classification of
WORDS to refer to a heterogeneous group of items whose most frequent function is to
specify the mode of action of the VERB. In English, many (by no means all) adverbs are
signalled by the use of the –ly ending,
e.g. quickly, but cf. soon, SYNTACTICALLY, one
can relate adverbs to such QUESTIONS as how, where,
when and why, and classify them accordingly,
as adverbs of ‘manner’, ‘place’, ‘time’, etc.; but as soon
as this is done the functional equivalence of adverbs, adverb phrases, PREPOSITIONAL
PHRASES, NOUN phrases and adverb clauses becomes apparent, e.g. A: When is he going? B: Now/Very soon/In five minutes/Next week/When the bell
rings. An ‘adverb phrase’ (often abbreviated as AdvP) is a phrase with an
adverb as its HEAD, e.g. very slowly, quite soon.
The term adverbial is widely used as a general term which subsumes all five categories.
‘Adverb’ is thus a word-CLASS (along with NOUN, ADJECTIVE, etc.) Within
adverbials, many syntactic roles have been identified, of which verb MODIFICATION has
traditionally been seen as central. A function of adverbials as SENTENCE modifiers or
sentence CONNECTORS has been emphasised in linguistic studies, e.g. However/Moreover/Actually/Frankly… I think she was right. Several other classes of
items, very different in DISTRIBUTION and FUNCTION, have also been brought under the
heading of (adverbial), such as INTENSIFIERS (e.g. very,
awfully) and NEGATIVE PARTICLES (e.g. not);
but often linguistic studies set these up as distinct word-classes. See Quirk et al. 1985:
Chs 7, 8, -15; Huddleston 1984: Chs 3, 10.
Once
there was The Grunge. It was massive and messy and emanated from your nightmare.
An aural chaos spewed forth from a bucketful of hopes and realisations. Prepared with a
handful of loud guitars, propelled through a clutch of prehistoric amps and speakers and
penetrated into a desperate core of rattling hearts, The Grunge spoke authentically to the
longhaired kids of America. And I don’t mean the ones who wore hairspray. The Grunge
meant bloody business.
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Text 5
The Dirty Word
by Karl Shapiro
The dirty word hops in the cage of the mind like the Pondicherry vulture, stomping with its heavy claw on the sweet meat of the brain and tearing it with its vicious beak, ripping and chopping the flesh. Terrified, the small boy bears the big bird of the dirty word into the house, and, grunting, puffing, carries it up the stairs to his own room in the skull. Bits of black feather cling to his clothes and his hair as he locks the staring creature in the dark closet.
All day the small boy returns to the closet to examine and feed the bird, to caress and kick the bird, that now snaps and flaps its wings savagely whenever the door is opened. How the boy trembles and delights at the sight of the white excrement of the bird! How the bird leaps and rushes against the walls of the skull, trying to escape from the zoo of the vocabulary! How wildly snaps the sweet meat of the brain in its rage.
And the bird outlives the man, being freed at the man’s death-funeral by a
word from the Rabbi.
(But I one morning went upstairs and opened the door and entered the closet and
found the great bird dead. Softly I wept it and softly removed it and softly buried the
body of the bird in the hollyhock garden of the house I lived in twenty years before. And
out of the worn black feathers of the wing I have made these pens to write these elegies,
for I have outlived the bird, and I have murdered it in my early manhood).
I didn’t hate Milton Keynes immediately, which I suppose is as much as you could hope for the place. You step out of the station and into a big open square lined on three sides with buildings of reflective glass, and have an instant sense of spaciousness such as you never get in English towns. The town itself stood on the slope of a small hill a good half-mile away beyond a network of pedestrian tunnels and over a large open space shared by car parks and those strange new-town trees that never seem to grow. I had the distinct feeling that the next time I passed this expanse of grass and asphalt it would be covered with brick office buildings with coppery windows
Though I have spent much time wandering through new towns trying to imagine what their creators could possibly have been thinking, I had never been to Milton Keynes. In many ways, it was much superior to any new town I had seen before. The underpasses were faced with polished granite and were largely free of graffiti and the permanent murky puddles that seem a design feature of Basingstoke and Bracknell.
The town itself was a strange amalgam of styles. The grassless, shady strips along the centres of the main boulevards gave them a vaguely French air. The landscaped light industrial parks around the fringes looked German. The grid plan and numbered street names recalled America. The buildings were of the featureless sort you find around any international airport. In short, it looked anything but English.
The oddest thing was that there were no shops and no one about. I walked for some distance through the central core of the town, up one avenue and down another and through the shadowy streets that connected them. Every car park was full and there were signs of life behind the gaping office windows, but almost no passing traffic and never more than one or two other pedestrians along the endless vistas of road. I knew there was a vast shopping mall in the town somewhere because I had read about it in Mark Lawson’s The Battle for Room Service, but I couldn’t for the life of me find it, and I couldn’t even find anyone to ask. The annoying thing was that nearly all the buildings looked like they might be shopping malls. I kept spotting likely looking contenders and going up to investigate only to discover that it was the headquarters for an insurance company of something.
I ended up wandering some distance out into a residential area – a kind of endless Bovisville of neat yellow-brick homes, winding streets, and pedestrian walkways lined with never-grow trees – but there was still no-one about. From a hilltop I spied a sprawl of blue roofs about three-quarters of a mile off and thought that might be the shopping mall and headed off for it. The pedestrian walkways, which had seemed rather agreeable to me at first, began to become irritating. They wandered lazily through submerged cuttings, nicely landscaped but with a feeling of being in no hurry to get you anywhere. Clearly they had been laid out by people who had thought of it as a two-dimensional exercise. They followed circuitous, seemingly purposeless routes that must have looked pleasing on paper, but gave no consideration to the idea that people, faced with a long walk between houses and shops, would mostly like to get there in a reasonably direct way. Worse still was the sense of being lost in a semi-subterranean world cut off from visible landmarks. I found myself frequently scrambling up banks just to see where I was, only to discover that it was nowhere near where I wanted to be.
Eventually, at the end of one of these muttered scramblings, I found that I was beside a dual carriageway exactly opposite the blue-roofed sprawl I had begun searching for an hour earlier. I could see signs for Texas Homecare and a MacDonald’s and other such places. But when I returned to the footway I couldn’t begin to work out how to get there. The paths forked off in a variety of directions, disappearing round landscaped bends, none of which proved remotely rewarding when looked into. In the end I followed one sloping path back up to street level, where at least I could see where I was, and walked along it all the way back to the train station, which now seemed so absurdly remote from the residential areas that clearly only a total idiot could possibly have thought that Milton Keynes would be a paradise for walkers. It was no wonder that I hadn’t passed a single pedestrian all morning.
Miss White, who was a dotty little woman with a queer, grinning glare
and had long ago taught
kindergarten at a good school, came back from Malta full of lilies.
‘They grow everywhere. Like weeds. At the roadsides in clumps. All among the
stones,’ she said.
She was talking at the church lunch.
Mrs Wellington, a warden’s widow, munched.
‘They would,’ she said. ‘Why not? They are
weeds in other countries. In Australia they are called pig lilies.’
‘But they’re free. They just grow anywhere. Beautiful.’
‘I know.’
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