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A language discourse is a way of writing or talking about language that carries within it a set of attitudes, assumptions, and ideologies. The word "discourse" here does not mean simply "a discussion" — it means a recognisable mode of talk with its own characteristic vocabulary, recurring metaphors, and underlying value system. When a newspaper columnist writes that "standards of English are slipping," when a radio presenter complains that "nobody can use an apostrophe any more," or when a politician calls for schools to teach "proper English," they are each producing a language discourse. They are not just stating facts; they are positioning themselves, their readers, and the people they describe within a web of beliefs about what language is, who owns it, and what its decline or change signifies.
For AQA A-Level English Language 7702, language discourses are the heart of Paper 2, Section B. You will be given two texts about a single language topic — for example, two articles about regional accents, or two opinion pieces about whether texting harms literacy — and you must (a) analyse how the writers use language to present ideas, attitudes and opinions (40 marks), and (b) produce a piece of directed writing on the same topic (30 marks), expressing and supporting your own view. This lesson establishes the conceptual foundations: what a language discourse is, how writers build and project attitudes through language, and how you turn that understanding into exam marks.
The first thing to grasp is that language discourses are made of meta-language — language used to describe, evaluate, or analyse language itself.
Key Definition: Meta-language — language used to talk about language. A sentence such as "Young people grunt instead of speaking in full sentences" is meta-language: it makes a claim about how a group uses language.
Meta-language is everywhere once you start looking for it. It appears in dictionary debates ("should 'literally' be allowed to mean 'figuratively'?"), in complaints about pronunciation on the news, in style guides, in social-media pile-ons over a misplaced apostrophe, and in the perennial moral panics about slang, swearing, and text-speak. Crucially, meta-language is rarely neutral. The choice to call a usage an "error," a "corruption," a "degradation," or a "vandalism" of English smuggles in a value judgement. The same usage could be described by a linguist as a "variant," an "innovation," or a "natural change." The descriptive vocabulary you choose is the argument.
This is why, in the exam, you must always separate two things: what a writer claims about language, and what linguistics actually tells us about language. The gap between popular belief and linguistic evidence is the richest seam of analysis available to you. A top-band answer continually shows awareness that a writer's confident assertion ("texting is ruining spelling") is a claim within a discourse, not an established fact.
A language discourse is recognisable because it bundles together three things: a topic, a set of attitudes, and an underlying ideology.
A language attitude is an evaluative response — positive or negative — to a particular variety, accent, word, or usage. Attitudes are emotional and immediate: pride in a regional accent, irritation at the word "innit," approval of "BBC English." A language ideology is the deeper, more systematic belief structure that the attitude grows from. Ideologies are usually invisible to the people who hold them, because they feel like plain common sense.
Key Definition: Language ideology — a coherent, often unspoken set of beliefs about what language is, how it should work, and what its variation or change means. Ideologies are embedded in institutions (schools, the media, government) and shape how language is taught, judged, and regulated.
Consider the sentence: "She doesn't speak properly." On the surface it is a simple description. Underneath, it rests on the standard language ideology — the belief that there is one correct form of English, that this form is inherently superior, and that everyone ought to use it. The speaker almost certainly does not experience this as an "ideology"; they experience it as obvious truth. Part of your analytical job is to make the invisible ideology visible: to show how a text's word choices, examples, and assumptions presuppose a particular ideology without ever arguing for it openly.
| Surface attitude | Typical phrasing | Underlying ideology |
|---|---|---|
| Standard English is "correct" | "She doesn't speak properly" | Standard language ideology — one variety is superior |
| The "right" accent for authority | "Newsreaders should speak clearly" (meaning RP) | Accent prestige — regional accents are less professional |
| English is in decline | "Nobody can spell any more" | The complaint tradition — the past was a golden age |
| Slang is laziness | "They just grunt at each other" | Verbal hygiene — informal language signals moral failing |
| Texting destroys literacy | "Emoji are killing English" | Language-endangerment / moral panic about the new |
None of these attitudes is supported by linguistic evidence. As you will see across this course, linguists consistently find that all language varieties are equally systematic, rule-governed, and expressive. The attitudes persist not because they are true but because they do social work — they mark status, police group boundaries, and express anxiety about a changing world.
A central concept for this whole topic is the complaint tradition, a term associated with the sociolinguists James Milroy and Lesley Milroy in Authority in Language (first edition 1985). They observed that complaints about the decline of English are not a modern phenomenon caused by texting or social media — they are a continuous thread running back centuries.
Key Definition: The complaint tradition (Milroy & Milroy) — the long, recurring history of public complaint about the supposed decline, corruption, or sloppiness of English. Because near-identical complaints recur in every generation, the "decline" they describe is almost certainly an illusion: language has not been getting steadily worse for 300 years.
The Milroys distinguish two types of complaint. Type 1 complaints are about correctness — they attack specific usages as errors (split infinitives, "less" vs "fewer," the use of "literally"). Type 2 complaints are about clarity and morality — they accuse careless language of being dishonest, manipulative, or symptomatic of social decay. Both types, the Milroys argue, are really expressions of the standard language ideology and of a desire to maintain linguistic — and therefore social — authority.
Recognising the complaint tradition is enormously useful in the exam. When you read a Section B text complaining that young people "can't write a proper sentence," you can immediately position it: this is not a fresh observation but the latest instalment of a centuries-old genre. That historical awareness is exactly the kind of conceptualised, evaluative comment that the AO3 mark scheme rewards.
The 40-mark analysis task asks you to show how the texts "use language to present ideas, attitudes and opinions." This is fundamentally a question about positioning — how a writer positions the topic, the reader, and the people being discussed. Below is a practical toolkit. In the exam you select the features that are doing the most work in the text in front of you; you never simply list them.
Key Definition: Positioning — the way a text places its subject, its reader, and the people it discusses in relation to one another and to a set of values. Analysing positioning means asking: who is constructed as the in-group, who as the out-group, and how is the reader invited to feel?
Take this invented but typical sentence from a complaint-tradition opinion piece:
"Every time I open my inbox, I despair: another generation that cannot tell 'their' from 'there', butchering the language the rest of us were taught to cherish."
Notice how much attitude is packed in. The verb "despair" performs emotional investment; "butchering" builds a violent semantic field that frames language change as an act of slaughter; "the rest of us" splits the world into a virtuous in-group and a careless out-group; and "the language… we were taught to cherish" appeals to nostalgia and ownership. There is no evidence here at all — only a single anecdote ("my inbox") inflated into a claim about "a generation." A strong analytical paragraph would name these techniques and evaluate them, observing that the absence of data marks this firmly as prescriptivist complaint within the Milroys' tradition.
Part (b) of Section B asks you to write your own text on the same topic — typically an opinion article, an open letter, a blog post, or the text of a speech, aimed at a specified audience. This is assessed for AO5: your ability to communicate as a skilled, deliberate writer who shapes language for effect.
Directed writing is not an essay and it is not a data-free rant. The best responses do three things at once:
A common mistake is to treat part (b) as a chance to switch off your linguistics and just "be persuasive." The opposite is true: the most impressive directed writing turns the analytical insight of part (a) into rhetorical power. If you have just analysed how a prescriptivist writer relies on emotive metaphor and no evidence, you can quietly out-argue that position in part (b) by marrying persuasive flair with genuine descriptivist evidence.
Under exam pressure it helps to have a repeatable routine. First, decide your line in one sentence — what is the single thesis you will defend? A wavering, "on the one hand… on the other" piece rarely persuades; even a nuanced position needs a clear overall direction. Second, gather three or four pieces of ammunition — a named commentator, a concept, a real example, a historical parallel — that you will deploy as evidence. Third, choose two or three rhetorical devices suited to the named form, such as a provocative opening anecdote, a tricolon at a key moment, a rhetorical question, and a memorable closing image. Fourth, plan the shape: a hook that grabs attention, a clear statement of your position, a sequence of developed points each anchored by evidence, an acknowledgement of the opposing view that you then answer, and a strong, resonant conclusion. This structure ensures the piece reads as a crafted text with a beginning, middle, and end, rather than as an undirected stream of opinions — exactly what AO5 rewards.
The single most common reason able students underperform on part (b) is forgetting the form and audience. A brilliant argument written as an undifferentiated essay, when the brief asked for a speech to Year 11s or a letter to a newspaper, sacrifices marks that were freely available. Before you write a word, fix in your mind: who am I addressing, in what genre, and therefore in what register?
Task: Analyse how Text A (a newspaper column complaining about young people's spelling) uses language to present its attitudes.
Text A constructs language change as an act of violence in order to position the reader as a fellow victim. The controlling metaphor is one of physical destruction: spelling is "butchered," grammar is "under assault," and the language is something "the rest of us" must "defend." This warfare lexis does ideological work — it transforms a neutral linguistic phenomenon (orthographic variation) into a moral emergency demanding the reader's outrage. The inclusive pronoun "us," set against the depersonalised "this generation," builds a clear in-group of careful, educated readers and an out-group of careless youth, recruiting the reader to the writer's side before any argument is made. Tellingly, the text offers no linguistic evidence whatsoever; its sole support is the anecdotal "every time I open my inbox," a single instance inflated to a generational claim. The text therefore exemplifies what Milroy and Milroy call the complaint tradition: a recurring, evidence-free discourse whose real function is to assert the writer's linguistic — and social — authority rather than to describe language accurately.
Examiner-style commentary: This is a Top-band response. It is conceptualised from the first sentence (identifying purpose — positioning the reader as a victim) rather than merely spotting features. Methods (metaphor, semantic field, pronoun contrast, evidence type) are integrated into an argument about effect and ideology, satisfying AO1 and AO2, while the link to the complaint tradition supplies the conceptual, evaluative overview that AO3 demands. A Mid-band version might correctly identify the warfare metaphor and the "us/them" pronouns but treat them as a list of devices without explaining the ideological work they do, and would likely not reach for a named concept such as the complaint tradition.
Section B can draw its two texts from any well-established language debate. You are not expected to have pre-memorised the specific texts — they will be unseen — but you are expected to recognise the type of discourse you are looking at, because each type has a characteristic set of attitudes, metaphors, and named commentators. The table below maps the territory you will explore across this course; treat it as a mental index you can reach for the instant you read the exam texts.
| Discourse | Core question | Recurring metaphors / lexis | Key names to know |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prescriptivism vs descriptivism | Are there "correct" rules, or only usage? | decay, disease, crumbling buildings vs growth, evolution | Swift, Lowth, Aitchison, Crystal, Trudgill |
| The Standard English debate | Is one variety superior? Should schools enforce it? | "proper," "standards," "correct" vs "dialect," "diversity" | Honey, Trudgill, Lippi-Green |
| Political correctness | Should we change words to avoid harm? | "PC gone mad," "thought police" vs "respect," "inclusion" | Cameron, Pinker |
| Texting and literacy | Is digital language harming the young? | "destroying," "vandalism" vs "creativity," "skill" | Crystal, Humphrys, Cohen, Thurlow |
| Accent and dialect prejudice | Are non-standard accents stigmatised unfairly? | "lazy," "common" vs "identity," "prestige" | Trudgill, Giles, Lippi-Green |
| English as a global language | Is the spread of English a good thing? | "killer language" vs "lingua franca" | Crystal, Phillipson, Kachru |
The point of holding this map in your head is speed of orientation. When the exam paper lands, your first job is to classify: "These two texts are about regional accents — this is the accent-prejudice discourse — so I should be alert to the lexis of laziness, the prestige/solidarity distinction, and the chance to invoke Trudgill." That classification tells you which attitudes and which named commentators are likely to be relevant before you have read a single line in detail.
The earlier toolkit listed the key methods; here we go deeper into the three that most reliably separate strong answers from weak ones, because these are the ones students most often name but fail to analyse for effect.
Metaphor is never decorative in a language discourse — it is the argument in compressed form. When a writer calls a usage a "virus," they are not merely being colourful; they are importing an entire frame in which the usage is involuntary, contagious, harmful, and in need of medical containment. Compare this with a writer who calls the same usage an "innovation": now it is deliberate, creative, and potentially valuable. The choice of metaphor pre-loads the reader's judgement. Your analytical task is to (1) name the metaphor, (2) identify the frame it imports, and (3) evaluate what that frame conceals. The disease metaphor, for instance, conceals the fact that speakers choose new forms — a point Aitchison makes directly when she rejects the "infectious disease" view of change.
Modality — the degree of certainty or obligation a writer expresses — is one of the quietest but most powerful tools for constructing authority. A prescriptivist text typically runs on high epistemic and deontic modality: things "are" happening ("English is dying"), and things "must" be done ("we must defend standards"). This bare assertion sounds authoritative precisely because it admits no doubt. A descriptivist text, by contrast, tends to hedge ("this may reflect change," "it appears that," "the evidence suggests"), which paradoxically signals intellectual honesty even as it sounds less commanding. A perceptive analysis observes that the more confident text is often the less evidenced one, and that high modality is doing the work that data would otherwise do.
The pronoun system is where a text builds its in-group and out-group. First-person plural "we" and the possessive "our language" do something subtle: they assume the reader already belongs to the community of "proper" users, recruiting them before any argument is offered. Second-person "you" creates synthetic personalisation (Fairclough's term) — the illusion of a one-to-one conversation that builds rapport and shared values. Meanwhile the third-person "they," especially when attached to a depersonalised group ("young people today," "this generation"), constructs the out-group to be judged. A strong analytical sentence does not just label "inclusive pronoun" — it explains the manoeuvre: "the shift from inclusive 'we' to distancing 'they' enacts in miniature the very social division the writer wants the reader to feel."
Key Definition: Synthetic personalisation (Fairclough) — the use of language (especially direct address with "you") to give a mass audience the impression of being addressed personally, manufacturing a sense of intimacy and shared values between writer and reader.
Part (b) names a form and an audience, and you must adapt your register and conventions accordingly. The argument may stay broadly the same, but the way you package it changes completely depending on the brief. The most common forms, and the conventions each expects, are set out below.
| Form | Typical audience | Conventions to deploy |
|---|---|---|
| Opinion article / broadsheet column | Educated general readers | Strong headline, confident first-person voice, anecdote opener, rhetorical questions, a memorable sign-off |
| Open letter | A named target plus the public | Direct address ("Dear…"), respectful but firm tone, clear call to action |
| Blog post | A self-selecting online audience | Conversational register, sub-headings, direct address, lighter touch but still evidenced |
| Speech / talk | A live audience | Discourse markers, direct address, tricolons, repetition for rhythm, signposting ("Let me turn to…") |
| Article for a student magazine | Peers / younger readers | Accessible register, relatable examples, energetic tone |
Whatever the form, three things stay constant: a clear and sustained line of argument, the integration of genuine linguistic knowledge as persuasive ammunition, and a register precisely calibrated to the named audience. The most common AO5 failing is a piece that is lively but empty of linguistic substance, or one that is full of knowledge but reads like an essay rather than the named form. You must do both at once.
Task: Write the opening of a talk for fellow sixth-formers on the question "Is it snobbery to correct someone's grammar?"
Picture the scene. Someone in your group chat writes "should of" instead of "should have," and within seconds three people have pounced. We have all done it — the little thrill of catching someone out. But here is the uncomfortable question I want us to sit with this morning: when we correct someone's grammar, are we really defending the English language, or are we just showing off? Because the linguist Deborah Cameron has a name for this itch to police other people's words. She calls it "verbal hygiene," and she argues it is almost never about clarity. It is about power — about who gets to decide whose English counts.
Examiner-style commentary: This opening earns marks in the upper bands for AO5. It is unmistakably a talk — the imperative "Picture the scene," the inclusive "we," the direct address to "us this morning" — rather than an essay. It establishes a clear line of argument through a provocative rhetorical question, and it deploys a genuine, accurately-attributed concept (Cameron's verbal hygiene) as the hinge of the argument rather than as decoration. A weaker opening would either chat engagingly without any linguistic substance, or state the Cameron point accurately but in a flat, essayistic register that ignores the brief's spoken form and teenage audience.
It helps to know why you are being asked to do all this. Across Paper 2 the five Assessment Objectives are weighted AO1 26 · AO2 26 · AO3 23 · AO4 15 · AO5 10. In Section B specifically, the analysis task (40 marks) leans heavily on AO3 — the ability to analyse and evaluate how contextual factors shape the production and reception of language — supported by AO1 (using linguistic terminology accurately and writing coherently) and AO2 (showing critical understanding of concepts and issues). The directed writing task (30 marks) is assessed through AO5 — your skill as a writer who can craft language for a specific purpose, audience, and genre. Understanding this division explains the two-handed skill this whole course builds: dissecting other people's persuasion, and then performing your own.
Before you analyse a single linguistic feature in the 40-mark task, spend a moment establishing the context of each text, because every word choice you go on to discuss is only meaningful in relation to it. Three questions orient you fast.
What is the purpose? A language discourse text almost always has a persuasive purpose dressed in another costume. It may appear to inform (a "report" on falling literacy) or to entertain (a comic rant about apostrophes), but underneath it is trying to move the reader towards an attitude. Identifying the true persuasive purpose, and the attitude being sold, is the foundation of everything else.
Who is the audience? A column in a conservative broadsheet, a post on a teenagers' forum, and a letter in a parish newsletter address utterly different readerships, and writers tailor their lexis, assumptions, and metaphors to the people they expect to be reading. A text that assumes its readers already despise "text-speak" is doing something different from one that expects resistance and must win the reader over. The audience shapes the in-group the text constructs.
What is the genre and mode? Is this an opinion column, a letter, a transcript of a broadcast, a blog, a social-media thread? Is it written, spoken, or somewhere in between? Genre brings conventions — a broadsheet column expects wit and a strong line; a letter to the editor expects concision and indignation — and recognising them lets you judge how the writer is exploiting, or subverting, those expectations.
Crucially, when Section B gives you two texts, much of the available analysis lies in the contrast between them. The two texts are almost always chosen to represent different attitudes, genres, or periods, and the examiner wants to see you handle them comparatively — noting where they converge, where they clash, and how their different contexts produce their different language. A common weakness is to analyse Text A fully and then Text B fully, in two sealed halves; a stronger approach threads them together, repeatedly setting one against the other.
These terms recur throughout the topic and should become second nature. Use them precisely; misusing terminology costs AO1 marks.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Discourse | A recognisable way of talking/writing about a subject that carries particular attitudes and assumptions |
| Meta-language | Language used to talk about language |
| Language attitude | An evaluative response (positive or negative) to a variety, accent, or usage |
| Language ideology | A systematic, often unspoken belief system about language and its value |
| Prescriptivism | The belief in fixed rules of "correct" usage; deviation = error |
| Descriptivism | The empirical study of how language is actually used, without value judgement |
| Standard English | The prestige dialect used in formal contexts, defined by grammar and vocabulary |
| Complaint tradition | The centuries-old, recurring genre of complaint about declining English (Milroy & Milroy) |
| Verbal hygiene | The universal impulse to regulate and "improve" language (Cameron) |
| Positioning | How a text places its subject, reader, and the people it discusses within a value system |
| Synthetic personalisation | Using direct address to give a mass audience a feeling of personal connection (Fairclough) |
| Moral panic | A disproportionate societal reaction to a perceived threat, with a demonised "folk devil" (Cohen) |
To succeed in Paper 2 Section B you need to: