AQA GCSE English Language: Paper 1 Q2: Language Analysis

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Cora Welland, titled The Salt Road. A storm builds over a coastal village at night.

The storm did not arrive so much as lay siege. All evening it had massed out at sea, a black wall stacked from the water to the stars, and now it came inland with a slow, deliberate hunger. The first gust hit the village like a fist, and every door in the street shuddered in its frame. Rain followed — not falling but flung, hurled sideways in hissing sheets that stripped the last leaves from the sycamores and sent them spinning. The wind found every gap. It moaned in the chimney, it whined under the eaves, it screamed along the telephone wires until they sang a high, thin, terrible note. Out in the bay the sea heaved itself against the harbour wall again and again, as though it meant to climb out and take the houses one by one. A slate tore loose and smashed in the yard. Somewhere a dog began to howl, and could not stop.

How does the writer use language here to convey the menace of the storm? You could include the writer's choice of: words and phrases; language features and techniques; sentence forms. (8 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Marcus Eaves, titled Low Cloud. The narrator returns to a city street at first light, before the crowds arrive.

At this hour the city belonged to no one. The great street, which by nine would roar with traffic and a thousand hurrying feet, lay open and empty as a dry riverbed. Shutters were down over every shopfront, blank steel eyelids closed against the dark. A single traffic light changed dutifully from red to green and back again, signalling to cars that were not there. The air was cool and clean and smelled, faintly, of last night's rain on warm stone. Far off, a milk float hummed and clinked, the only living sound, and a fox — bold, unhurried — trotted down the very centre of the road as though it owned the place, paused to look at me with bright incurious eyes, and slipped away between the bins. Pigeons stirred on the ledges overhead. The whole city seemed to be holding its breath, waiting, like a stage before the actors come on.

How does the writer use language here to convey the strange emptiness of the city at dawn? You could include the writer's choice of: words and phrases; language features and techniques; sentence forms. (8 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Priya Nandakumar, titled The Lock-Keeper's Daughter. A market square comes alive in the early morning.

By six the square had become a single enormous machine of noise and colour. Traders flung open the steel legs of their stalls with a clatter, and within minutes the cobbles vanished beneath a tide of crates: oranges piled in glowing pyramids, fish laid out silver on beds of crushed ice, bolts of cloth in scarlet and saffron and peacock blue unrolling like banners. The air was a riot. It carried the bite of fresh coffee, the sweetness of warm bread, the sharp green smell of mint crushed underfoot, and beneath it all, faint and salty, the sea. Voices rose on every side — a butcher bellowing his prices, two old women bargaining like duellists, a child shrieking with delight at a balloon. Pigeons exploded upward in a grey clap of wings. Everywhere there was movement: hands weighing, wrapping, counting coins; carts rumbling over the stones; a kettle screaming on a brazier. The whole square seemed to pulse, as if it had a single beating heart.

How does the writer use language here to convey the energy and abundance of the market? You could include the writer's choice of: words and phrases; language features and techniques; sentence forms. (8 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Daniel Oduya, titled The Night Shift. A girl named Femi waits alone at night to hear news.

The waiting was the worst of it. Femi sat very still on the bolted plastic chair, her hands knotted in her lap, and watched the second hand of the stopped clock that would never move again. Time itself seemed to have thickened, to have set like cooling wax around her, so that every minute had to be dragged through it by force. She listened. Far down the corridor a door sighed open and her heart leapt up like a startled bird — but it was only a porter, who passed without a glance, and the door sighed shut, and her heart fell back. She counted the floor tiles. She counted them again. The strip light overhead hummed its single endless note, on and on, until the sound seemed to be coming from inside her own skull. Her mouth was dry. Her phone lay dark and silent in her hand, and she stared at it, willing it to ring, daring it to ring, and it did not ring, and the silence pressed down on her like a held breath that would not, could not, be let go.

How does the writer use language here to convey Femi's anxiety as she waits? You could include the writer's choice of: words and phrases; language features and techniques; sentence forms. (8 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Helen Ashby, titled The Attic Year. A character walks into a long-abandoned house.

The house had been waiting a long time, and it knew her step at once. As Imani pushed the door, it gave with a reluctant groan, and a breath of cold, stale air rolled out to meet her, carrying the museum smell of dust and damp plaster and something older underneath, like the inside of a forgotten drawer. The hall stretched away in brown half-light. Dust lay on every surface in a soft grey fur, undisturbed, deep as snow, and where the curtains hung in rotted ribbons the daylight came through thin and tired. A grandfather clock stood against the wall, its hands frozen, its pendulum still, its silence enormous. Cobwebs draped the chandelier like grey lace, and as Imani crossed the floor the boards complained beneath her, one long mournful note after another, as though the house were remembering aloud everyone who had ever walked there and gone. On the stairs, a child's shoe lay on its side, very small, very still.

How does the writer use language here to convey the eerie, abandoned atmosphere of the house? You could include the writer's choice of: words and phrases; language features and techniques; sentence forms. (8 marks)