AQA GCE Advanced English Language: Unit 2 ENGA2 Representation and Language
Introduction
This coursework unit is designed to develop candidates’ ability to write for specific audiences and purposes and to explore
the key ideas of representation and ideology. It draws on the key concepts of use-related variation and develops their
ability to use linguistic frameworks to analyze and interpret language in use. In the unit, candidates will produce creative
and analytical work linked by the issues of how texts produce representations of people, institutions, and events, and help to
produce, reproduce or challenge social values and attitudes.
Investigating representations
For the Investigation task candidates should investigate how texts might produce social values
and how they might contribute to maintaining or changing values. Candidates may study texts used to represent:
• social groups (eg according to gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, age, class)
• individuals (eg a celebrity)
• events and issues (eg a war, death, work)
• institutions (eg the monarchy).
Work should focus on how lexis, grammar, semantics, and discourse structure in individual texts produce representations.
Candidates should explore the texts’:
• purposes
• construction of an author identity
• the construction and positioning of an ideal reader and the shaping of response
• representation
• possible actual audience and interpretations
• genre.
Candidates should analyze between three and five texts (which may be extracted from longer texts). There should be a temporal
a relationship between the texts. An investigation may focus on a number of texts:
• produced at the same time (eg surveying newspaper articles published on the same day)
• evolving overtimes (eg a news story spanning a period of time)
• produced at different times (eg texts produced in the1950s, the 1970s and the 21st century).
