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New directions for A Level English Language

Dan Clayton considers ways of charting a course through the changing waters of English Language A Level, introducing interesting new developments and recommending resources for keeping teaching up-to-date.

The Bad News: decline in numbers …

Just before the A Level provisional entry figures were published in June 2023, there was some cautious optimism that the worst was over and that the nosedive in A Level English Language entries from just over 20,000 students in 2017 to around 14,000 in 2022 might have bottomed out.

Against a backdrop of rising numbers of overall students taking A Levels (a 4.5% rise in 18-year-olds over the last 5 years), the picture for A Level English across all three courses (Language, Literature and the combined Language and Literature) had been depressingly familiar for the last six to seven years. A Level English Literature numbers in England were down from around 42,000 in 2017 to just over 32,000 in 2022 and Language and Literature from about 10,000 to around 6,500.

2022 had seen a tiny increase in numbers for English Language, and when the 2023 figures were published, English Literature saw a rise in 2023 (up to 33,600 in England) – but the good news stopped there and the 2023 figures for English Language saw another decline, this time down to just over 13,000. It felt like a kick in the teeth.

At the risk of sounding like Ian Faith, Spinal Tap’s bullish, cricket bat-wielding manager, this drop in popularity for the English A Level is probably not about the subject’s ‘appeal becoming more selective’ but about the brutal headwinds of STEM, the decoupling of AS and A Levels and a GCSE that puts off more students from further study than it encourages.

It probably also has a lot to do with a cost of living crisis that makes three years of studying a subject at university, and the attendant debt that generates, much less appealing. And this is a subject that – according to much of the print media in this country, at least – offers few lucrative career routes and little chance of significant income after it’s been completed. Even though there are compelling arguments and statistics to challenge this perception of English, it’s a very difficult narrative to counter.

‘In many ways, the reformed A Level has been extremely successful, with students rising to the challenge of some quite sophisticated and demanding ideas and methods.’

…. and the Good News: reform and revision

But this piece is not intended to disseminate doom and re-tread the arguments about the GCSE that I have made before (and which NATE, the Common English Forum and the English and Media Centre have made more eloquently and persuasively in recent months) but to look at the positive strides the A Level has made and where it’s now heading.

When the A Level specifications were last revised in2014–15, one of the key considerations for AQA English Language (along with jumping through Ofqual’s outlandish statistical hoops for assessment objectives)was to refresh the thinking around important areas such as language diversity and change.

This was easier said than done, as the new course was already having to navigate a merger between two existing specifications. The previous AQA A and B specs had their own distinct lineages, and the much bigger AQA B spec had not featured language variation in the form of accent, dialect, sociolect and linguistic diversity for the best part of a decade.

Meanwhile, things in the world of sociolinguistics had been moving on (as they do) and many linguists were striding boldly into the third wave, surfing the peaks of social constructionism, the creation of social meaning and performance of identity, while many teachers were still left on the beach, drawing on work that had been done in the 1970s and 1980s.

And even though both legacy AQA specifications had questions on diachronic change (language changeover time), they were quite rooted in textual analysis, often using a comparison of relatively modern texts with historical texts on similar subjects (hairdressing, car advertising and table manners, for example) as a jumping-off point for wider discussion of change: not always successfully, it has to be said.

A new specification

The new specification therefore had a pretty good stab at bringing things up to date. In came a focus on English around the world, acknowledging the fact that most English is now spoken and written by people beyond the British Isles. In too came language and ethnicity, including ideas around identity, code-switching, style shifting and contact, and alongside these new areas came more discursive questions that allowed students to critically evaluate big ideas about language change and diversity while drawing on examples, case studies and research from their own study of the subject.

And on top of all this, students were encouraged in much of what they did in their textual analysis work to take a discourse analysis approach, informed by thinking from Critical Discourse Studies, which explores power, ideology and positioning in different texts, including ones about language issues.

Taking stock

In many ways, the reformed A Level has been extremely successful, with teachers finding the newa reas interesting and engaging to teach, and students rising to the challenge of some quite sophisticated and demanding ideas and methods. The academics who make up the HE panels, and others who work veryc losely with A Level teachers and students, have been extremely positive about the course and the calibre of the students it generates and who reach them at undergraduate level. One even commented wryly that A Level almost does ‘too good a job’ which means that he has to keep on his toes when planning his first-year course to make sure it’s not just a rehash of the material previously studied!

What is even more impressive is that students are doing this from an almost standing start. As I have written about in Teaching English before, and banged on about to anyone who will listen (and even some of those who would rather not), the English Language GCSE has not been fit for purpose for some time and certainly isn’t a qualification that involves what anyone who knows the first thing about linguistics would call genuine language study.

So while the transition from GCSE is a pretty steep one for many students (and teachers of the subject, who are still largely from English Literature backgrounds), one of the real selling points of the course has been how unlike GCSE the A Level is. Which is sad, but probably necessary…

Shifting discourses

The direction of travel for the A Level is also interesting. As all English Language teachers will inevitably tell their students at least twice a week, you just have to take one look at social media or online news to see that language is a topic that generates huge amounts of discourse; it even is The Discourse (with a capital T and capital D) some days (i.e. the main topic for online outrage and/or serious discussion on a given day). That provides no shortage of material for lessons.

Accent change: In the last six months, there has been much discussion around accent change in the UK: for example, the shrinking use of rhoticity (the post-vocalic ‘r’ in words like farm and bird) among younger speakers in the North West, or the growing use of Standard Southern British English and MLE among younger speakers in the south of England, as RP and Cockney decline.

New words: There has also been plenty of discussion of new words entering the language, or perhaps more precisely, existing words picking up new meanings and applications and spreading from one group of users to another. This has certainly been the case in online spaces where the pace of adoption (or perhaps appropriation, it could be argued) by one community from another has gone into warp speed. So here we have expressions like ‘spill the tea’, ‘slay’ or even ‘serving c***’ moving from quite niche Black American and drag artist usage around ‘ball culture’ into wider usage, if not, in the case of the latter, complete acceptance.

So what does this tell us about the changing nature of language and where that may be leading the course? The media’s love of news stories about language – often in the form of click bait but also more considered and linguistically-informed pieces – indicates that there will be no shortage of Language Discourses material for students to engage with in the future and that suggests this bit of the course is well-placed to allow for a good overview and examination of how these stories are covered (and why they are covered in these ways) and how the research lands in the media.

New directions

But we can also see that the older distinctions that the A Level was based upon – physical places, ‘categories’ of people (Black, white, working class, women and men…)using language in certain ways and change taking place because of social contact – are perhaps all morphing and blending as our understanding of the complexities of human identity and the language around it develop.

‘The new course takes a more intersectional approach and acknowledges that we, as language users, have multiple identities and perform those identities linguistically through diverse methods and to create diverse meanings.’

Certainly, the new course takes a more intersectional approach and acknowledges that we, as language users, have multiple identities and perform those identities linguistically through diverse methods and to create diverse meanings, and it recognises that online technology has become a means of turbo-powering linguistic change.

The open format of the questions is helpful too in allowing students and teachers to address these new areas and to slot in new research and thinking alongside some of the classic studies. But even then, the course is probably at least a few steps behind the lived experience of many teenagers.

Perhaps all academic study is destined to be in this position, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing: we often need a degree of critical distance to help us reflect meaningfully on the language we observe and make sense of it in relation to what we already know, and as anyone who has hastily hit retweet on an article they haven’t properly read might tell you, sometimes we just need to take a few minutes to think and digest.

The other issue for English Language teachers has been how to keep tabs on all this. Even those A Level English Language teachers who feel on top of the subject can’t be expected to be across every new development in linguistics, and the majority of English teachers teach other courses and even other subjects. And that’s before pastoral, management or having-an-actual-life duties come into play.

Resources

There have been some admirable efforts by linguists and educators to gather resources and share those for teachers and the A Level is now better resourced than ever.

  • The York English Language Toolkit has been an excellent resource for sharing linguistic research from University of York academics in a student and teacher-friendly format (https://englishlanguagetoolkit.york.ac.uk/)

One new development designed to help teachers that I have been involved in putting together in 2023 has been a free EMC download called New Directions, which I have co-written with Amanda Cole from the University of Essex.

With funding from a University of Essex Impact Accelerator grant, Amanda and I were able to select a range of relevant and interesting new linguistic research on areas of linguistic diversity, collate them in the form of research summaries and Q&As with the linguists involved and offer a set of resources and activities designed to keep teachers and students up to date with the kind of work that has been happening since the specification was last refreshed.

Many of the studies reflect the direction of travel of the subject in areas around gender, sexuality and sexual identity, along with shifts in thinking about varieties of English in the UK, particularly those where age and ethnicity play a key role. What has been particularly pleasing to see as we have put this resource together is how willing linguists have been to spread the word of the work they do and how positively they view the A Level.

And finally …

With so many interesting and evolving areas of study, the English Language A Level continues to attract an enthusiastic and engaged cohort of students (and a committed and knowledgeable group of teachers) and in many ways is set up nicely for just a few minor tweaks should there be curriculum reform somewhere down the road.

Now all we need to do is spread the word to Year 10 and 11 students about the kind of work they can do at A Level and beyond, how different it is to what they’ve done previously, and maybe one day we’ll even have a GCSE in English Language that we don’t have to be ashamed of and that might actually help produce a new generation of enthusiastic linguists. We can all dream…

Further reading

New Directions: https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/publications-magazines/20710/new-directions-language-diversity-research-and-resource-pack-download-emc-free/

Rhoticity in the North West: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/researchers-fear-the-spoken-r-is-ready-to-roll-away-from-the-last-bastion-of-rhoticity

Changing accents of young people in the south-east of England: https://theconversation.com/cockney-and-queens-english-have-all-but-disappeared-among-young-people-heres-whats-replaced-them-215478

‘Ball culture’ and the lexical spread of ‘internet vernacular’: https://theconversation.com/theyre-serving-what-how-the-c-word-went-from-camp-to-internet-mainstream-210214

FFT Education Data Lab: https://results.ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/

Common English Forum proposals for curriculum change: https://englishassociation.ac.uk/the-common-english-forums-proposals-for-curriculum-change/

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  • Image of Dan Clayton

    Dan Clayton is an education consultant at the English and Media Centre, former English teacher and a senior examiner and moderator for different awarding bodies. He runs the EngLangBlog account on Bluesky and is a member of the Lexis podcast team.

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Dan Clayton

Dan Clayton is an education consultant at the English and Media Centre, former English teacher and a senior examiner and moderator for different awarding bodies. He runs the EngLangBlog account on Bluesky and is a member of the Lexis podcast team.