Cambridge IAL English Language cheat sheet

Directed response tasks usually require a transformation of the source text (e.g. recast a formal article as a letter, a speech or a diary entry); the assessed skill is adapting register, purpose and audience while retaining the source's core content and viewpoint.

Analytical response: identify the text's purpose (persuade, inform, entertain, instruct), its audience and its genre conventions first; every subsequent comment on language should be tied back to these three coordinates.

Comment on form and structure as well as lexis: paragraph length, sentence length variation, use of headings, bullet points, dashes, italics and layout all carry meaning and are credited.

Use a three-part analytical move: quote or identify the feature, name it precisely (e.g. 'asyndetic tricolon', 'pre-modified noun phrase', 'rhetorical question'), then explain its effect on the specified reader.

Register is described on a scale of formality, not as 'formal/informal' binaries: consider Latinate vs Anglo-Saxon lexis, contractions, passive voice, modal density and terms of address.

For the directed response, keep the source's facts consistent; inventing new statistics or contradicting the original text is penalised more than imperfect stylistic mimicry.

Sentence-level terminology worth deploying: fronting, inversion, cleft and pseudo-cleft, ellipsis, substitution, coordination vs subordination, minor sentences, and end-focus/end-weight.

When the question gives a specified audience (e.g. 'a sceptical local council'), signal audience awareness through address, assumed knowledge, tone and the amount of explanation given, and state these choices explicitly in the commentary.

Paper 2 requires two pieces of writing for different purposes and audiences; each is assessed on content/structure and on style/accuracy, so plan content and register separately.

Genre conventions are a scoring criterion: a review needs evaluation and a verdict, a travel article needs sensory description and a sense of place, a speech needs direct address and rhetorical patterning, a letter needs a consistent relationship with its reader.

Structure markers that examiners reward: a deliberate opening hook, signposted paragraphs each with one controlling idea, cohesive devices across paragraph boundaries, and a closing that resolves the stated purpose.

Cohesive devices to vary: lexical chains (repetition of a key noun or its synonyms), anaphoric and cataphoric reference, discourse markers of addition, contrast, concession and consequence, and pronoun shifts to build solidarity with the reader.

Rhetorical devices for persuasive tasks: tricolon, anaphora, antithesis, rhetorical question, hypophora (asking and answering), inclusive 'we', direct address, and concrete exemplification after abstract claims.

Accuracy is assessed separately from ambition: a controlled complex sentence with correct punctuation scores better than an attempted elaborate construction that breaks down; check subject–verb agreement, tense consistency and comma splicing.

Match lexis to audience: technical vocabulary for specialist readers, glossed terms for lay readers, and avoid register clash (slang inside a formal proposal, or Latinate abstraction inside a teenage magazine column).

Paragraphing is a meaning-making tool: a one-sentence paragraph isolates and emphasises; a long cumulative paragraph builds momentum; a shift in paragraph length can signal a shift in tone or time.

Paper 3 analyses authentic spoken and written data; the framework is phonological, lexical, grammatical, semantic, discourse and pragmatic, and comments must be anchored to specific transcribed features.

Spoken-mode features to identify: fillers (erm, um), hedges (sort of, kind of), vague category markers (and stuff, or something), discourse markers (right, so, anyway), false starts, self-repair, repetitions and backchannels (mm, yeah).

Paralinguistic and prosodic features in transcripts are shown by annotation - pauses as (.) or (2.0), stress as CAPITALS, overlap as square brackets, rising intonation as an arrow; comment on what the annotation reveals, not just that it exists.

Accommodation theory: convergence (shifting towards an interlocutor's style to build solidarity) and divergence (distancing); apply it to evidence such as dialect feature use, formality shifts or topic management.

Politeness: positive facework (compliments, inclusive pronouns, claiming common ground) vs negative facework (hedging, indirect requests, apologies for imposition); bald on-record imperatives are face-threatening.

Turn-taking: adjacency pairs (question–answer, greeting–greeting), preferred vs dispreferred responses (a dispreferred second is typically delayed, hedged or prefaced), and interruption vs overlap as different interactional moves.

Written-mode features: graphology, orthography (non-standard spelling, capitalisation for emphasis), syntactic complexity, nominalisation, and the way digital texts blend modes (emojis, abbreviations, punctuation as tone).

Link every feature to a function and a context variable: who the participants are, their relationship, the power and solidarity axis, the setting and the transactional or interactional purpose of the exchange.

Paper 4 essays address a set topic (e.g. language and power, language and gender, language change, child language acquisition, English as a global language) and require both descriptive knowledge and evaluation of competing claims.

Language and power: distinguish instrumental power (power to act through language), influential power (persuasion) and the exercise of power in institutional discourse; features include imperatives, modality, pronoun choice, jargon as gatekeeping and constraints on turn-taking.

Language and gender: move beyond deficit/dominance/difference models to social-constructionist and performative accounts; comment on marked terms (actor/actress), lexical asymmetry, generic masculine and semantic derogation.

Language change: processes include borrowing, affixation, compounding, blending, clipping, conversion, acronymy, initialism and semantic shift (narrowing, broadening, amelioration, pejoration); prescriptivism vs descriptivism is an evaluative stance, not a fact.

Child language acquisition: stages run pre-verbal, holophrastic, two-word, telegraphic, then later morphology; theories to evaluate are behaviourist imitation and reinforcement, nativist innateness, and interactionist/CDS accounts.

Global English: Kachru's three circles (inner, outer, expanding) and the native/non-native dichotomy critique; consider lingua franca use, English as a Lingua Franca accommodation, and the case for/against standard norms.

Essay structure that scores: a thesis stated early, each paragraph advancing one claim with data or example evidence, counter-argument acknowledged and rebutted, and a conclusion that answers the exact wording of the question.

Evaluation language: distinguish description ('speakers use X') from analysis ('X indexes Y because Z') and from evaluation ('this claim is weakened by evidence of...'); markers reward the third kind.