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AzureBlue

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How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« on: January 31, 2015, 12:21:32 pm »
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How I Studied for VCE English Language U3/4
From 50 and Premier’s Award Recipient in English Language (2012)


Hi all, I hope you enjoy your English Language study this year as much as I did! It is a very interesting subject and I’ve written down some very detailed tips on how I studied for the subject (and some things I would improve on if I did it again). I hope this helps you, and I wish you all the best in the year ahead!

Before school starts + How to Start on Your Example Compilation
•   Pre-reading is an excellent technique to be able to absorb and retain more of the information during class. In the summer holidays before term started, I read through most of the Living Lingo textbook (Burridge, Laps, Clyne). Some students might find it helps to make notes while reading Living Lingo in dot points – this is what I did to retain information better and make it easier to revise (due to the ‘chatty’ nature of the textbook).
•   Another thing that is very useful to do over the holidays and throughout the year (it’s a really gradual task…) is to find a sizeable amount of media articles and quotations relating to English Language. Although this is directed towards your essays in Unit 4, this is possibly the most time-consuming task in English Language so better to do it before all your SACs roll in! Personally, at this stage, I just went and found articles about the main topics that appear in essays; public language (especially used by politics and businesses), teenspeak, discriminatory language and political correctness will be the topics mainly appearing in the news. In particular, http://www.weaselwords.com.au is a very helpful and regularly updated source of weasel words in English Language. Also 'Google news' helps - for example, if you type in 'racist language' in google and click the 'news' tab it will specifically look for those keywords in recent news.
•   Other topics that you might find in other places include jargon (you can find these from your own hobbies as then you can explain them well – personally, I am an avid chessplayer and I was also involved in Olympiad mathematics so that’s where I got mine from), Australian English (you can find the language features in the textbook, expand on them and find extra language features such as sporadic yod-dropping), Ethnolects (most of you would’ve investigated an ethnolect in units 1 / 2 so keep that stuff! It will come handy). Otherwise, pick a few ethnolects and note down some features out of different subsystems that arise out of cross-linguistic transfer and overgeneralisation etc.
•   Other than those media examples, it is also helpful to find quotations from linguists. This means David Crystal, Kate Burridge etc., you can find these from books that linguists wrote (so I used the textbook, Mastering Advanced English Language (Thorne), and David Crystal’s English Language Encyclopaedia).  Another helpful tip here is that you can find these from stimulus material from previous years on the exams! :P I separated the quotations from linguists and the quotations from the media etc. into two separate piles. After organising these, my quotations from linguists later in the year, I ended up with a bit over 120 linguist quotes and about 40 pages of examples. However, at this point in the year…. I just had a huge messy box of articles! Hahahaha.

In Unit 3
•   You should make notes on the important points that your teacher mentions in class, and make sure your knowledge of the subject is solid. You should be given notice on what SACs you have during the year – so note them down, this can really help in your organisation of your study and what to focus on at particular times!
•   Your SACs in Unit 3 (for most schools this is the case) will be on short-answer first, and then commentary. Very rarely do you get an essay SAC in Unit 3 (due to the vast majority of the essay content being in U4) but make a note of this if you do – if this is the case for you, begin writing essays early and this also means you need to memorise your quotes and examples early.
•   To prepare for short-answer and commentary SACs: Practice practice practice! :) If you can obtain some past SACs from your school, that might help you in what to expect and ease the nerves! Personally, I found the Kirsten Fox English Language Exam Guide the most useful towards this (despite being called ‘exam guide’ I found it most useful towards my SACs as well) – because her solutions are very detailed, well structured and excellently written and it is a good idea to aim to structure your own responses like that. It is VERY important that not only do you pick out relevant examples for the question, but that you also explain every single example you give in relation to the question – or in the case of a commentary, why did the author of the text use passive sentences? Why did the kids use backchanneling? If you’ve finished everything in the English Language Exam Guide before your SAC, use the Insight/VATE exams for SAC practice.
•   I organised my commentaries using Kirsten Fox’s structure; so for most written texts I’d go Introduction (Context/Register/Purpose/Audience/Mode/Field), Lexis, Syntax (+ information flow), Cohesion & Coherence. For most spoken texts I’d go Introduction (Context/Register/Purpose/Audience/Mode/Field), Lexis, Syntax, Prosodics, Turn-Taking/Topic Management. HOWEVER, this may differ – some texts, eg. Some advertisements will have interesting features in semantics so this should feature in one of your paragraphs – it really depends on what text you get as well.
•   Something that I didn’t do but wish I could do now is to organise some sort of grid to revise for features of each text type (eg. Blog, Phatic Communication, Transaction, Advertisement etc.). I think it would help if you list the important features of each feature in a grid using subsystems – gradually, as you attempt more texts, it would not only speed you up, but also act as a checklist in your head so you don’t miss any features! (This is actually highly annoying… realising you missed a feature from one subsystem in a commentary… and then coming back to fill it in only to realise you’ve stuffed up your structure or you have no lines to do so. Use a technique such as leaving lines after each paragraph and not concluding your paragraphs until the end?).
•   Try to follow what your school teacher likes for the SACs. Some school teachers really like you to organise your essays by subsystem… whilst this actually does not work well at times, realise that your teacher marks your SACs, not the examiner. If you believe your school teacher has said something that is completely false (and everyone makes mistakes, at least occasionally!), it is important to clarify this with them. Once, in another subject's SAC, the teacher made a mistake in explaining a concept, so a lot of the students replicated this in the SAC and then they got the mark anyway because it was the teacher's fault there.

In Unit 4 + Exam Preparation
•   In the Term 2 holidays, you might still have a big disorganised box of printed articles (I did!) so you can try organising them now that you have essays coming up. I did dot points under topics for my linguist quotes, and used a grid format on Word for my examples collection (for some topics I used Subsystem/Metalanguage Term/Example and for others Description/Example/Explanation as my columns) and organised this grid under topic headings.
•   How did I memorise my 120 linguist quotes and 40 pages of examples? I didn’t :P Having a huge depository of examples is very helpful in picking out the best ones as you have a lot to choose from! What I did for this is I wrote essays with these examples and from this, I worked out which ones worked best for me, bolded the examples, and remembered those. If you do Biology, however, you will have probably worked out some effective techniques in memorisation – what helped for me for that subject is explaining, say, the steps of mitosis etc. to an inanimate object to consolidate it. So for English Language, I was reciting my quotes to inanimate objects, as well as explaining my examples! This might work for some and seem extremely weird for others, so do whatever works for you, as different people have different learning styles.
•   Ask your teacher what sort of area your Unit 4 SAC is going to be on – Ethnolects? Identity? PC? and focus on that area during the SAC. Obviously, your SAC should be on an area that you have covered in class. So if you haven’t covered PC yet, your SAC is probably not going to be on PC.
•   Personally, I wrote my first essay at around the start of Term 3 (but I had compilations of examples done before then). And yes – it was very hard and took me a good couple of hours! It helps reading the ‘good’-quality essays on the VCAA examiners’ reports and there is also a helpful database on ATARNotes here and a few samples in the Kirsten Fox book. This will help you get an idea of how to write one. Then start on your own essay, using the examples you have collected as the examples on these sample essays will be a bit too old (recent examples are ideal because if you use some 2010 example the examiners might think you’re being lazy in using someone else’s examples and not shown initiative in keeping up-to-date with the state of language ‘now’. I’ve found using old quotes of linguists is fine though – just no old media quotes).
•   For the essay, make sure you write a wide variety of topics. This is so you don’t get surprised at the end of the year when your exam is say, the only year that doesn’t have an identity topic and that’s solely what you’ve been practicing.
•   Look at the past essay topics. I find that some of the most common topics are on things like: Identity, Public Language, Language Change. I wrote about 15 essays throughout the whole year – the majority were on Identity (as I liked this topic, I had great examples in it and it was pretty reliable in appearing in the choice of topics almost every year). My ‘secondary’ topic was public language, which I also wrote a few essays on. I wrote some other essays on topics such as Standard English, quite a few on Language Change etc. to make sure I wasn’t surprised at the end of the year. As a result, at the end of the year, I was very comfortable with the exam essay – being prepared makes it not a source of anxiety! And another thing – memorising essays is no good as the topics vary a bit (you probably won’t get exactly the same worded topic in the exam) which means you often use the same examples but different topic sentences and explanations. Unfortunately, I do not have such a good memory that I can memorise an essay exactly word-for-word and reproduce it anyway - and that's okay! But make sure you remember your examples and roughly how you explained them in previous essays.
•   Keeping plugging away at the exams (the order I did was Insight/VCAA/VATE). Exams from the old (pre-2012) study design are fine as the study design hasn’t really changed much apart from change of format (topic order switched around in textbook and commentary instead of short-answer in exam). Besides, if you have a question like “Discuss the syntax in this text” that’s basically your syntax paragraph in your commentary anyway and certainly, the old exams may have longer short-answer questions like this! I found this helped too as I could then self-correct my paragraphs using the solutions provided. As I did the subject in 2012, I think I only had a few analytical commentaries available to me – of course, you can write a commentary on any text you find, but then you need corrections – and hence I found that writing old exams with solutions was more effective.
•   As for end-of-year lectures, I highly recommend the Connect Education lecture (which has really good notes!) at the end of the year, and the VATE lecture (which is run by English Language school teachers). Although I was already well-versed in the subject’s material, they acted as a good overview and revision for the course.
•   RELAX before the exam (at least on exam day)! On the long drive to school, I was reading over my quotes and examples list and almost got carsick… as a result, I felt really nauseous through my exam… which was not good. So the best thing to do is probably just try and relax and have faith that if you have worked hard in your preparation, you will be fine, and you've done all you can do! :)

My exam scores were 15/15 (Short-Answer), 28/30 (Analytical Commentary), 30/30 (Essay) which scored me a 50 and Premier's Award, and I know some who got a lower exam score and still scored a 50, so you can lose a few marks for a perfect study score, unlike some maths subjects :P Certainly, I think the suggestion that I noted above (with writing a grid with text types in revising for commentaries) would've helped me in scoring higher in the commentary.

I hope this helps, and best wishes with your studies!  :D

belle123

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Re: How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« Reply #1 on: January 31, 2015, 04:50:26 pm »
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Wow, Thanks so much for this!!
I'm doing English Language this year and I'm trying to find different methods to study, I like the suggestion for the grid, could you elaborate on this point more??

- Something that I didn’t do but wish I could do now is to organise some sort of grid to revise for features of each text type (eg. Blog, Phatic Communication, Transaction, Advertisement etc.). I think it would help if you list the important features of each feature in a grid using subsystems – gradually, as you attempt more texts, it would not only speed you up, but also act as a checklist in your head so you don’t miss any features!

Also how would you annotate your media articles?

Thanks  :)
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AzureBlue

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Re: How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« Reply #2 on: January 31, 2015, 05:06:15 pm »
+1
I'm doing English Language this year and I'm trying to find different methods to study, I like the suggestion for the grid, could you elaborate on this point more??
Also how would you annotate your media articles?
No worries! :)

I originally got the idea of the 'grid' when it was suggested in the VATE end of year lecture as a way of organising examples for essays. To extend this idea to commentaries you could do something like this - open a word or excel doc, and use 2-3 columns, and with headings for text types. And then in the left column, you could write the features (under subsystem headings) preferably in order of 'easiness', and in the right column you could put general explanations for the features (eg. why would someone use backchanneling?). This is again a gradual process, you may find more features as you analyse another text of the same text type etc. I've inserted the format below (this is just a 'skeleton' grid to demonstrate the format).

For example (apologies in advance for formatting - I don't know how to insert a grid in this forum):
Phatic Communication (eg. two friends chatting about their weekend)          General Explanation
Subsystems:                                     
Lexis
- Contractions
- Discourse particles
- Teenage slang

Syntax
- Lots of simple and compound sentences
(paratactic style)
- Fragmented sentences
- Exclamative sentences abundant

Prosodics
- Rising/falling intonation
- Stress

Turn-Taking
- Backchanneling

As for media articles, I would read through them and pick out the most relevant quote from the article, and then record the quote and context. For example, if *insert company name* asserted that they were 'offering career transitions' after firing 5000 people, this is all you need from the article. Then you would explain WHY the technique was used (in this case, euphemism is used to conceal the unpalatable truth that the company fired employees and 'offering career transitions' adds a positive spin to the statement and hence retains the company's image.) You enter these in your table and you can throw away your article :P Much easier to revise from than a pile of long articles!
« Last Edit: January 31, 2015, 05:07:51 pm by AzureBlue »

belle123

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Re: How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« Reply #3 on: February 01, 2015, 12:01:20 pm »
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Oh that's such a great idea, definitely going to use the grid, Thanks so much!  ;D
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odeaa

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Re: How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« Reply #4 on: February 01, 2015, 06:39:47 pm »
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This is awesome, thanks so much!
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Re: How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« Reply #5 on: February 02, 2015, 10:55:15 am »
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Welcome back. :)
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Re: How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« Reply #6 on: February 11, 2015, 01:27:18 am »
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What was your approach before every SAC? E.g. how would you research, amount of practice essays etc :D ?

AzureBlue

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Re: How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« Reply #7 on: February 11, 2015, 07:05:02 pm »
+1
What was your approach before every SAC? E.g. how would you research, amount of practice essays etc :D ?
Depends on SAC. For short-answer and analytical commentary SACs, I did the relevant bits of Insight Englang Exam Guide as well as the short-answer sections of past practice exams for practice. For essay, you practice past essay topics on the general area the SAC is going to be about, eg. identity. As I stated before, I didn't do a huge amount of practice essays or commentaries, maybe about 10-15 essays and 2-5 commentaries through the whole year? I focused more on short-answer sections as they are easy to self-mark and readily available (there are probably about 30 relevant prac exams out there). Research for examples I did gradually throughout the year and not specifically for any SACs.

Butterflygirl

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Re: How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« Reply #8 on: January 12, 2016, 09:21:34 am »
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Hey,
I was just wondering if I should print out the articles I find and annotate them or just create a table and insert the quotes into it. If it's better to do it in a table, do you think an excel or word document?

And when annotating, do I comment on source, subsystem, register and audience of the text or just pick out the quote and the feature used (as well as the purpose of using it)?

Thankyou >.<

ekay

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Re: How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« Reply #9 on: January 12, 2016, 10:14:42 am »
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Hey,
I was just wondering if I should print out the articles I find and annotate them or just create a table and insert the quotes into it. If it's better to do it in a table, do you think an excel or word document?

And when annotating, do I comment on source, subsystem, register and audience of the text or just pick out the quote and the feature used (as well as the purpose of using it)?

Thankyou >.<

It doesn't really matter how you do it, neither method is innately better! It's just like writing notes in general; some people prefer handwriting them whilst others prefer typing, and it depends which one you feel works better for you and helps you remember. Having said that, I personally kept a record of my media examples on a Word table, as did many of my friends, because I found it more organised to look at and it was easier to search up examples I'd found earlier, but if you've got a good memory then maybe annotating by hand is better for you!

Definitely keep a record of where and when the example is from for future reference in case you need it (so you don't need to keep the whole article). It wouldn't hurt to comment on register and audience, but you will really only be referring to an article for a specific example and then discussing the significance of it, so it's probably not as important. As you said, just note down the example, what language features it used and why the author did so (maybe a little summary of a segment of the article as well to give a bit of context to help you remember what the example is about) :)
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Butterflygirl

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Re: How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« Reply #10 on: January 12, 2016, 06:22:47 pm »
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It doesn't really matter how you do it, neither method is innately better! It's just like writing notes in general; some people prefer handwriting them whilst others prefer typing, and it depends which one you feel works better for you and helps you remember. Having said that, I personally kept a record of my media examples on a Word table, as did many of my friends, because I found it more organised to look at and it was easier to search up examples I'd found earlier, but if you've got a good memory then maybe annotating by hand is better for you!

Definitely keep a record of where and when the example is from for future reference in case you need it (so you don't need to keep the whole article). It wouldn't hurt to comment on register and audience, but you will really only be referring to an article for a specific example and then discussing the significance of it, so it's probably not as important. As you said, just note down the example, what language features it used and why the author did so (maybe a little summary of a segment of the article as well to give a bit of context to help you remember what the example is about) :)

Okay, thanks :)

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Re: How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« Reply #11 on: February 09, 2016, 10:57:06 pm »
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What was your approach before every SAC? E.g. how would you research, amount of practice essays etc :D ?

No one can really tell you how many practice papers you "should" do before any assessment - but obviously the more papers you do, the more practice you will have, and so the better prepared you will be. With English, because you may not want to rewrite your essays over and over and over again, you could just mentally answer some essay questions as you do your paper. Even just writing your introduction in response to the essay question, followed by an essay outline with all your arguments would be useful! The introduction will include your thesis, signposting of your arguments, as well as your answer of the question, so that's a cool tip for practice papers if you feel like an entire essay/paper will be overwhelming!
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Butterflygirl

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Re: How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« Reply #12 on: February 15, 2016, 08:00:24 pm »
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I have a SAC coming up and I just needed help with a few things. First what does "consistency and conventions" mean in terms of discourse features. Also, how do collocations achieve cohesion within a text? I thought it achieves coherence. Another thing, are there any stand out features and functions of an informal written text? Such as "informal lexis" for features and "to engage" for function.

Help is highly appreciated. My SAC is in a few days :'(

Corey King

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Re: How I Studied for VCE English Language (U3&4)
« Reply #13 on: October 22, 2020, 03:09:13 pm »
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How I Studied for VCE English Language U3/4
From 50 and Premier’s Award Recipient in English Language (2012)


Hi all, I hope you enjoy your English Language study this year as much as I did! It is a very interesting subject and I’ve written down some very detailed tips on how I studied for the subject (and some things I would improve on if I did it again). I hope this helps you, and I wish you all the best in the year ahead!

Before school starts + How to Start on Your Example Compilation
•   Pre-reading is an excellent technique to be able to absorb and retain more of the information during class. In the summer holidays before term started, I read through most of the Living Lingo textbook (Burridge, Laps, Clyne). Some students might find it helps to make notes while reading Living Lingo in dot points – this is what I did to retain information better and make it easier to revise (due to the ‘chatty’ nature of the textbook).
•   Another thing that is very useful to do over the holidays and throughout the year (it’s a really gradual task…) is to find a sizeable amount of media articles and quotations relating to English Language. Although this is directed towards your essays in Unit 4, this is possibly the most time-consuming task in English Language so better to do it before all your SACs roll in! Personally, at this stage, I just went and found articles about the main topics that appear in essays; public language (especially used by politics and businesses), teenspeak, discriminatory language and political correctness will be the topics mainly appearing in the news. In particular, http://www.weaselwords.com.au is a very helpful and regularly updated source of weasel words in English Language. Also 'Google news' helps - for example, if you type in 'racist language' in google and click the 'news' tab it will specifically look for those keywords in recent news.
•   Other topics that you might find in other places include jargon (you can find these from your own hobbies as then you can explain them well – personally, I am an avid chessplayer and I was also involved in Olympiad mathematics so that’s where I got mine from), Australian English (you can find the language features in the textbook, expand on them and find extra language features such as sporadic yod-dropping), Ethnolects (most of you would’ve investigated an ethnolect in units 1 / 2 so keep that stuff! It will come handy). Otherwise, pick a few ethnolects and note down some features out of different subsystems that arise out of cross-linguistic transfer and overgeneralisation etc.
•   Other than those media examples, it is also helpful to find quotations from linguists. This means David Crystal, Kate Burridge etc., you can find these from books that linguists wrote (so I used the textbook, Mastering Advanced English Language (Thorne), and David Crystal’s English Language Encyclopaedia).  Another helpful tip here is that you can find these from stimulus material from previous years on the exams! :P I separated the quotations from linguists and the quotations from the media etc. into two separate piles. After organising these, my quotations from linguists later in the year, I ended up with a bit over 120 linguist quotes and about 40 pages of examples. However, at this point in the year…. I just had a huge messy box of articles! Hahahaha.

In Unit 3
•   You should make notes on the important points that your teacher mentions in class, and make sure your knowledge of the subject is solid. You should be given notice on what SACs you have during the year – so note them down, this can really help in your organisation of your study and what to focus on at particular times!
•   Your SACs in Unit 3 (for most schools this is the case) will be on short-answer first, and then commentary. Very rarely do you get an essay SAC in Unit 3 (due to the vast majority of the essay content being in U4) but make a note of this if you do – if this is the case for you, begin writing essays early and this also means you need to memorise your quotes and examples early.
•   To prepare for short-answer and commentary SACs: Practice practice practice! :) If you can obtain some past SACs from your school, that might help you in what to expect and ease the nerves! Personally, I found the Kirsten Fox English Language Exam Guide the most useful towards this (despite being called ‘exam guide’ I found it most useful towards my SACs as well) – because her solutions are very detailed, well structured and excellently written and it is a good idea to aim to structure your own responses like that. It is VERY important that not only do you pick out relevant examples for the question, but that you also explain every single example you give in relation to the question – or in the case of a commentary, why did the author of the text use passive sentences? Why did the kids use backchanneling? If you’ve finished everything in the English Language Exam Guide before your SAC, use the Insight/VATE exams for SAC practice.
•   I organised my commentaries using Kirsten Fox’s structure; so for most written texts I’d go Introduction (Context/Register/Purpose/Audience/Mode/Field), Lexis, Syntax (+ information flow), Cohesion & Coherence. For most spoken texts I’d go Introduction (Context/Register/Purpose/Audience/Mode/Field), Lexis, Syntax, Prosodics, Turn-Taking/Topic Management. HOWEVER, this may differ – some texts, eg. Some advertisements will have interesting features in semantics so this should feature in one of your paragraphs – it really depends on what text you get as well.
•   Something that I didn’t do but wish I could do now is to organise some sort of grid to revise for features of each text type (eg. Blog, Phatic Communication, Transaction, Advertisement etc.). I think it would help if you list the important features of each feature in a grid using subsystems – gradually, as you attempt more texts, it would not only speed you up, but also act as a checklist in your head so you don’t miss any features! (This is actually highly annoying… realising you missed a feature from one subsystem in a commentary… and then coming back to fill it in only to realise you’ve stuffed up your structure or you have no lines to do so. Use a technique such as leaving lines after each paragraph and not concluding your paragraphs until the end?).
•   Try to follow what your school teacher likes for the SACs. Some school teachers really like you to organise your essays by subsystem… whilst this actually does not work well at times, realise that your teacher marks your SACs, not the examiner. If you believe your school teacher has said something that is completely false (and everyone makes mistakes, at least occasionally!), it is important to clarify this with them. Once, in another subject's SAC, the teacher made a mistake in explaining a concept, so a lot of the students replicated this in the SAC and then they got the mark anyway because it was the teacher's fault there.

In Unit 4 + Exam Preparation
•   In the Term 2 holidays, you might still have a big disorganised box of printed articles (I did!) so you can try organising them now that you have essays coming up. I did dot points under topics for my linguist quotes, and used a grid format on Word for my examples collection (for some topics I used Subsystem/Metalanguage Term/Example and for others Description/Example/Explanation as my columns) and organised this grid under topic headings.
•   How did I memorise my 120 linguist quotes and 40 pages of examples? I didn’t :P Having a huge depository of examples is very helpful in picking out the best ones as you have a lot to choose from! What I did for this is I wrote essays with these examples and from this, I worked out which ones worked best for me, bolded the examples, and remembered those. If you do Biology, however, you will have probably worked out some effective techniques in memorisation – what helped for me for that subject is explaining, say, the steps of mitosis etc. to an inanimate object to consolidate it. So for English Language, I was reciting my quotes to inanimate objects, as well as explaining my examples! This might work for some and seem extremely weird for others, so do whatever works for you, as different people have different learning styles.
•   Ask your teacher what sort of area your Unit 4 SAC is going to be on – Ethnolects? Identity? PC? and focus on that area during the SAC. Obviously, your SAC should be on an area that you have covered in class. So if you haven’t covered PC yet, your SAC is probably not going to be on PC.
•   Personally, I wrote my first essay at around the start of Term 3 (but I had compilations of examples done before then). And yes – it was very hard and took me a good couple of hours! It helps reading the ‘good’-quality essays on the VCAA examiners’ reports and there is also a helpful database on ATARNotes here and a few samples in the Kirsten Fox book. This will help you get an idea of how to write one. Then start on your own essay, using the examples you have collected as the examples on these sample essays will be a bit too old (recent examples are ideal because if you use some 2010 example the examiners might think you’re being lazy in using someone else’s examples and not shown initiative in keeping up-to-date with the state of language ‘now’. I’ve found using old quotes of linguists is fine though – just no old media quotes).
•   For the essay, make sure you write a wide variety of topics. This is so you don’t get surprised at the end of the year when your exam is say, the only year that doesn’t have an identity topic and that’s solely what you’ve been practicing.
•   Look at the past essay topics. I find that some of the most common topics are on things like: Identity, Public Language, Language Change. I wrote about 15 essays throughout the whole year – the majority were on Identity (as I liked this topic, I had great examples in it and it was pretty reliable in appearing in the choice of topics almost every year). My ‘secondary’ topic was public language, which I also wrote a few essays on. I wrote some other essays on topics such as Standard English, quite a few on Language Change etc. to make sure I wasn’t surprised at the end of the year. As a result, at the end of the year, I was very comfortable with the exam essay – being prepared makes it not a source of anxiety! And another thing – memorising essays is no good as the topics vary a bit (you probably won’t get exactly the same worded topic in the exam) which means you often use the same examples but different topic sentences and explanations. Unfortunately, I do not have such a good memory that I can memorise an essay exactly word-for-word and reproduce it anyway - and that's okay! But make sure you remember your examples and roughly how you explained them in previous essays.
•   Keeping plugging away at the exams (the order I did was Insight/VCAA/VATE). Exams from the old (pre-2012) study design are fine as the study design hasn’t really changed much apart from change of format (topic order switched around in textbook and commentary instead of short-answer in exam). Besides, if you have a question like “Discuss the syntax in this text” that’s basically your syntax paragraph in your commentary anyway and certainly, the old exams may have longer short-answer questions like this! I found this helped too as I could then self-correct my paragraphs using the solutions provided. As I did the subject in 2012, I think I only had a few analytical commentaries available to me – of course, you can write a commentary on any text you find, but then you need corrections – and hence I found that writing old exams with solutions was more effective.
•   As for end-of-year lectures, I highly recommend the Connect Education lecture (which has really good notes!) at the end of the year, and the VATE lecture (which is run by English Language school teachers). Although I was already well-versed in the subject’s material, they acted as a good overview and revision for the course.
•   RELAX before the exam (at least on exam day)! On the long drive to school, I was reading over my quotes and examples list and almost got carsick… as a result, I felt really nauseous through my exam… which was not good. So the best thing to do is probably just try and relax and have faith that if you have worked hard in your preparation, you will be fine, and you've done all you can do! :)

My exam scores were 15/15 (Short-Answer), 28/30 (Analytical Commentary), 30/30 (Essay) which scored me a 50 and Premier's Award, and I know some who got a lower exam score and still scored a 50, so you can lose a few marks for a perfect study score, unlike some maths subjects :P Certainly, I think the suggestion that I noted above (with writing a grid with text types in revising for commentaries) would've helped me in scoring higher in the commentary.

I hope this helps, and best wishes with your studies!  :D

Hey AzureBlue,
You wouldn't happen to have any of your dot point notes for the Living Lingo textbook would you?
I'd be interested to see how you wrote them so I could emulate that when taking my own notes :)