AQA A-Level English Language and Literature Paper 2 Exploring Conflict: a complete overview

What Paper 2 Exploring Conflict demands

Exploring Conflict studies how writers represent conflict and asks you both to analyse it and to write creatively about it. There are two strands: the Writing about society re-creative task with its critical commentary, and the set play studied through dramatic encounters. The unifying concept is conflict, analysed as both a theme and a linguistic construction, through the integrated language and literature method.

This guide ties the strands together; each has its own dot-point page with practice questions.

Writing about society: re-creative writing and commentary

The re-creative task transforms a set text (a new perspective, a changed genre, a filled gap) while staying faithful to its world, voice and concerns. It is informed transformation, not free invention. The accompanying critical commentary analyses and justifies your choices with linguistic and literary concepts, linking them to the base text and to their intended effect. The two are marked together, so the writing must be crafted and the commentary must be analysis, not a description of the process. Keep notes on your deliberate choices as you draft, because these become the commentary's content.

Dramatic encounters: the set play

The set play is analysed through its dramatic encounters, the confrontations where conflict is built. Treat dramatic dialogue as constructed spoken discourse and use conversation-analysis tools, turn-taking, adjacency pairs, interruption, politeness and face, and implicature, to show how power and conflict operate in talk. Combine this with literary attention to character, theme and structure, and with stagecraft: stage directions, setting, entrances and exits, silence and dramatic irony. The play is written for performance, so the audience's view shapes every encounter.

Analysing conflict across the paper

Conflict is the organising idea. It may be external (between characters, between an individual and society, or between forces and ideas) or internal (within a character). Writers construct it through the lexis of opposition, transitivity and agency, modality and commands, the discourse of confrontation, and structural escalation. Always analyse conflict as construction, not summary, and consider whose perspective frames it and how sympathy is distributed.

The integrated method and assessment objectives

The master skill remains the integrated method: a literary claim proved with named linguistic evidence. Paper 2 assesses AO1 (method and terminology), AO2 (how meanings are shaped), AO3 (context) and, for the re-creative writing, AO5 (creative and crafted writing). Balancing crafted writing with rigorous analysis is what the paper rewards.

Check your knowledge

A mix of recall and application questions covering Paper 2 Exploring Conflict. Attempt them, then check against the solutions.

1. Name the two strands of Exploring Conflict. (2 marks)
2. Define re-creative writing in this paper. (2 marks)
3. Name three conversation-analysis tools for analysing dramatic dialogue. (3 marks)
4. Distinguish external from internal conflict. (2 marks)
5. Explain the purpose of the critical commentary. (2 marks)
6. Explain why stagecraft matters when analysing a dramatic encounter. (3 marks)