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EnglandEnglish Language & LiteratureQuick questions
Component 01: Exploring non-fiction and spoken texts
Quick questions on Analysing spoken and multimodal texts - OCR A-Level English Language and Literature
7short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What is interaction?Show answer
A transcript of conversation is structured interaction, and discourse analysis reads its architecture. Turn-taking and who controls the floor reveal power; interruptions and overlaps show competition or collaboration; adjacency pairs (question-answer, greeting-greeting) show how talk is organised; topic management shows who steers. Alongside, pragmatics reads the relationship: politeness and face-work, the implicatures behind indirectness, the speech acts performed. Together these analyse how speakers build a relationship and negotiate power in real time.
What are spontaneous speech features?Show answer
Spontaneous speech carries features that written texts edit out, and they mean something. Fillers ("um", "er", "you know") and false starts mark planning in real time; pauses (often timed in a transcript) signal hesitation, emphasis or turn-management; repairs (self-correction) show the speaker monitoring their talk; non-fluency can mark spontaneity, nervousness or thought. Read these not as errors but as evidence of the spoken mode at work, and connect them to the speaker's stance or the relationship.
What is interaction read as power?Show answer
"The transcript stages a struggle for the floor: speaker A's repeated overlaps and latched turns seize topics before speaker B can finish, while B's lengthening pauses and rising fillers mark a speaker losing ground. The discourse itself, who holds and who yields the floor, dramatises a power imbalance that no single word states, and because this is spontaneous talk the imbalance is negotiated live, turn by turn." Discourse read as live power.
What is a scripted-spoken speech?Show answer
"The address is built for the ear: the tricolon mounts through three parallel clauses to a stressed final beat, and the inclusive 'we' gathers the listening crowd into a single body. On the page the repetition might seem laboured, but delivered aloud it is rhythm and build, the spoken mode's way of carrying a public audience by sound as much as sense." Scripted-spoken rhetoric read for delivery.
What is q1?Show answer
Why must a transcript be analysed as interaction, not prose? [2 marks]
What is q2?Show answer
What do spontaneous speech features (fillers, pauses, repairs) signal? [2 marks]
What is q3?Show answer
Analyse how a spoken text builds a relationship between speakers, and compare with a written text. [32 marks]
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