OCR A-Level English Language and Literature: the integrated method (foundations) overview quiz quiz

Reading every text with the tools of both English Language and English Literature at once

Studying language methods only in Year 12 and then switching to literary study in Year 13

Answering language and literature in two completely separate exam papers sat at different times

Choosing at the start either a pure language route or a pure literature route through the course

Spot and list as many separate linguistic and literary features as you possibly can within the time available

Name a feature precisely (AO1), read how it shapes meaning (AO2), and explain it through context (AO3) in one point

Write one detached paragraph of pure historical context first, then a quite separate paragraph that simply labels the features

Summarise in your own words what the text says and the main events or arguments it sets out for the reader

It is built from a series of unusually long and elaborate sentences full of subordinate clauses

It mentions the author's biography and the personal circumstances in which the text was first composed

You cannot cleanly split it into a 'language half' and a 'literature half'

It opens with a clear topic sentence that states the single idea the paragraph is going to develop

AO4 and AO5

AO3 and AO4

AO2 and AO5

AO1 and AO2

The Component 03 recreative writing and the NEA Task 2 original piece

Every single analytical essay you write across all three of the examined components

Only the Component 01 closed-text comparison of an anthology text and an unseen text

Only the poetry essay, where you evaluate your own creative response to the set poems

The single-text poetry essay and the single-text drama essay in the closed exam

The Component 01 comparison and the NEA Task 1 essay

The reflective commentary that accompanies your recreative writing piece

Every single-text analytical essay you write, whether on prose, poetry or drama

It is purely a way of checking the spelling and technical accuracy of the writing on the page

It is only ever relevant to non-fiction texts and has nothing to offer the analysis of literature

Transitivity, mood, modality and voice analyse exactly how a speaker, character or narrator is constructed

It is merely a descriptive label for the word classes in a sentence and has no real bearing on the meaning a text makes

The metrical rhythm of a line and the pattern of its stressed and unstressed syllables

The choice of font and the typographical layout of the text as it appears on the page

The exact number of stanzas in a poem and how many lines each of those stanzas contains

Who is the agent of actions and who is acted upon, constructing power and agency

It analyses what characters imply but do not say (implicature) and how politeness is observed or flouted

It counts how many lines of dialogue each separate character is given across the whole scene

It describes the physical set, the props and the printed stage directions that an audience would actually see on stage

It is simply a way of checking the spelling and punctuation accuracy of the printed dialogue

All of the texts in the anthology are written texts, so mode is a fixed single category

Texts blend spoken and written features; speeches, transcripts and digital texts sit between the poles

Mode is only a surface label that does not affect the meaning a text makes or the way in which it should be analysed

Spoken and written language are essentially identical and can be analysed in exactly the same way

The technical accuracy of the spelling and the correctness of the grammar throughout the text

The overall length of the text and the visual layout of its paragraphs across the page

Production (who made it, when, why) and reception (how audiences then and now read it)

The wording of the title and the full name and literary reputation of the named author

Representation always distorts the truth, so any constructed version of a subject is by definition false

Representation is only ever about the visual images in a text and never about the choices made in language

Representation is a fixed and natural property of the subject itself and so it cannot really be analysed

Language makes choices (naming, grammar, presupposition) that build a particular version of a subject

AO3 rewards reading context into features; context that never reaches a feature is background, not analysis

Any mention of the historical or social background of a text is explicitly forbidden by the OCR mark scheme rubric

A separate context paragraph always makes the essay far too long and so candidates run out of time

Context is never relevant to the analysis of how a text actually makes its meaning on the page