OCR A-Level English Language and Literature: non-fiction and spoken texts (Component 01) overview quiz quiz

A 2 hour paper made up of two entirely separate essays, each on a different set text

A 1 hour, 32 mark comparison of an anthology text and an unseen text

A coursework folder submitted across the year and marked internally by the school

A multiple-choice paper testing recall of the anthology texts and key terminology

Because the paper is sat closed-book, so candidates must recall the anthology text from memory

Because the paper is essentially a test of creative writing rather than of close analytical reading

Because the whole paper is a comparison, so connections across texts are central

Because it is the longest paper of the three components and so naturally carries the most marks

Summarise the argument of the text clearly and accurately before moving on to anything else

Count the paragraphs and sentences in order to measure the overall structure of the text first

Identify the author's biography and life history and use it to explain the meaning of the text

Analyse the how (construction of voice, persuasion, representation), not the what

Through register, a credible persona, credentials, and high-certainty declaratives

Solely through emotive imagery that works directly on the feelings of the reader or listener

Through the visual layout and colour scheme of the page rather than through any language choices

Only through the use of rhetorical questions, which alone establish the speaker's authority on a topic

The three tenses an argument can be cast in: the past, the present and the future

Ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion) and logos (reason)

The three core levels of language description: lexis, grammar and phonology

The three framing contextual factors: the audience, the purpose and the mode

Transcripts are always informal, so they can only ever be analysed for casual conversational features

Transcripts contain no punctuation at all, which makes ordinary sentence-level prose analysis impossible

Its meaning is in turns, overlaps, repairs and face-work, not only the words

It cannot really be analysed in any meaningful way, since spontaneous talk is too disordered to study

Simple errors in the speaker's delivery that should be ignored entirely when analysing the transcript

Clear evidence of the speaker's poor education and limited command of the standard form of the language

Nothing of any analytical value at all, since they carry no meaning and merely clutter up the transcript

Real-time planning, hesitation, emphasis or turn-management, meaningful evidence of the spoken mode

A scripted-spoken hybrid: written to be spoken, with rhetoric built for the ear

Purely spontaneous speech, produced live and unplanned in exactly the same way as casual conversation

A purely written text, best analysed in the same way as a newspaper article or a piece of crafted prose

A multimodal digital text, whose meaning depends mainly on images, layout and on-screen visual design

Title, author, date, length

Mode, audience, purpose and genre

Spelling, grammar, punctuation, vocabulary

Font, colour, layout, images

To save ink and writing effort, since a shorter answer that covers fewer features is always preferred

Because the features of any given text are essentially random, so the question is really the only way to pick between them

There is no time to analyse everything in the hour, so the relevant patterned features are those bearing on the focus

To avoid having to use precise terminology, since a question-led answer can describe features in plain words

Writing an introduction that is far too short to set up the comparison properly for the examiner

Using a great deal of precise linguistic terminology, which slows the writing and eats into the hour

Reading the printed anthology text twice over before turning to begin work on the unseen text

Over-decoding the unseen text and leaving no time for the comparison

The two texts often differ in mode (a speech against an article), so contrasting their mode-specific resources is productive AO3

Because mode is wholly irrelevant to a comparison, so contrasting it adds nothing useful to the answer at all

Because both of the paired texts always share exactly one mode, which makes mode an easy point of agreement

Because mode is really just a matter of spelling and punctuation, which are very simple features to compare quickly in the answer