OCR A-Level English Language: the language levels toolkit overview quiz quiz

Lexis, grammar and accurate spelling only, with nothing said about sound, context or layout at all

Lexis and semantics; grammar; phonology and prosody; pragmatics; discourse; graphology and multimodality

Reading, writing, speaking and listening, the four skills assessed at primary level rather than analytical tools

Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, the four main word classes treated as the whole analytical toolkit

Personal, unsupported opinion about whether you happen to like the text or not

Memorising the whole text word for word and reproducing it under timed conditions

Applying methods of language analysis and using accurate terminology

Original creative writing produced in response to a stimulus or commission brief

Naming as many separate linguistic features as you possibly can, without commenting on effect

Correct spelling and punctuation only, assessed entirely in isolation from any analysis

Simply comparing two texts side by side without reference to context or meaning

Analysing how contextual factors and language features construct meaning

It supplies AO1 but not AO3; the marks need the move from feature to effect

It is simply factually wrong, because the feature has been misidentified or mislabelled

It takes up far too much space on the page that could be used for other points

Linguistic features should never be named or labelled at all in an analytical answer

They are exactly the same thing, two interchangeable names for one single concept

Semantics is literal meaning; pragmatics is implied, context-dependent meaning

Semantics is about the physical production of speech sounds; pragmatics is about spelling

Semantics applies only to spoken language; pragmatics applies only to written language

Make sentences longer for no purpose, padding out the text to fill more space

Add a greater number of evaluative adjectives and adverbs to the noun phrases

Omit or background the agent of an action, which can conceal responsibility

Change the grammatical topic of the sentence to a completely unrelated subject

Graphology and visual layout, since transcripts are presented as printed pages to be read

Only lexis, because vocabulary growth is the single thing worth tracking in young children

Spelling and handwriting accuracy, judged against the conventions of the standard written form

Phonetics, phonology and prosody, with grammar and pragmatics, tied to developmental stage

The way a caption fixes the meaning of an image; graphology and multimodality

A type of compound sentence joined by coordinating conjunctions; the grammar level

A distinctive consonant speech sound made at the back of the mouth; the phonology level

A group of words drawn from one shared semantic field or topic area; the lexis level

A prescriptive spelling rule, generated by the conventions of standard written English

An implied, unstated meaning, generated when a speaker flouts one of Grice's maxims

A type of decorative display font, generated by the choices of a graphic designer

A grammatical inflection added to a word stem to mark tense, number or possession

It is explicitly against the rules set out in the specification and will always be penalised heavily by the examiner

Producing six separate points is simply too many to manage within the time allowed for the task

Coverage is not the goal; strong analysis selects the levels that do the most meaningful work in the text

Only one single language level is ever relevant to any given text, so the rest are wasted effort

They are completely identical terms with no difference between them at all in any context whatsoever

Phonetics deals only with the written language and with spelling conventions, while phonology deals only with the spoken language

Phonetics is the study of word meaning and the lexicon; phonology is the study of grammatical structure

Phonetics is how speech sounds are physically produced; phonology is how sounds pattern and function in a language or text

The effect of a structure depends on context; short sentences can signal urgency, plainness, certainty or simplicity

Short sentences do not actually exist as a real grammatical category in English at all

Narrative or dramatic tension is never a relevant idea to raise in a language analysis answer

The claim is always correct in every case, so it can be safely applied to absolutely any text as a wholly reliable formula