Self-Taught Language A: Paper 1: Guided literary Analysis

 Learner Portfolio Expectations for Paper 1:

• record responses to a passage or text read for the first time

• formulate guiding questions for different passages and use them as a lens through which to view those passages

• assess which of the skills involved in Paper 1 you feel less confident in and use the portfolio to track progress in the development of those skills

• keep a record of the literary forms covered in your practice of Paper 1 skills, make sure that you have covered all possible literary forms that might appear in Paper 1, and assess how much of a challenge each one presents to them

• compare their successive practices of Paper 1 to the first one you have done and monitor the evolution of their overall performance in the paper

Criterion A: Understanding and interpretation 

• Know, understand, and interpret elements of literary, stylistic, and rhetorical craft.

• Know, understand, and interpret features of particular text types and literary forms.

You will be expected to show an understanding of the extracts or texts, identify their literary, rhetorical, and stylistic features, and highlight any patterns that can be seen in their use.

The guiding question is designed to give you a point of entry into the text. It is not compulsory to answer it directly, but you may find it useful in structuring your response. For example, if the extract or text is a poem and the question asks how imagery evokes the impact of love in a person’s life, you should analyze the poem in order to identify the imagery and any patterns in its use and interpret how these are used to communicate a particular view of love. You could ask which view of love and its effect on people the poem offers.

 

Criterion B: Analysis and Evaluation

• Analyze and evaluate ways in which the use of language creates meaning.  

• Analyze and evaluate uses and effects of literary, stylistic, rhetorical, visual or theatrical techniques.  

• Analyze and evaluate ways in which extracts or texts may offer perspectives on human concerns.  

You will be expected to consider how the author of the unseen extracts or texts has used language to create meaning. Using the example of a poem and a question concerning how imagery evokes the impact of love in a person’s life, a good analysis and evaluation would explore how its imagery creates a particular view of love. There might also be a discussion about how the particular conventions of the literary form have been used to highlight such a view. The structural aspects of the poem could be explored in relation to how effectively they help convey ideas and attitudes about love. In all these cases there should be an assessment of the ways in which style and form relate to meaning.  

 

Criterion C: Focus and Organization

• Communicate ideas in clear, logical and persuasive ways. 

Criterion C in Paper 1 assesses how well-organized, coherent and focused the presentation of ideas is in your answer. The guiding question that accompanies the extracts or texts is not compulsory but it can be a good point of entry into the passage and it could provide you with a focus to make sure your analysis is coherent. In the example provided above, the examiner creating the paper considered that the focus on imagery would be an interesting one to develop in the case of this particular poem. Centering your analysis on this aspect will help you to make sure that your ideas are coherently developed. If you decide not to answer the guiding question make sure you choose an alternative point of entry so that your analysis develops a coherent and focused reading of the extracts or texts. This criterion interacts closely with criterion A in the sense that, to make your answer coherent, you will be expected to integrate evidence from the text to support your arguments in your answer. In this case, you would be expected to quote examples of imagery from the poem. How you integrate those quotations into your analysis and how you use them to support the points you are making will largely determine how effective the organization of your analysis is.  

 

Criterion D: Language

• Communicate in a range of styles and registers and for a variety of purposes and situations.  

Criterion D assesses the use of language in your answer. This refers to the correctness, precision and appropriateness of your use of words and sentence structure. This is a guided analysis and the register should be appropriately formal and academic. This means there should not be informal expressions in your answer. You should avoid, for example, short forms. It might also help to become familiar with specific terms to describe different literary features. For this particular question, being able to refer to different types of imagery such as visual, auditory and figurative, and to specific literary figures like metaphor, simile and synecdoche may also be helpful.  

 

Paper 1 gives you the opportunity to deal with the technical and formal aspects of literary texts. As you will have the extracts and texts in front of you, it allows you to provide close evidence from them to support the arguments you want to construct about it.  

To get ready for Paper 1, you must develop your reading and writing skills. The best preparation is to read as wide as possible a variety of texts and forms in your SSST language. It is also important to have a firm understanding of literary terminology, but remember that simply recognizing or listing literary features is unlikely to contribute to a carefully-reasoned argument about the extracts or texts you choose to write about.  

In addition to reading and annotating texts, you should practice writing about them. It will be helpful to investigate how this type of analysis is written and structured in your language of study. Please remember that you are expected to produce a reasoned argument on the use and importance of a significant stylistic feature central to the given passage.  

When dealing with the extracts or texts in Paper 1 you must be able to explain the effect of the use of the significant stylistic feature and support this with careful analysis. It is not enough just to describe the feature and give examples: it is also necessary to write about how they are used to develop the meaning of the text. To give an example, writing in the assessment “there is a lot of imagery here” is not productive. Writing something like “imagery is used extensively in the text and is central to the creation of the fearful, tense atmosphere that characterizes the piece”, and then going on to explore specific instances of imagery and how they convey fear and tension, would be more profitable. 

Activities to help you prepare for Paper 1:  

• When studying a literary text, you should keep a note of particular extracts that contain interesting literary features and use your learner portfolio to practice a close analysis of them. When you do this, ensure you have examples from different literary forms.  

• Look at the marking criteria of Paper 1 and cut up the separate bands of each criterion. See if you can put them back together in the correct order for each criterion, from the lowest mark to the highest •  

• Ask your SSST Coordinator to provide you with examples of student work in the teacher support material (TSM) and mark these with the assessment criteria. Afterwards, compare your mark with the one awarded by the examiner. What could this student have done to make their analysis better? What did they do well? How does this affect what you will do in your analyses? Write your reflection in your learner portfolio.  

• Use the assessment criteria to mark what you have written in your practice analysis. Which were the areas where you did well and which areas could you improve? Discuss with your supervisor or tutor what you can do to improve these areas.