This guide is for the examination unit of A2 English Language and Literature AQA A, ‘Comparative Analysis and Text Adaptation’.
This demanding 2½ hours examination develops students’ analytical and productive skills acquired in the AS year.
It requires students to compare texts of different types, as well as to recast a given extract into a different set type of text and provide a commentary that explains their linguistic choices.
These tasks are assessed using all four Assessment Objectives:
Structuring the Teaching
The journalistic text for the recasting task (currently Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs or A House Somewhere) can take up a lot of class time; but it’s important to remember that, while students may feel reassured by covering the extracts in depth in class, what they actually have to do with them is use them as source material, and they therefore only really need to understand them.
Covering different styles of writing and possible features to use in a range of texts (thinking about and discussing the many and various implications of ‘G-CAP’: genre, context, audience and purpose) is an extremely valuable use of time that it is dangerously easy to overlook.
That said, the texts are of such intrinsic interest that it seems a shame to treat them too cursorily, as they can spawn interesting discussion and enable...
