A2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
ELLA 3 COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS AND TEXT ADAPTATION
MOUNTAINSIDES OF HELL – HOMEWORK FEEDBACK
I have sent letters of concern to the parents of students who did not submit this piece of work.
· Generally I was very impressed with the quality of the work done for this third full recasting task and commentary. No one was marked lower than upper Band 3. This means people are working at grade C and above.
· Practicing these recasting tasks and commentaries will significantly improve the quality of your work. So in the words of the Labour Party’s 1997 General Election campaign song, “Things can only get better!”
· Make every effort to include a commentary with your recasting task.
· Writing for the recast task and commentary must be concise. Make every effort to include as much detail in as few words as possible. Be careful not to cut points off.
· Include as many relevant features of language in your recast task as you can. As you plan your recast task you should jot down potential words and phrases that contain powerful and relevant language features.
· Include as much relevant terminology in your commentary as you can. Make sure you are confident in the meaning of the term, comment on its function in the recast text and include a comment on the effect on the audience.
· YOU SHOULD AIM TO INCLUDE 12 – 18 DIFFERENT INTEGRATED LANGUAGE FEATURES IN YOUR COMMENTARY. Most of you included 7 or 8.
· I think it generally works well to include the contextual statements in introductory and concluding paragraphs. However I don’t think you need to devote the whole of these paragraphs to contextualising the text. I think it’s important to start including relevant content details from the original text as soon as possible.
· Another successful way of including contextual information in your recast task is to embed the contextualising details throughout the recast task.
· Be aware that there are two or three purposes in any recasting text. There will be a lead purpose and at least another purpose – a minor purpose. You should make both purposes clear in your recast task and refer to them directly in the commentary.
· Avoid using long quotations in your commentary from the recast task. You should just quote a word or a phrase at most. You won’t have time in the exam to quote huge chunks of your text.
· You could underline the language features in your recast task as you write it to remind you of the features to include in your commentary. You could also write your recast task using double spacing to enable you to edit or add text later.
· I think whatever recast task you have been set it’s important to include a variety of sentence structures. You should especially include short, simple, compound and complex sentences. I also think it’s a good idea to include declarative, imperative, interrogative and perhaps exclamative sentences. Remember the examiners have chosen a recasting task to enable you to really explore language, purpose, genre and audience fully. Of course you should use the appropriate sentence structures suited to your task. But you should be aware the possibility of the range available to you.
