§-English Literary Studies Q&A
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English Literary Studies Q&A by dot point
A short Q&A bank for every SA English Literary Studies syllabus dot point. Each question and answer is drawn directly from our worked dot-point page, so you can scan key concepts before opening the long-form answer.
Creating Texts (20%)
Craft an original text that uses literary conventions deliberately and explains those choices to demonstrate control of form and effect.
Create an original written, oral or multimodal text that uses literary conventions deliberately to demonstrate command of craft learned from studied texts.
Create a re-creative or transformative text that reshapes a studied text and uses the new form to demonstrate critical understanding of the original.
Write a writer's statement that explains the deliberate choices behind a transformative text and demonstrates critical understanding of the original.
Responding to Texts (50%)
Analyse how a text is shaped by its author's choices and by the contexts of its production and reception.
Use close textual analysis of the short texts studied in class to develop one informed, sustained interpretation rather than a survey of features.
Analyse how visual and graphic elements - image, composition, layout and their relationship to words - create meaning and effect in a literary text.
Read closely and analyse how specific language and structural choices in a passage produce meaning and effect.
Compare how two or more texts represent ideas, perspectives and values, and analyse what the comparison reveals.
Evaluate how different critical perspectives produce different readings of a text and argue a reasoned position among them.
Analyse how a text conveys values, attitudes and ideologies and positions its reader to accept or resist them through its language and structural choices.
Analyse how a text draws meaning from its references to, echoes of, or evocation of other texts, and explain the effect of those connections.
Apply a named critical perspective to a text and analyse how that lens foregrounds particular features and produces a specific reading.
Structure a sustained analytical response so that a clear thesis governs every paragraph and the argument develops toward a considered conclusion.
Use appropriate critical terminology and metalanguage accurately to evaluate texts and justify interpretations with precision.
Analyse how voice, point of view and narrative perspective shape what a reader knows and how a reader judges, and explain the effect of the chosen vantage.
Text Study (external, 30%)
Adapt close-reading strategy to the text type in front of you - poetry, prose fiction or non-fiction - so you analyse what each form makes most meaningful.
Select an independent text to compare with a shared-study text so the pairing shares enough common ground to argue and enough difference to reveal something.
Develop a focused, arguable inquiry question that drives a genuine comparison of two texts for the Comparative Text Study.
Plan and write the external Comparative Text Study critical essay as an integrated comparison driven by a single arguable thesis.
Respond to unseen text in the 90-minute Critical Reading exam by analysing closely and arguing a focused response under time pressure.