What Unit 3 asks for

Unit 3 is controlled assessment: two written responses, each marked out of 30, worth 10% each.

• Task 1 — The Study of Spoken Language. One written response investigating the characteristics of, and influences on, two pieces of spoken language. A typical CCEA task is: listen to two talks, one formal and one informal; consider the variations of language use and explain why language changes in different contexts.
• Task 2 — The Study of Written Language. One written response demonstrating knowledge of characters, themes or genre in a literary text or texts. You may write about a text you are studying for GCSE English Literature — but you must submit a different piece of work that meets this task requirements.

Important: the Unit 3 tasks are not printed as fixed questions in the specification. Task setting is at medium control: CCEA provides a thematic list, and your centre develops the tasks from it and may contextualise them. CCEA replaces the controlled assessment themes every year, so always work from the current themes and guidance for the series you are entered for — never an old task sheet.

The characteristics of spoken language

Spoken language is not written language read aloud. It is made in real time, and it shows. Learn to name what you hear.

• Fillers — er, um, you know: buying planning time.
• False starts and repairs — I went — well, we went...: thought being edited live.
• Ellipsis — leaving out words the listener can supply: Coming?
• Discourse markers — right, anyway, so: signposts that steer the talk.
• Non-fluency features — pauses, hesitations, overlaps.
• Turn-taking, interruption, back-channelling — mm, yeah — the listener working aloud.
• Colloquialism, slang, dialect, accent — and, at the other end of the scale, standard English.

Do not moralise. Non-fluency is not bad English; it is what unscripted talk is made of. The analytical question is never is this correct? but why this, here, with these people?

Name the feature

Influences on spoken language

The AO2 outcome is to understand variations in spoken language, explaining why language changes in relation to contexts, and to evaluate the impact of spoken language choices. So every feature you name must be explained by a cause.

• Context — a rehearsed platform speech versus a kitchen conversation.
• Audience — thousands of strangers, or one friend who already knows the story.
• Purpose — to inspire, to instruct, to bond, to complain.
• Relationship and status — equals overlap and interrupt; unequal speakers rarely do.
• Planning time — a scripted speech has few fillers because the thinking was done last week.
• Identity — regional dialect, in-group slang and idiolect all signal who you are and who you are with.

Explaining a difference

Formal talk, informal talk, or both?

Tap a feature, then tap where you would most expect to hear it.

Structuring the spoken language response

You have two pieces of spoken language and a comparison to make. Structure decides whether the analysis lands.

• Do not write two separate essays. Structure by point of comparison — fluency, formality, turn-taking, lexical choice, purpose — and cover both speakers under each.
• Quote the transcript precisely, including the hesitations. The, er, the thing is is data; smoothing it out destroys the evidence.
• Every paragraph: feature named, evidence quoted, cause explained (context, audience, purpose), impact evaluated.
• End with the big claim: what do these two extracts, together, show about how English varies with situation?

The Study of Written Language

Task 2 is a written response showing your knowledge of characters, themes or genre in a literary text or texts. It is assessed against AO3, which asks you to read and understand texts, develop and sustain interpretations of writers ideas and perspectives, and explain and evaluate how writers use linguistic, structural and presentational features to achieve effects and engage and influence the reader.

• You may use a text from your Literature course — but the piece you submit for Unit 3 must be a different piece of work, written specifically for this task.
• Themes are arguments, not topics. Love is a topic; the novel presents love as a form of ownership is a thesis you can prove.
• Characters are constructs. Write about how the writer builds the character — through dialogue, through what others say, through what is withheld — not as though they were a real person.
• Genre means the conventions the writer keeps, bends or breaks — and why that matters to a reader.

Topic or thesis?

Spoken feature to what it reveals

Tap a spoken feature on the left, then tap what it tells an analyst.

The controlled assessment rules

Unit 3 has a high level of control for task taking. It matters that you know what that means before you start.

• Your centre develops the tasks from a CCEA thematic list (task setting is at medium control) and may contextualise them. CCEA replaces the themes every year, so use the current ones for your series.
• Research, planning and preparation happen with more freedom; the final writing is done under high control, in supervised conditions.
• Your teacher must be able to authenticate the work as your own.
• Each task is marked out of 30; the unit total is 60.

Practical consequence: your notes have to do the work. Go into the supervised session with a plan, your transcript references, and your quotations already chosen.

Using a Literature text

Writing about characters, themes and genre

Whichever focus you take, the structure of a strong paragraph is the same.

• Character: claim about how the writer constructs them, then the evidence — a speech habit, a repeated gesture, a silence — then the effect on how we judge them.
• Theme: claim about what the text argues, then evidence across the whole text (openings and endings are gold), then evaluation of how convincingly it argues it.
• Genre: name the convention, show where the writer keeps or breaks it, and explain what the reader expectation was — because genre only means something against expectation.

AO3 wants sustained interpretation: one idea, developed and defended across the whole response, beats six ideas mentioned once each.

Quoting a transcript

The paragraph engine for Unit 3

Both tasks reward the same paragraph shape. Learn it once, use it sixty times.

The evaluation sentence is the one most candidates leave out — and the one the top band is made of.

The big ideas to know

You have now covered both Unit 3 tasks and the analytical vocabulary they need. Press Finish to see your score.