A-LEVEL
ENGLISH LITERATURE B
LITB2/ Unit 2 Dramatic Genres
Report on the Examination
2745
June 2014
Version: 1.0
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REPORT ON THE EXAMINATION – A-LEVEL ENGLISH LITERATURE B – 2745 – JUNE 2014
This summer’s coursework submission marked the end of the second year in which dramatic
comedy has been the focus of LITB2, and schools and colleges seem to be increasingly confident
in their teaching of this genre. The best work was done when schools and colleges understood that
this unit requires a focus on both drama and comedy, and that an exploration of aspects of genre
can be used both to debate different readings of a text and to consider aspects of dramatic
method. Despite the general success of this year’s submission, certain problems persisted; some
advice from last year’s report has therefore been repeated, for emphasis.
Students do not have to justify their selected play as a comedy. If there is any significant doubt that
the text can be meaningfully placed within the genre of dramatic comedy then its very selection
seems hard to defend. When students, in their readings of such texts as Measure for Measure,
debated whether the play could be better seen as a comedy or a tragedy, they inevitably at times
ended up arguing that the play was not a comedy at all. Responses such as these spent
disproportionate time discussing features of a genre which is no longer the focus of this unit. The
most effective tasks focused clearly on an element of dramatic comedy within the play and
explored the significance of the dramatic operation of that feature of the genre.
It is worth emphasising here that there is a difference between writing about a play which is a
comedy and writing about dramatic comedy. Some responses very briefly identified the text as a
comedy and then proceeded to explore areas of the text that had no direct relation to the genres of
either comedy or drama.
Assessment
The purpose of moderation is to produce fairness and parity for all students. Understandably,
therefore, the marks of some schools and colleges required adjustment. The most usual reason for
these adjustments was that students produced work which in terms of the marks awarded by the
centre matched neither the assessment criteria nor the standards suggested by the autumn
standardising materials. It was often the case that when schools and colleges made comparative
reference to these materials their final marking was shown to be more accurate. Many moderators
questioned the degree to which schools and colleges had read and used the standardising
materials during their own internal coursework standardising. That, of course, is one of their
primary purposes, although such references need to be used judiciously. There were occasions
where schools and colleges claimed that a particular piece was comparable in standard to a
specified standardising folder without any convincing evidence to support that assertion.
There were also cases where the comments made by the centre on the students’ work bore little
relation to the final mark awarded. The most valuable centre comments are those which offer an
honest assessment of both the strengths and weaknesses of the work. Supportive and exhortatory
remarks directed to the student are in themselves of little use to the moderator. Although some
tolerance is allowed between the marks of schools and colleges and the marks of moderators,
some marks need to be adjusted to do justice to those schools and colleges who have applied the
criteria accurately.
The Assessment Objectives and English Literature ‘B’
During the last year, standardising and teacher support meetings have continued to emphasise
that the four units in this specification encourage particular approaches to the study of literature. If
schools and colleges set tasks that offer meaningful opportunities to respond to all four
assessment objectives they will not only be increasing their students’ chances of success, but also
be reinforcing good practices that will benefit responses to the other three units in English
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Literature ‘B’. The best students integrated the assessment objectives within their arguments,
rather than seeing them as operating independently of each other.
This summer’s submission suggested that many schools and colleges have worked hard on
encouraging their students to shape accurate, tightly constructed and relevant arguments. Both
externally examined papers, LITB1 and LITB3, place considerable emphasis on the importance of
students attending to the precise wording of the set questions. Consistently relevant and coherent
arguments are no less important in LITB2. These skills were inevitably less in evidence when the
tasks themselves offered very little opportunity to debate. It is also important, both in the externally
examined papers and in coursework, that students focus carefully on the precise requirements of
the tasks. There were many instances where students seemed to pay only cursory attention to
what the task required and delivered instead what was not much more than a running commentary
on selected scenes from the play. It was disappointing when schools and colleges showed little
interest in commenting on their students’ technical and structural weaknesses (AO1) when arriving
at the final mark.
The requirement to address AO2 must be kept in mind when schools and colleges create tasks.
Students must have the opportunity to discuss the ways that playwrights create their stories and
the ways that plays work. Both AO2 and AO4 require a response to the plays as plays, not as
some indeterminate form of text. Some students wrote very effectively about dramatic form and
structure, about the significant elements of drama. Others wrote about the plays as if they were
novels, or even biographies.
The requirement to debate meaning is central to this specification and to AO3 in particular. Many
successful tasks firmly linked their debate to aspects of dramatic genre, and clearly understood
that genre study itself offers many opportunities to debate readings of the text. Schools and
colleges need to use critical references with discrimination. The best practice occurs when
students integrate clearly relevant critical opinions into their own arguments, evaluating and
incorporating them within a wider debate. When all the students in a sample use the same critical
references for the same purposes, this does not reveal much in the way of independent response
to the task.
Although many students use critical reference very effectively as a means of structuring their own
arguments, this approach is not the only way of demonstrating an understanding of alternative
interpretations of a text. Many admirable responses had again clearly been generated by
discussions that had naturally emerged from study within the classroom.
There was less evidence this summer of the unprofitable practice of using a specific production
simply as a means of describing what goes on in a play, as if the performance was in some way
definitive. Drama productions are themselves interpretations, and can be used very effectively in
support of a particular reading of a play.
There was less evidence this summer of the inappropriate use of contextual material (AO4) in
students’ work. Sweeping statements about the wholesale subordination of Elizabethan women
and the racism and misogyny of Shakespearean audiences were thankfully rare. When such
material appeared, it frequently dominated the opening paragraphs of the essay and prevented the
development of any purposeful argument.
The Genre of Dramatic Comedy
The title of LITB2 is ‘Dramatic Genres’. The central focus of this unit is on how playwrights
construct their stories using the dramatic methods at their disposal. The sub-genre of comedy
allows for focused study on certain aspects of the plays alongside an understanding of genre as a
social and cultural construct that eludes fixed definition and inevitably shifts its boundaries over
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time. The study of genre can also itself assist debate in that the ways in which an individual text
explores or responds to an element of genre can provide an opportunity to consider different
interpretations of that text.
The evidence of this summer is that that schools and colleges are more consistently focusing their
students’ attention on the plays as dramatic constructs. This may be due to dramatic comedy’s
tendency to draw attention to its own artifice and to delight in its own manipulation of word, stage
action and plot structure. There is, however, an important distinction to be made between the
concept of ‘comedy’ as a feature of social culture and ‘dramatic comedy’ as a literary form. Those
students who were reduced to identifying the funny bits in the plays inevitably produced very
superficial studies of the texts. Another approach that proved problematic was when a familiar
comic ‘theme’ was identified, such as the lack of self-knowledge, and the incidence of this ‘theme’
was then dutifully described without any clear sense of how this element of the play was operating
within the genre of dramatic comedy. Lack of self-knowledge in itself is not definitive of comedy: it
is also a characteristic of many tragic heroes. It is equally unproductive for a student to begin by
stating that comedies deal with social issues and then going on to do little more than describe the
occasions within the play where a selected ‘issue’ manifests itself.
The word ‘Dramatic’ in the title of the unit is at least as important as ‘Genres’. The examination of
dramatic methods is a central requirement of this unit and cannot be delivered simply by identifying
a series of incidents within the play and then explaining how they would make the audience ‘feel’.
An approach which proved equally seductive, and often equally unproductive, was to confidently
identify what the playwright ‘felt’. Wilde was a very popular choice of dramatist. One of his
observations on drama might be usefully borne in mind in this context: ‘Shakespeare’s intentions
were his own secret: all we can form an opinion about is what is actually before us.’
Texts
There are certain requirements for any text chosen as an example of dramatic comedy in this unit
that are worth repeating. The play must contain a range of significant elements or features of the
literary genre of dramatic comedy. The play must have been written for the stage, or must have
been adapted for the stage, in which case the text must be that used for the stage version. There
must be a published playscript available for study. Television or film scripts are not appropriate
choices for this unit. For this reason, this report must again stress that the use of Alan Bennett’s
Talking Heads is not recommended. Although the soliloquies have been produced on stage, the
usual text that schools and colleges select is the BBC edition of eight plays written for television.
There was more evidence this summer that the genre of dramatic comedy is providing schools and
colleges with the opportunity to select from a wide and productive range of texts.
The most popular Shakespeare plays seemed to be Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night.
Some very good responses were also offered, however, on As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors,
Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Taming of
the Shrew. Many students offered work on the ‘dark’ comedies, Measure for Measure and The
Merchant of Venice. When their approach genuinely focused on an element of comedy within the
plays these choices also worked well.
A very few students submitted responses to two Shakespeare plays. While this is acceptable,
schools and colleges will have to consider in these cases whether their students are gaining the
range and depth of experience available.
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A very wide range of other dramatists was offered this summer. Oscar Wilde was the most popular
choice, and The Importance of Being Earnest the most popular play. An Ideal Husband ,A Woman
of No Importance, and Lady Windermere’s Fan also made several appearances. Some very
impressive essays were submitted on Wilde’s comic methods, and some remarkable re-creative
responses.
Other very popular texts included Pygmalion, The History Boys, Abigail’s Party, and Educating
Rita. Many plays attracted productive interest from a small number of schools and colleges.
Moderators reported interesting and productive work on: Bouncers, Loot, Entertaining Mr Sloane,
What the Butler Saw, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Real Inspector Hound, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead, Lysistrata, Jerusalem, Top Girls, The Country Wife, The Rivals, The Way
of The World, The Man of Mode, The School for Scandal, Blithe Spirit, The Playboy of the Western
World, Translations, Waiting for Godot, , The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, The Caretaker,
and The Bald Prima Donna.
Some texts, while clearly appropriate choices in terms of their potential, in practice often proved
problematic for this cohort. Several moderators again commented on problems encountered with
submissions on The History Boys. While there were many impressive responses, some students
approached the play in ways that had very little connection with the stated aims of this unit.
Debates about the ways in which Hector and Irwin represented different philosophies of education
offered only minimal insight into the genre of dramatic comedy, and those students who took issue
with Hector’s ‘paedophile tendencies’ or Dakin’s sexism tended to respond to the characters as if
‘real’.
If schools and colleges choose texts which clearly have elements of different genres, they must be
very careful about their choice of task. Some essays on Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale,
and The Merchant of Venice, for instance, steadily developed into analyses of features of the play
that had little to do with dramatic comedy.
It is very important that schools and colleges choose texts that will suit the interests and abilities of
their students. Responses to texts that had clearly been carefully selected by the centre produced
work that was fresh, engaged and engaging.
Tasks and Task Setting
The appropriateness of a text cannot be judged apart from the accompanying task. It seems logical
that schools and colleges should consider the range of tasks that look likely to be made available
by a text before making a final choice. Successful tasks will address both parts of the unit title. The
focus, whether conventional or re-creative, needs to be on the ways that an individual play can be
seen to explore an element of dramatic comedy.
Some general points:
 Tasks need to provide the opportunity for a genuinely independent reading of the text. If several
students choose the same task, that task must be framed in such a way as to encourage
distinctively different responses.
 There were some submissions in which every student responded to the same task, made the
same assertions about the text, repeatedly used the same or very similar expressions, and utilised
identical textual references. This form of excessive scaffolding is against the whole spirit of
coursework and makes it impossible to give credit to the students for any kind of independent
judgement.
 The task must invite a response that is deliverable in 1500 words. That will not be the case if the
subject is impossibly broad, e.g. ‘What are the main comic features of Twelfth Night?’
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 A range of tasks will assist independence of response, but there is no requirement that every
student must be given a separate task. Some schools and colleges helpfully provided a list of all
the tasks offered to the students.
 There is no guarantee that a task which has worked well for one cohort of students will always
be successful. Schools and colleges are encouraged to continually review their task setting.
 Tasks which appear in standardising materials are not necessarily to be seen as exemplars.
Schools and colleges must make their own judgements as to whether they will suit the needs of
their students.
 A question that schools and colleges have to ask themselves is ‘How has my teaching of the
text offered the opportunity for my students to deliver a genuinely individual reading of that text?’ A
similar question has to be asked of the tasks set.
The evidence from this summer’s submission was again that where problems with a centre’s tasks
emerged, they were largely due to two factors. The first was that no real debate was offered and
the second was that the focus of the task was not clearly on an aspect of dramatic comedy.
There were several types of task which failed to generate genuine debate:
 Tasks which essentially invited description, e.g. ‘How does Shakespeare’s use of disguise add
to the comedy in As You Like It?’, or ‘How does Russell use Frank’s study to create comedy in
Educating Rita?’ A better debate might be offered here by considering the different readings that
Russell’s use of the study opens up within the comic world of the play. The task ‘Describe how
Shakespeare uses love to create comedy in Twelfth Night’ could be re-shaped into a discussion
about the degree to which love is presented as ridiculous within the play.
 Tasks which are really non-debates, e.g. ‘The theme of mistaken identity is central to Much
Ado. Discuss.’
 Another type of non-debate: ‘To what extent does She Stoops to Conquer conform to comic
conventions?’ This kind of task almost inevitably generates a list of features.
 The ‘debate’ where it is almost impossible to disagree with the central proposition, e.g. ‘Is it
possible to see The Importance of Being Earnest as a mockery of society?’
 The use of the inappropriate formula (very common), e.g. ‘To what extent is disguise important
in Twelfth Night?’ Here ‘to what extent’ does not work; there is no way of estimating the degree of
‘importance’. A better approach might be to debate whether disguise is presented as operating in
a positive or negative way within the comic world of the play.
 The impossible judgement, e.g. ‘How successfully does Shakespeare use x to create comedy in
Act I scene iii?’ Understandably, students at AS level tend to say that he does it rather
successfully, and then go on to describe what happens in the play.
 Another kind of impossible judgement: ‘Bottom steals the show in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Discuss.’ The only meaningful way of responding to this proposition is by reference to a specific
production, and the response is likely to be unhelpfully particular.
One process that has proved successful in the past is to identify a feature of the sub-genre
(perhaps the comic role of a fool or trickster), to locate analysis of this feature within the presented
experience of a particular character or significant scene, ensure that selected aspects of dramatic
method are explored, and to direct the reading of the text towards a debate (perhaps the degree to
which the character can be seen as offering something more complex than the representation of a
stock role).
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Re-creative Tasks
The re-creative option continues to be popular with many schools and colleges, and some
moderators reported seeing more examples of good practice this year. For any students, at all
levels, this approach allowed them to explore aspects of comic drama within the text more
effectively and with more apparent enthusiasm than was evident within their conventional
response.
The re-creative response has to perform the same general function as the conventional response:
to deliver a reading of the play as a dramatic comedy. At times the wording of the task gave little or
no indication of how this was to be achieved. ‘Tasks’ such as ‘Lady Bracknell’ or ‘Algernon’s Diary’
do not give the moderator much to go on. If an extra scene is provided, it is important that it is
located precisely within the original play. It is not altogether helpful if the moderator has to wait for
the commentary to find out what the point of the whole exercise was meant to be.
It may be useful when developing a re-creative task to begin with a proposition that might form the
basis of a conventional task (e.g. ‘In Educating Rita, Frank sees himself as a satiric commentator
on events, but is largely revealed as a comic fool’) and then shape a re-creative response to
explore that proposition (perhaps by offering an additional scene involving Frank and his wife).
The material of the re-creative response must be made possible by the base text. When students
departed in significant ways from the original play, adding events which altered the whole nature of
the plot or introducing new characters, then the focus of the whole response inevitably became the
student’s own creative writing, rather than the craft of the playwright. In some commentaries, in
fact, students justified their alterations to the original by claiming that the playwright would have
done the same if he had thought of it.
As with a conventional response, the craft of the playwright needs to be a central focus of the
student’s interest. An understanding of the playwright’s methods can emerge implicitly in the recreative piece and explicitly in the commentary. Such an understanding is unlikely to emerge if, in
the commentary, the only treatment of form, structure and language is in relation to the student’s
own writing rather than in relation to the base text. The commentary needs to establish a clear
connection between the re-creative piece and the base text, and illustrate the significant choices
that have been made in the creation of that re-creative piece. In this context, AO1 should be seen
as relating to the student’s own writing. AO2, especially at the higher levels, relates to the form,
structure and language of the base text.
There is no requirement for students to replicate exactly the form and language of the chosen
playwright. Some students who set out to imitate Wilde’s dramatic language predictably fell far
short of the original. The selection of narrative voice matters. It is often far more effective and
interesting to present the point of view of a character who is at times marginalised in the source
play. Characters such as Viola and Beatrice tend to have had a lot to say about themselves (and
others) in the base text. Such selections often lead to little more than bland replicas of the original.
Some very effective interpretations of The Importance of Being Earnest emerged through using the
voices of Lane and Merriman in extra scenes, and Cecily and Gwendolen in diary entries that
focused on the characters as comic ingénues.
The re-creative approach has to illuminate a reading of the primary text, to show what has been
learned through this approach about the text as a dramatic comedy. Schools and colleges should
consider carefully what form of response is in the best interests of their students.
It is expected that re-creative responses will be genuinely individual. It was again disappointing to
find submissions where every student chose the same narrative voice, situated the speech in the
same place in the play, and seemed to have exactly the same view of the selected character.
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It should be emphasised that the combined length of both re-creative piece and commentary needs
to be within the 1500 word limit. It should also be emphasised that centre annotation is as
important in the re-creative response as in the conventional response and should not be confined
to the commentary. It is also just as important to submit bibliographies as in the conventional
response.
As always, schools and colleges are encouraged to make appropriate use of their coursework
adviser when revising their chosen tasks.
Annotation and Administration
Some important points made in earlier reports are repeated here:
Annotation
Many moderators commented on the correlation between effective centre annotation and accurate
application of the assessment criteria.
Annotation which assists the moderation process will:
 Occur throughout the two pieces of work
 Include detailed summative comments on each piece of work
 Address both strengths and weaknesses within the work. Too often students’ work contained
significant flaws that were nowhere acknowledged in the centre comment.
 Show awareness that the final audience for the work is the moderator and shape comments
accordingly.
 Indicate the degree to which and in what ways the Assessment Objectives have been
addressed. To merely identify different Assessment Objectives is of very limited value. Simply
putting ‘AO2’ in the margin, for instance, could justify a mark of anything from 1 to 30.
 Ensure that the summative comment makes sense in terms of the final mark awarded. In some
cases this summer it was difficult to see the connection between the two.
Administration
The presentation of scripts matters, as does adherence to deadlines. Moderators’ work will be
made much easier if schools and colleges:
 Secure scripts with treasury tags rather than paper clips or plastic wallets. Scripts often pass
through many hands and staples tend to unfasten.
 Ensure that bibliographies, including the edition of the play, and accurate word counts are
included. The inclusion of bibliographies and careful teaching of the use of quotation and citation
may help schools and colleges to reduce the incidence of plagiarism. Moderators reported
examples this summer of students including material in their essays which was clearly not their
own.
 Present the folders in the sample in descending rank order.
 Arrange the two pieces in the same order as on the cover sheet (i.e. ‘Shakespeare’ first).
 Adhere to deadline dates. The deadline date for moderators to receive marks is always May
15th, or the last working date before this. This is the deadline for schools and colleges, not for
students.
Word Counts
Disappointingly, it is again necessary to remind schools and colleges that the upper word limit for
this unit is 1500 words for each piece of work. With the re-creative response this applies to the
combined word count of the re-creative piece and the commentary. Quotations are included in the
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word count. If footnotes are used to advance the argument, they should also be included in the
total. It is expected that every piece of work will be accompanied by an accurate word count.
The majority of schools and colleges had no difficultly in submitting work within these limits and the
students’ work benefited as a result. There were, however, a number of assignments that were
submitted this summer which were well over 1500 words in length. It cannot be over-stressed that
students who go over the word counts do themselves no favours whatsoever. Schools and
colleges must stress this fact to their students. Credit cannot be given for a breadth of response to
a task if that breadth has only been achieved by flouting the word limits. AO1 requires a degree of
structured argument. The criteria for Bands 5 and 6 include the phrase ‘well structured’. It is hard to
see how work which clearly exceeds the given limits can be seen as ‘well structured’ within the
terms of this unit.
Some schools and colleges seemed to believe that word counts operate within a 10% tolerance.
No such tolerance operates.
Conclusion
Much of the work submitted this year was remarkably impressive, the result of what was clearly
some very effective teaching. There seems to be an increasing confidence in the understanding of
the nature of dramatic comedy. Many moderators reported that the process of moderation went
more smoothly than ever before, again reflecting some very effective practice on the part of
schools and colleges.
Moderators commented on the number of ‘refreshingly original essays’ they encountered, and the
evidence suggests that students are responding well to the wide range of dramatic comedies that
are available.
Study in this unit should enable students to:
 Understand something about how genre works
 Shape arguments coherently and succinctly
 Use textual references relevantly and appropriately
 Explore the ways in which dramatists create their narratives
These skills, while essential to success in this unit, will also benefit students’ work in the A2 units,
and in the specification as a whole.
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Mark Ranges and Award of Grades
Grade boundaries and cumulative percentage grades are available on the Results Statistics
page of the AQA Website.
Converting Marks into UMS marks
Convert raw marks into Uniform Mark Scale (UMS) marks by using the link below.
UMS conversion calculator www.aqa.org.uk/umsconversion
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