1. Unfamiliar Text Overview
Level One

2. What is Unfamiliar Text About?
Unfamiliar Text requires you to read excerpts or whole unseen texts, and answer questions about the ways that language is used.
This is an important skill in English, which requires you to understand language techniques as well as ideas and mood in the texts that you read.

3. Structure of the Paper
Your Unfamiliar Text AS is an external that you will complete in your exam at the end of the year.
You will have around 60 minutes to complete it.
There will be THREE extracts- all different styles of text.
Each text will have accompanying questions.

4. What Kinds of Texts?
Prose Fiction
Poetry
Non-Fiction

5. Question Style Typically the questions have 4 parts.
You usually have to:
Identify a language feature used for a particular purpose in the text or explain an attitude or idea in the text.
Give an example of that language feature.
Explain how that language feature helps you to understand an aspect of the text.
A longer answer question which asks about how the writer helps us to understand something in the text (usually an idea or concept), referring to multiple techniques.

6. An Example
Identify ONE language feature the writer uses to describe the Waitomo Caves.
Provide an example of this language feature from the text.
Explain how this language feature helps you to understand what the Waitomo Caves are like.
Explain how the writer helps us to understand what the experience of visiting the Waitomo Caves is like, throughout the text.
Support your answer with reference to the techniques, including language features, that the writer uses to show:
• her view of the setting
• her response to the experience
• what the benefit of experiences like this might be.

7. Structuring An Answer
The longer answer questions can be challenging to structure answers to.
You should be aiming to write a miniature essay using the following structure.
Write an introductory statement which addresses the question.
Identify 2-3 techniques which are used in this way. Provide an example and explain the effect of each.
Conclude by summarising and making a statement about author’s purpose.

8. Techniques Draw the table below in your book.
In groups, brainstorm all the language features you know which you might expect to find in each of the different text types and record them in your table.
Remember- there will be language features which should appear in more than one column!
Prose
Poetry
Non-Fiction