Listening and viewing
This domain tests close viewing and/or listening: how you analyse significant aspects of visual or oral texts and support your analysis with evidence. At Level 2 it connects to standard 91107. You need to explain how techniques position the audience, create meaning, or shape response.
Core rules
- Identify the text's purpose and context briefly, then focus on specific techniques.
- For film and television: shot size, angle, movement, lighting, colour, editing, diegetic and non-diegetic sound, silence.
- For oral texts: tone, pace, pause, volume, emphasis, vocabulary, and register.
- Use evidence: a time code, a described shot, a line of dialogue, or a sound cue.
- Explain the effect on the audience and link to the whole text.
Worked example
A close-up shows a character's shaking hands while the soundtrack drops to silence. A weak answer says 'it creates tension'. A stronger answer explains: the close-up isolates the hands, so the audience sees the effort of concealment; the silence removes distraction and makes the tremor feel exposed; together they construct sympathy and suspense.
Traps
Describing plot instead of technique; ignoring sound; treating a technique as decoration; giving no time-coded evidence; confusing what happens with how it affects the viewer.