One piece of advice that I may offer: familiarise yourself with the curriculum. Virtually no-one does it, but it will actually show you what you need to do.
This is the one produced for Canadian schools. It will take me a while to download and interpret it, so I'll just show you
the New South Wales one for secondary English. Pay particular attention to the Outcomes (page 13). Also, "Stage 4" refers to years seven and eight; "Stage 5" is years nine and ten. It's a bit of a tricky document because it's been written for each and every single stakeholder in the education process (parents, teachers, governments, etc.) without any input from the actual students, so it's very wordy and almost meaningless in places if you don't know what you're looking for (fortunately, we're getting a national syllabus soon, which will be much better-written).
Now, the Outcomes are effectively what students are expected to be able to do. Take a look at Outcome 5.4 - by the end of year ten, a student in New South Wales should be able to "select and use language forms and features and structures of texts according to different purposes, audiences and contexts and describes and explains their effects on meaning". Wordy, yes ... but this is exactly what you're doing by using QTE. When you are identifiying the forms, features and structures of the text, you are identifying the techniques used by the composer. When you are doing it for different purposes, audiences and contexts, you are doing it across a range of texts. And when you are describing and explaining their effects on meaning, you are identifying the effect under the QTE model.
So, try and get your hands on a Canadian syllabus. Find the section marked Outcomes, but bear in mind it might be known by a different name - Expectations or something similar. If you're having a little bit of trouble, ask your teacher which expectations correlate with the assessment task (if all students in your year do the same assessment task for a mandatory unit of work, the assessment must absolutely be written with these expectations or outcomes in mind). I'd also suggest doing it in private, because your classmates might find it a little bit odd.
One question however, when you explained the effect, is that basically the effect that quote had on the audience?
Yes. But be careful - you're not just explaining the effect of the quote, you're explaining the effect of the quote
and the technique.
Also, can a teacher reduce marks if the student's answer does not match theirs, but it still validly answers the question?
They most certainly should not do that. The marker's personal response to the question should not be a factor in how they mark. If anything, it should actually get you more marks (provided you have done it properly) - if they disagree with your answer, your answer should persuade them. So, if you say "Romeo and Juliet are not in love" when the teacher believes that they
are in love, your answer should contain an argument (with evidence under QTE) that persuades them. If they have marked you down simply because they disagree with your answer (rather than because you failed to answer the question), then they're seriously in the wrong.
I had that happen on my English exam last year, I wrote a whole page and a half with a valid answer but got 0 out of the 4 marks.
I can't really comment any further without seeing both the question and your response.
As far as the Canadian curriculum, what interludes describes is the impression I get of how English is supposed to taught and marked here. However, it often doesn't turn out that way. In grade 9, I had a teacher who was more concerned with grammar, spelling, and sentence structure. I had a lot of trouble with her class, not because of how she marked, but because I didn't do much work. I still managed a 79, but that was far lower than my other grades.
Like I explained, there is the technical and interpretive side of English. Your year nine teacher appears to have emphasised the technical aspects. Don't get me wrong, they're just as important as the interpretive stuff. However, I believe that students should be literate enough by year nine that the technical aspects of the subject are of secondary importance.
In grade 10, I had a great English teacher. She marked almost exactly the way interludes described above. As long as you could support your opinions with facts, or lines from the text (Julius Caesar), you would do fine. She also graded spelling and grammar, but it made up less of the overall mark than the actual content of your writing. A combination of her teaching style, her personality (I got along very well with her), and me actually working hard in the class, meant I finished with a 96 that year.
That's pretty much the way English should be taught. And it's the way I try and teach it.
Last year, I had a teacher who was in her first year teaching. She did all these odd new agey teaching methods, and basically turned English into drama class. I lost a lot of marks on my culminating assignment (a presentation to the class), because I didn't sing or dramatically read the song (we had to analyze lyrics). I finished with an 85, but it was frustrating, because I had high 90's on all the written assignments and the assignments that were actually English assignments, but lost marks for all the Drama class that she seemed to want to put in there.
The "new agey" stuff works, provided it is done properly. Teachers use a framework called Bloom's Taxonomy that divides tasks into six different categories depending on the skills required to successfully complete the task. They start with lower-order skills like knowledge and comprehension, before getting increasingly sophisticated, moving through application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Analysing lyrics would fall into the fourth order of the taxonomy, which is fairly sophisticated, but not the most challenging; it's described as "the ability to break down material into its component parts so that is organisational structure may be understood. This may mean the recongition of the relationships between or recognition of organisational principles involved". You can do that without singing or dramatically reading the text, unless the assignment specifically states that you must as a part of the rubric or the marking criteria.
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