For A Level English Literature Component 03, what genre of text works best for each kind of task?

We don’t specify which genre combinations should be used for each task; this should be entirely up to you and depends how you want to structure the course.  Many teachers feel poetry lends itself particularly well to Task 1, as the close reading can be of a single poem (or 45 line extract of a longer work) which can prove easier to choose.

Those who are co-teaching AS and A Level may want to use the drama text studied for AS component 02 as the focus of Task 1, perhaps in the summer term post AS exams when the text is particularly fresh.  You just need to bear in mind that Task 2 is a comparative cross genre essay and therefore it may be prudent to decide which genres will work best in this context and work backwards to determine the text genre for Task 1.