Hello everybody!
For today’s video I’ve gone through all of the past AQA English Literature papers
looking for patterns to help you focus your revision for this year’s exams.
We’ve had summer Literature exams on this spec in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2022,
giving us a total of 24 Shakespeare questions, 28 19th Century novel questions,
and 96 modern drama and prose questions to look through. So let’s see what we’ve found.
44 times / 148, the question has been based on one named character. Around half of these have
been focused on how a character is presented in a particular way, such as spiteful, unlikeable,
important, selfish or mysterious. So to prepare for this kind of question,
why not think about the characters in your set texts and map out all the different adjectives
you might use to describe them. Then consider how you might answer an exam question on each
one. For example: Macbeth as ambitious, Macbeth as heroic, Macbeth as hypocritical.
Often the named character questions will ask you how a character presents a certain
theme. Now sometimes in a text there aren’t many different themes – for example with
An Inspector Calls the whole thing is about social responsibility. But in your revision
you might consider how the presentation of the themes differs through different characters:
how social responsibility is presented through Eric, Mrs Birling, Inspector Goole and so on.
27 times a question has focused on more than one character. Now often that’s looking at
how a relationship is presented between two obvious characters such as Romeo and Juliet,
or Beatrice and Benedick: characters whose paths are clearly intertwined in the text. But sometimes
the questions have paired or grouped characters you might not expect. So one idea for revision
is to consider which characters could be paired up in a question, and the challenges that might
pose. If we continue with ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as a text, imagine a question on Juliet and the nurse,
or Romeo and Benvolio. In my videos I don’t want to give away any real past questions,
because you might end up sitting them for a mock, but there was one particular Shakespeare question
which asked about the relationship between the two characters who were the protagonist
and antagonist. It wasn’t a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ question, but using that as an example, imagine
a question asking you to explore how Shakespeare presents the relationship between Romeo and
Tybalt – perhaps not a question you’d at first anticipate. So maybe spend some time thinking
about how different characters could pair up, and what you might write about them if they did.
What I would call a MAJOR theme has been named in the question 38 times. 8 times that’s been linked
to how a specific character presents that theme, but 30 times it’s been completely open: how is
that theme presented in the text. So let’s give an example with ‘A Christmas Carol’. If we consider
one of the major themes to be…generosity. You might like to think about which parts of the text
you’d include in your answer if simply asked how generosity is presented in the text. Sometimes an
open question is difficult, because there are so many thing you could write about, that it can take
quite some time to work out what the best examples are. If the question is more narrowly focused,
e.g. ‘how is Fred used to explore generosity’, that’s often easier to answer because the question
itself focuses in on some specific points. But be prepared for open theme-based questions. If
the question is on fate in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, who and what would you write about? Or ‘power’
in Macbeth, ‘class’ in An Inspector Calls, ‘social responsibility’ in A Christmas Carol, and so on.
So those are the main types of questions we’ve seen so far, but there are others.
9 times we’ve been given a quote from the author, or a character, or just an opinion on the text,
and have then been asked to explain our viewpoint on it. For example (and these are again made up):
‘Priestley creates a shocking ending to the play’. How far do you agree with this statement.
Or
Golding has said about Lord of the Flies, ‘“man produces evil as a bee
produces honey”. How far do you agree that the novel shows this to be true?
It’s not easy to prepare for these kinds of questions, but it is useful to know they
might crop up. There seems to be a mistaken idea that there is always a character question or a
theme question, but that’s not actually true. So don’t be thrown if you get something like this.
And then there have been a handful of questions that I would consider outliers or curve balls.
Questions on the importance of the title, the setting, the ending – things that we
might not expect to see as the entire focus of the question. Or even VERY open questions
like ‘How does the writer present the ways characters react to difficult situations?’
Again, there’s no easy way to revise for these kinds of questions, other than to know your text
inside out, and to be prepared that the questions could ask you anything at all!
Let me know in the comments section which kind of question you prefer,
and which you think is the most difficult to answer.
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