Hello everyone and welcome to today’s video, where we take a look at the exam report for
the November 2020 AQA English Language GCSE paper 2, and see what tips it gives us to
do well in this paper in the future.
Starting off with question 1, and it’s shocking to see that only 10% of students achieved
the full four out of four in this question. Now if you’ve watched my animated video
on question 1, you’ll know it’s not quite as easy as paper 1 question 1, but what’s
surprising is that the exam board have said there was no particular pattern to the types
of errors made by students. So it’s not like there was one really difficult statement
everyone messed up on. A lot of it seemed to come down to rushing the question and not
reading closely. Now I’m not going to give you the exact example because you might end
up sitting this paper for your mock, but imagine the text read ‘There were nearly 500 people
at the event.’ and the statement was ‘There were more than 500 people at the event’.
Lots of people chose this as being true, but it’s not. We need to see that, whilst the
two sentences are about 500 people, one says there were ‘more than’ and one says there
were less than. Now I don’t think this was about students not understanding what the
words meant - I think students rushed the question, seeing a few of the words as the
same and not reading closely. So for question 1, don’t rush. Read sentence by sentence
and check your answers at the end. As with paper 1, you can spend 5 minutes on this question,
so there’s no need to rush.
In question 2, there was a common error of writing about the wrong people. Let’s imagine
source A was about the writer, Jane, and her boss, Joanne, and source B was about the writer,
Mo, and his boss, Cal, and the question asked for a summary of differences between the two
bosses, Joanne and Cal. Well, many students failed to distinguish between the writers
and their bosses, and so ended up writing points about the wrong people - about Jane
and Mo.
One simple tip to help here was pointed out in the exam report, and that was to always
read the Introduction in the text box before reading the extract, as there is frequently
contextualising information to help orientate students in advance of reading an unseen text.
That little introductory text box will help you work out who is who as you’re reading.
Another piece of advice is to practise reading non fiction texts which contain multiple people
in them, and see if you can work out which points are about which person.
Question 3 is the language analysis question, and the main issue was students finding and
naming language features but not commenting on WHY the writer had used them.
Now the assessment objective for question 2 refers to the use of ‘relevant subject
terminology’, and this has led some students to approach the question as if it is all about
feature spotting - looking out for similes, metaphors, personification, that kind of thing.
The key to this question is to be specific
about the effects the writer’s language choices have, or explain a reason behind the
writer’s choices. Your comments have to be specific to the text - they need to be
precise and contextualised to the extract.
One way to do this, is to read the extract and ask yourself ‘what is the specific effect
that the writer is trying to achieve?’ It could be to reveal a key characteristic of
a person, such as dominance, or confidence, excitability or enthusiasm. Or it could be
to present a feeling about an experience, such as intimidation or vulnerability. It
really could be anything, so you need to re-read the lines carefully and not just look for
language to write about, but to think carefully about the effect.
In question 4 it seems a number of students were able to identify the perspectives of
the writers, but failed to comment on the writers’ methods. This is bullet point two,
and it’s so important. There are really two distinct parts to this
question: 1) students have to demonstrate an understanding of ideas and attitudes in
both texts, comparing those ideas and attitudes, and number 2) students have to compare the
methods used to show these attitudes.
One simple way to look at this question is like this: Step 1: What ARE the attitudes?
Step 2:What methods are used to present those attitudes?
Step 3: Analyse WHY those methods are used.
And finally on to question 5, and the main point is about a line of argument. Some students
struggled to combine the points they made into a single identifiable argument. This
is a 40 mark question, so you can spend five minutes planning your answer, and look to
present a coherent line of argument throughout, rather than just a jumble of isolated points.
I hope you found this video useful - if you did please do give this one a thumbs up, and
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