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 1,
and see what tips it gives us to do well in this paper in the future.
Starting off with question 1, and this always seems to be one students struggle with.
It’s supposed to be the exam board’s easy opener, but perhaps students rush it because
they think it’s easier than it is, or maybe those nerves at the start of the exam cause students to
make easy mistakes. Either way, there are a couple of key points to learn from November. As you know,
this question asks you to list four things on a certain topic from a certain part of the source.
The first point is to do with close and careful reading. 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 question was ‘list four things about Pam’,
and the text read. ‘Pam looked at the moonlit shopping centre.’ And the way the text was
presented, there was a line break after the word moonlit, just as you see it here on-screen. Well,
a number of students - enough to make it into the exam report - wrote ‘Pam looked at the moonlit’.
Now what’s going on here? Perhaps some students thought this word was ‘moonlight’.
Some did actually write ‘Pam looked at the moonlight’, but again that wouldn’t get a mark.
Pam didn’t look at the moonlight - she looked at the moonlit shopping centre.
You can directly quote from the text, but the quote must make sense and answer the question.
‘Pam looked at the moonlit’ doesn’t do that. This isn’t a complete sentence - it’s an
incomplete phrase. It needs the rest of the sentence to make sense.
It’s possible that some students, because this word moonlit was at the end of the line,
didn’t read the full sentence which continued on the next line.
Another error in question 1 was students selecting information from outside the lines specified in
the question, so I think putting these two points together it’s clear that it’s quite
easy to rush this question, or not give it due focus and attention, and lose some relatively easy
marks. Now the exam lasts for 1 hr 45 minutes, and there are a maximum of 80 marks available.
If we allow 15 minutes to read the source, that gives us just over 1 minute per mark available,
so you can afford to spend 5 minutes on question 1, and I think that’s plenty of time
to carefully choose your 4 points - there’s no need to rush and make simple mistakes.
In question 2 there was a word of caution about analysing lengthy quotes. Using long
and unfocused quotations can lead students to write about content rather than language. The
report said that students COULD be advised to use short, precise quotations. Let’s look at a quick
made up example. Let’s imagine you’re going to analyse the religious imagery in this quotation:
‘The angelic clouds drifted across the sky whilst Jacob squinted up with his hand to his brow,
desperately trying to spot the kite he had let go of only seconds before.’
OK so if you’re writing about religious imagery, you don’t need to quote the whole sentence. You
could just write about how the writer uses religious imagery, describing the clouds
as quote ‘angelic’. In this case your quotation would be one single word – you’re writing about
the religious imagery and in this sentence there is only one single word you’re going to analyse
in that way. The rest of the sentence has nothing to do with religious imagery, so there’s no need
to quote it in this part of your answer. It will help you, as the exam report put it, to ‘direct
your analysis to the word or phrase that drew your attention and shaped your understanding.’
For question 4 there was a common mistake we’ve seen before: confusing characters.
Let’s say the question is all about if Pam is presented as confused in the lines stated.
Well, many students chose quotations which were describing characters other than
Pam. This is a simple mistake, but make sure you are writing about the correct character.
It’s all down to close reading, and by the time you get to question 4 you should
be quite familiar with the text, so it’s a mistake that should be fairly easy to avoid.
For question 5 there was some useful advice about the picture prompt - a
reminder that you don’t have to write solely about the details in the picture,
but can use it as a starting point to develop your own creative ideas.
And finally in question 5, it was noted that there were examples of ‘uncontrolled sentence
and paragraph lengths’. Sometimes we can get so carried away with our story or descriptive piece
that we forget there are 16 marks available for technical accuracy. Not only should your
sentences and paragraphs be grammatically correct, you can also vary sentence and paragraph length
for effect. I’ll link a video at the end where we see a great example of just that.
I hope you found this video useful - if you’d like another video to cover paper 2
then please do give this one a thumbs up, and subscribe to the channel.