In AQA English Language Paper 1 question 4, you’ll be directed to a specific part of
the text, and given an opinion on it, perhaps from a student or a reader. You’ll then
be asked to what extent you agree with that opinion.
The assessment objective is A04, to evaluate texts critically and support this with appropriate
textual references. Let’s look at a typical question:
Focus this part of your answer on the second part of the source, from line 18 to the end.
A reader said, ‘When Brightly is in the church, he enjoys his time there, and it has
a positive effect on him, even though his life is hard.’
To what extent do you agree? In your response, you could:
Consider your own impressions of Brightly Evaluate how the writer has created these
impressions Support your response with references to the
text. [20 marks] So the first thing to say here is that you
can agree, disagree or have a balanced view: all three approaches are valid, so there is
quite an element of free choice in the question. Now as a 20 mark question, you should spend
around 25 minutes on question 4. That means you’ve got enough time to re-read the section
of the text in question and make your mind up whether you will agree, disagree or have
a balanced view. The key skill in question 4 is evaluation.
You’re evaluating essentially two things: the ideas in the source in relation to the
statement in the question, and number two the methods used by the writer to convey these
ideas. A continual sticking point for many students
has been with the evaluation of methods, so let’s look at that in more detail, focusing
on that second bullet point: to ‘evaluate how the writer has created these impressions’.
The wording here can vary slightly. Sometimes it’s been ‘evaluate how the writer conveys’
something, or ‘evaluate how the writer creates a sense’ of something, but the point is
essentially the same thing: to evaluate the methods the writer has been using.
Now there has been some confusion with this question at times: given that it’s not assessing
a02: use of language and structure, the question is ‘well, which methods can I actually write
about?’. Well the good news is I’ve looked through
the past mark schemes and you can write about pretty much anything:
Language structure
tone Linguistic choices
Irony Themes / message / moral
symbolism Imagery
Sentence length Verb tense
Narrative voice Form
Contrast Colour imagery
Religious imagery Sensory description
And that’s just the things that have come up in the papers we’ve had so far.
In other words, you can write about any method the writer has used, if you feel that method
has created the impression you’re writing about.
Now, all I would do, and it’s something you can do as well because this paper’s
available free of charge to download at mrbruff.com Is I would re-read the source from line 18
onwards (obviously I’ve already read the whole thing once at the beginning of the exam
so I’m familiar with the story, and I might have some ideas about the question already)
And I would underline, or circle or star anything that seemed to be important in helping me
to make a decision about whether, when Brightly was in the church he enjoyed his time there
and it had a positive affect on him. And I might look at this sentence: ‘ A hymn
was sung about Jerusalem the golden, where happy souls were indulging in over-eating
themselves in a sort of glorified dairy filled with milk and honey
And I might pick out some of the language choices there that seem to suggest that positivity
- the religious language of ‘Jerusalem, souls, glorified’ and perhaps the positive
imagery from ‘golden’ and ‘happy’. And those are of course language examples,
and it’s not just that you just look at language, but that’s the sort of approach
I would take. Let’s have a look at a sample paragraph
which explores the methods of imagery, contrast and irony.
I agree with the reader that Brightly enjoys his time in the church, and it does have a
positive effect on him. Even once he has left the church, he is still thinking about his
time there, and the song he heard for ‘some days’. In fact, it had such a positive effect
upon him, he even visits a ‘public library’ to look up Jerusalem on a ‘map of the world’.
However, what it is that he enjoys is the song about milk and honey, and the irony is
that although the church gave him hope, it did nothing to satisfy his hunger, and he
‘left the warm church without any of the promised milk and honey’. This imagery of
the ‘warm’ church contrasts with the description of ‘barren village’ and ‘piled rocks’
where Brightly spends the rest of his time. This contrast illuminates how little Brightly
has, and how the joy he takes from the song, is only ever fleeting, because it describes
a place that is out of Brightly’s reach. Therefore, the positive effect it has on him
is merely superficial, and has no real tangible benefit to Brightly’s life.
As you can see in this paragraph, the two evaluative skills are there: there’s the
evaluation of the source in relation to the statement, where the answer suggests that
Brightly is indeed positive, but it’s superficial and fleeting. And then there’s the evaluation
of the methods the writer uses - the methods of imagery, contrast and irony.