Hello everybody and welcome to today’s video: final tips for the summer 2022
AQA English Literature Paper 2 exam. Now obviously this exam series is unlike any other,
because this year’s paper 2 is based on Shakespeare and unseen poetry.
So the first thing I want to talk about is section A:
the Shakespeare question. As you know, you’re given an extract from the play
and asked how something is presented in the extract and the play as a whole.
One thing I’d suggest is that you think about where the extract comes from in the wider text,
and consider how this might form part of your answer. AQA don’t just choose these extracts
randomly - a lot of thought goes into them, so consider the placement of the extract within
the larger context of the play. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to just think about
what happens shortly before and after the moment you’re writing about. Let’s look at an example:
Imagine a Romeo and Juliet question about Act 1 Scene 5, when the two characters first meet,
with a question about the presentation of love in the play. Well of course there’s
the religious imagery, and the fact that the dialogue between the two actually forms a sonnet
when you put the lines together. Both of these points would lead us to think about love as pure
and perfect. But when we stop and consider what has happened shortly before this scene,
it will add to our answer. Only a few scenes before we’ve been hearing how Romeo is heartbroken
because of his unrequited love for Rosaline, and how he’s actually going to the party in the
first place because he hopes to see Rosaline there. The sudden change in a few scenes,
from obsession with one woman to obsession with another, will help add a whole new
layer of meaning to our answer. So think about where the extract comes from in the wider text,
and how that might be relevant to the question you’re being asked.
Now let’s move on to unseen poetry, and the main point to make here is about timing. The
first question in this section, 7.1, asking you to analyse the first unseen poem, is worth 28 marks,
and the following question, 7.2 asking you to compare this unseen poem to another unseen poem,
is worth only 8 marks. Now what we’ve seen in past exam reports is that many students
spend more time on this final question than the first, even though it’s only worth 8 marks. And
of course in some ways you can see why that mistake is made: comparing two poems would seem
to require more time and effort than analysing just one, but it’s all about the marks available.
This paper is worth a total of 70 marks, and you’ve got 1 hr 45 minutes to spend on it.
So that means you should spend around 1.5 minutes per mark available. I We need to remember that the
first two questions have 4 marks available for spelling, grammar and punctuation. So for those
two you’re going to want to build in a few minutes to check those technical skills at the end,
and to think about them as you’re writing too. But roughly speaking we can say that you should spend
about 50 minutes on the Shakespeare question, 40 minutes on the first unseen poetry question,
and 15 minutes on the second unseen poetry question. The big risk here is that many
students will spend way too long on the last question, but you have to remember:
it’s only worth a maximum of eight marks, so don’t spend any more than around 15 minutes on it.
Unseen poetry is a challenge, and perhaps even more-so this year,
when something like 50% of you haven’t even studied the anthology poems.
But past exam reports on unseen poetry have made some really useful points.
You must give yourself time to read and think about the poems.
The June 2017 exam report pointed out that many students wrote about the first poem better in
the second question than in the first, and this was felt to be because students were
finally starting to understand the first poem by the time they got to the final question.
The advice was to ‘pause and reflect’ before answering the first unseen poetry question.
And this goes against everything you want to do when you’re in the high pressured
time controlled environment of an exam, but it IS important. You’ve never seen these poems
before – you need to give yourself a little bit of time to read, pause, and think about them.
Well I hope you found this video useful. Remember, I have playlists on every Shakespeare play,
along with videos on unseen poetry, so do check those out and subscribe to the channel.