In last year’s November resit paper, fewer than half of the students entered achieved
4/4 in AQA English Language Paper 2 question 1.
It's supposed to be a simple question, but there are some hidden depths to it, and in this video, I'll teach you how to get 4 out of 4 in this potentially difficult question.
In this video we’re looking at AQA English Language Paper 2 question 1, which is a four
mark question assessing the first bullet point of
Ao1: to identify and interpret explicit and implicit information and ideas.
Question 1 presents you with eight statements, asking you to identify four which are true.
Let’s look at a typical question, taken from Mr Bruff’s guide to GCSE English Language,
available in paperback on Amazon or eBook at mrbruff.com
Read source A from lines 1 to 25. Choose four statements which are true.
Shade the circles in the boxes of the statements which are true.
So the first simple tip is to draw a box around the part of the text you’re being asked
to take your answers from: in this case lines 1-25. Just make sure you do that carefully,
and don’t strike through any actual lines of text in the source, because you’re going
to need to look back at this part of the text when you’re working on other questions and
you don’t want to find that you can’t read some of the words.
You might think this question is similar to paper 1 question 1, but it is actually a bit
harder, as it MAY require you to infer and read between the lines. Let me show you what
I mean by that: Some of the true statements will be easy to
find, like statement B: ‘Andrew Bruff makes online video tutorials’. That’s easily
identified as true from a reading of the line in the source ‘He creates video tutorials
for English language and literature, and uploads them onto youtube.com/mrbruff’.
But the correct statements are not always as easy as that to find.
Look at statement H: Liam Murphy makes a joke to excuse his poor exam results.
Now there is nowhere in the text that explicitly says ‘Liam Murphy makes a joke to excuse
his poor exam results’ What you have to do is read the line ‘I
won’t tell you my exam results but, if I’d gone to an all-boys’ school, I might have
been a brain surgeon’, and actually infer from that that a) this is a joke, and b) the
joke is excusing his poor exam results. Now that is true, but the point I’m making is
that you have to read between the lines to work it out.
And there are other challenges too: In the November 2018 resit paper, many students
chose an incorrect statement which was worded very similarly to a statement from the text.
So the original text said something like ‘Speak to most students who revise online, and you’ll
discover that Youtube is their number one website of choice for learning’ and one
of the statements in the question was ‘Most students revise online’. And you can see
that the wording of the statement is very similar to what it says in the text, but that’s
not actually what the source is saying. The statement is incorrect. The source doesn’t
say that most students revise online, it makes a statement about what most students who revise
online do when they are there. And what happened in the November 2018 exam, and what you need
to make sure you avoid yourself, is many students selected that statement as correct, and then
just looked for three more correct statements. The truth was that that statement was not
correct, and there were therefore four more correct statements to find.
Now the exam board isn’t trying to catch you out - a careful and close reading of the
text is what A01 is all about, but this is a good reminder to read the text very carefully.
And you have time to do so: The entire exam paper, just like with paper
1, is worth 80 marks, and the exam is a 1hr 45 minute exam. Now if you allow 15 minutes
for reading the sources, you’re left with 90 minutes to achieve a possible maximum of
80 marks, which means you should spend around 1 minute per mark available on each question.
So with question 1, you should spend around five minutes on it. That’s more than enough
time to read the eight statements, re-read the section of the text in question, and carefully
choose your answers. Once you’ve found a correct statement, you
need to shade the circle in the box next to it.
And here’s a very useful final tip: The statements are always presented in the same
chronological order as the text, so it should be easy to check in a methodical and consistent
way that you’ve identified the correct answers. If you found this video useful, please do
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