English
The benefit to this table is that it offers a structure not only to our writing, but our thinking too, restricting the amount of evidence we can use, prompting us to select carefully. By displaying all the information in one glanceable table it also helps students to better make connections and to spot patterns of difference or similarity. The 10 seconds it takes to draw the table and the extra couple of minutes to extract the relevant information is, to my mind, well worth it for the added concision and quality of inference this support helps to produce. However, if students feel drawing and compiling the table will take too long in a question that is admittedly already tight on time, they can of course circle the relevant evidence directly onto the Source and write their response from that. I still very much recommend rehearsing and modelling this table, though, because even if students decide not to actually draw it in the exam, I’ve still found it significantly helps with how to think about and better understand
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what this question is expecting from us. With enough practice, whether or not they physically draw the table, its shape will remain imprinted on students as a way to structure their response as they write.
Question 3
I’ve found that students tend to be on pretty firm ground for this question, given it is effectively the same as Paper 1, Question 2 and indeed similar in skill to more or less any language analysis they would do across their English GCSE. As such, I approach this question much as I do with Paper 1: students select 3 or 4 images from the relevant extract that strike them as especially rich. These are images they should be able to say multiple things about, and, if rehearsed often enough, it tends to be reasonably easy to identify those images in the passage that are suitably fertile. Once they have highlighted or underlined three or four images, they can start to write the response itself. I tend to suggest students begin
with a ‘big picture’ idea that they express in the first one or two sentences of their response: ‘When considering how the writer uses language to describe the landscape it is immediately obvious it is hostile and dangerous’. This helps to co-ordinate the rest of the analysis, ensuring the students begin their response with an overall argument about how the writer is using language to achieve a specific effect. Students can then select the first image to discuss, making sure it elucidates or substantiates they big picture idea they have started with, which it should since the opening idea comes out of the three or four images they have already chosen. I always recommend students begin with whatever image they consider to be most analytically interesting, the image about which they could say the most. This is because English Language as an examination very much succumbs to the law of diminishing returns: most of the marks students receive will come from the opening of their response and as their response continues they will find it harder and harder to squeeze further
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