English exam preparation

For the english exam you need to make sure you understand what each question is asking from you. There are 6 questions on the language paper. Question 5  will ask you to either inform, explain or describe. This question is worth 16 marks so you should spend approximately 25 minutes to complete this question.

Question 6 is worth 24 marks so you should be spending approximately 35 minutes completeing this question. This question will be asking you to persuade or argue. You need to have good techniques for this question in order to meet the criteria of the question. This is the question that is worth the most marks so if you feel you are not going to have much time at the end, when you get onto section B, start with question 6.  

Section A has 4 questions. Three of these are worth 8 marks which means that you should be spending about 12 minutes on this in order to complete.

Section B has 2 questions. These are worth 16 marks and 24 marks. These are the two that you need to be spending the most time on and make sure you are going into enough depth for these last two.

Most of these questions test your understanding of sources that you are given in your exam.

Question 4 asks you to compare texts so you will be given a source to analyse and then you will be given a choice of two other texts to choose from and you have to compare these two.

It is important that when you do your literature exam, you know the texts e.g. Of mice and Men and an inspector calls. You must also know the poems when you go into the exam so that you are not clueless in the exam. You should have already studied the texts in class anyway and you should have already seen the poems and analysed them in class. If not, you should speak to your teacher.

You will go into your exam knowing the poems but you will also have an unseen poetry question. This will be a poem that neither you or your teacher will see so you will not be able to be helped with this question - you will just need to try and do a few questions so you get the feel of how these questions will go. You also need to ensure that you are confident with answering these questions as if you go into the exam not knowing what you are doing this can knock your marks quite badly.

English - exam preparation

English literature - exam preparation