Ask a room of GCSE students what they find hardest about the language analysis question and you hear the same worries. How much am I meant to write? Which part of the text do I use? Am I analysing language, or structure, or both? Hardly anyone asks these out loud, so many students sit the exam half guessing at the basics and hoping their answer lands in roughly the right place.
Guessing at the basics is expensive. An answer that is far too short rarely has room to earn marks at the top of the scale, while an answer that is far too long burns minutes you need for the 20 mark and 40 mark questions later in the paper. Writing about the wrong lines, or about the wrong skill, can leave you with a page of effort that earns almost nothing. None of these problems has anything to do with how clever you are. They come from not having the ground rules clear before the clock starts.
This short lesson, a little over three minutes, is designed to put those ground rules in your head quickly. Mrs Wear takes the question in five pieces, so you can see what the task really is, what it is worth, how long it deserves, where in the text you are allowed to work and what a sensible amount of writing looks like. It is a quick overview rather than a deep dive into analysis itself, and it points you to fuller lessons when you want more detail.
She speaks from her time as an AQA examiner, so you hear what an answer looks like from the marker's side of the desk. That perspective is what makes a short video so useful: you come away with a plan for the shape of your answer, not just a list of rules. It works as a first look at the question or a last check before a mock.
Why this lesson is worth your time
- It clears up the questions students are often too shy to ask, in a few minutes.
- It helps you set a sensible time budget so Question 2 does not eat into later questions.
- It shows you how much space an answer should fill, which removes a lot of exam-day worry.
- It leads naturally into the longer analysis lessons in this course.
Who should watch
Anyone starting to revise AQA Paper 1 who wants a clear overview of Question 2 before going deeper, and anyone who has already tried the question and is not sure why the marks come out lower than expected. It suits students aiming for any grade. Teachers and parents can use it as a quick, plain summary of what the question asks and how long it should take.
Make the most of it
Watch once, then note down the five points from memory without looking back. Next, attempt a Question 2 on a past paper using the time and space you have just learned, and compare your response with the one in the Model Answers Paper 1 2017 AQA English Language GCSE. The Language Technique Bank will help when you want more to say about the writer's choices. Then take the quiz underneath.
This lesson is also on my YouTube channel. Watching it here means you can register to keep track of the lessons you have finished, bookmark lessons for later and test yourself with the quiz underneath.
So, the questions then for this question is pretty much always the same. How does the writer use language to describe X? And what X is will vary depending on the question. And so, basically, this question is testing your language analysis skills. Pretty straightforward. So, this question is worth eight marks, and because of that, you should be spending 10 to 15 minutes answering it depending on the exam timing strategy that you've gone for. This question has a specific line range that it wants you to talk about. You can only analyse things from within that specific line range. Anything you talk about outside of that line range, you do not get marks for. So, stay in the line range. The good news is that they copy over that exact line range into a box just above the question for you.
So, you don't need to look back at the whole text insert, you just need to look at the chunk above the question and only talk about that chunk. Well, I do a whole video on what is analysis, so you should go check that out for a lot more detail. But, for the purposes of right now, language analysis basically means you're looking at the words and language techniques that the writer has used, and you're breaking down how those techniques create meaning. Again, this is all in reference to a particular question. So, if, for example, the question was how does the writer use language to describe the castle, you're looking at how the writer has used words and language techniques to create meaning about that castle.
Now, when I was an AQA examiner, I could often tell how strong an answer was going to be just on roughly how much the student had written. When they'd written too little, I immediately knew it wasn't going to do that well. When they'd written way too much, it could still potentially do well, but I knew they would have wasted a lot of exam time. The perfect amount for this question is about two paragraphs. Now, let me explain what I mean by two paragraphs. Firstly, that could mean that you have one idea to answer the question, so one idea on how the castle is presented, but you explore that in a lot of detail over two paragraphs. You might know this from your school as like PEEL or PEAZL. I teach it as T, but basically, you've gone into a lot of detail analysing a lot of different techniques.
In terms of an actual AQA exam paper, what that looks like roughly is two pages. The page that the question comes on, which really is more like half a page, and then one page after that. You tend to be able to fill that amount. Of course, how much you fill the second page is going to come down to handwriting, too. I've seen students with minuscule handwriting, where they, you know, fill a page and a bit because their handwriting is so small. Whereas in the members of the giant handwriting club, it becomes out as maybe a little over two pages, even though they're both writing, you know, the exact same amount of content. So, keep in mind handwriting here and your handwriting and how that will make a difference, but roughly speaking, on the pages the AQA print and the line spaces they've got, is about two pages is your kind of maximum amount you want to be writing.
The second way of looking at it is if you've got two ideas and each paragraph is a different idea. Again, still PEEL, PEAZL, T, but you've got two ideas on how the castle is presented. So, you look at multiple techniques going to one idea, multiple techniques going to the second idea. Again, having it last for a maximum of two of those AQA printed pages.
