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Paper 1 Question 3 Explained

AQA Paper 1, Question 3 (8 marks)

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If one question on Paper 1 makes students stare at the page, it is the structure question. The wording sounds like it wants your opinion, the word structure feels slippery, and many students are not sure what separates a structural comment from a language comment. Under exam pressure that confusion turns into a paragraph of general remarks, or a page of language analysis that the question was never going to reward.

Getting this wrong is costly because the question is easy to misread and easy to waste time on. An answer packed with comments on individual words can feel thorough and still earn very little, simply because it addresses a different skill. Knowing precisely what the examiner is looking for, and what they will ignore, is worth more here than any amount of extra vocabulary. It also saves you from the sinking feeling of realising halfway through that your whole answer is aimed in the wrong direction.

This lesson is a short one, a little over three minutes, and it is meant to be a clear first look at Question 3. Mrs Wear picks out five things worth knowing: what the question is truly asking, what it is worth, how long to spend, which skill is being assessed and where you can always find something to say when the text feels thin. It is an overview, so it does not replace the full lesson on the question, but it gives you the map before you walk the ground.

The delivery is brisk and friendly, with the focus firmly on the exam. If you have ever felt that this question was written in a different language, a few minutes here should help the wording make sense, and it leaves you ready to move on to the longer, more detailed lesson with a head start.

Why this lesson is worth your time

  • It explains the confusing wording of the question in plain terms.
  • It helps you stop spending marks and minutes on the wrong skill.
  • It gives you a reliable way in when an extract seems to offer little to write about.
  • It is short enough to watch before every practice attempt.

Who should watch

Students at the start of their Paper 1 revision who want a clear picture of Question 3, and those who have tried it and keep landing on the same disappointing mark. It suits every target grade. Teachers and parents can use it as a quick, jargon-light explanation of what this question is after and why students trip over it.

Make the most of it

Watch once, then try Question 3 on a past paper and ask yourself after each paragraph whether you were commenting on structure or on individual words. Look through the Structure Technique Bank for ideas and their potential effects, and compare your answer with the Model Answers Paper 1 2017 AQA English Language GCSE. 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.

The question for number three will always be the same. They word it as, "How has the writer structured the text to interest you as the reader?" Now, you might be thinking, "Well, I found this text really boring, so it didn't interest me." That isn't what AQA mean. They don't actually genuinely care if you were interested. What they mean by that is, you obviously love books. You obviously found absolutely everything in the text really interesting because obviously the writer made it really interesting. So, basically what AQA is saying to you for this question is, "Hi. Please write down anything about structure that you can see going on in this text. Thanks." This question is worth eight marks, which means you should spend a maximum of 10 minutes answering.

This is assuming that you've spent the first 15 minutes of the exam already kind of just reading the text and thinking about your answers to all four of the questions. If you haven't done that, if you've taken a different approach, then obviously your timings might be a bit different. This question is testing your ability to analyse structure. So, what exactly does that mean? When you're analysing language, you're looking at the words that the writer uses and exploring the meaning created by those words. When you're analysing structure, you're looking at the order that the text is written in and why it's written in that order.

For example, if the text opens with a rhetorical question, you're not going to analyse the language of the rhetorical question. You're going to analyse why the text starts with a rhetorical question. And I've just said that realising like we're dealing with fiction and they're rarely going to use rhetorical questions, but you know. So, for example, if the text begins with a flashback, why? Why start your text at the very beginning by going back to a point earlier in the text. What effect does that have? What does it make your audience think or feel? Cuz this question is a testing your ability to analyse structure, you should not analyse language at any point. Analysing language gets you absolutely no marks.

This is quite a difficult thing on the part of AQA because actually structure and language and the meaning that they create is heavily intertwined. But the key thing you should make sure you're not doing is that you're not zooming in on particular words and talking about their effect, but instead you're looking more at the big picture of why that word is used at that point of the text. That's the key question you need to keep asking yourself when you're trying to analyse structure. Why at that point of the text? No matter what text you're dealing with, there are going to be two structural devices that are always present and you will always be able to write a full answer on if you can't find anything else.

The first is the narrative viewpoint because every text has to have a narrative viewpoint, and the second is the writer's focus and whether they're focusing on character or setting, shifting from macro to micro. If everything I'm saying to you right now means nothing to you and you have no idea what I'm talking about then you need to watch my other videos on this question. Those two, narrative viewpoint, writer's focus, always going to be there. So, if you can't find anything else, just talk about those.

4 quick questions. Check what you remember from the video.

Resources for this lesson

Fiction Technique Bank Fiction Technique Bank Free Language Technique Bank Language Technique Bank Free Model Answers Paper 1 2017 AQA English Language GCSE Model Answers Paper 1 2017 AQA English Language GCSE £2.99 Structure Technique Bank Structure Technique Bank Free
← AQA Paper 1 Question 4: Grade 9 Model Answer & Evaluation