My A Level English Exam.

So I had my A Level English Language and Literature exam this morning (6th June 2014).

It was not bad.



My exam was for the WJEC exam board. For this exam there are 2 sections. Each section is worth the same amount of marks (40). The exam is two-and-a-half hours long, so really you're looking at an hour-and-fifteen-minutes per question, but only an hour actually writing it. The fifteen minutes for each is for analysing, annotating, planning and proof-reading.

The first section (section A) has only one question. This question is the same on every English paper, with only one word changed each time. It will be something along the lines of,

'Using Integrated Literary and Linguistic techniques, compare and contrast the presentation of woodland in texts A, B and C.'

That was the question I got this morning. The only thing that will ever change in this question over the years is the word woodland. You will be given three different unseen texts. I got Wind Through The Beechwood (a Petrarchan Sonnet) by Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), the opening chapter of Rebecca by Daphne Du  Maurier and a page from The Woodland Trust website.

The idea is to analyse each, and then compare and contrast them against each other before drawing a relevant conclusion. For this particular question, you muct analyse their presentation of woodland (nature, forests etc.), it is no good you writing a whole essay about how the texts talk about strong women for example, because you won't get any marks for that. They will have chosen the three texts because they are all about woodlands.

There are a lot of things to look for when you analyse a text, so here's a way to cover all bases: OFSWLPT. You can make a rhyme or something out of it if it helps you to remember, but I just remember it as it is.



O-overview
F-form & structure
S-sentence level/grammar
W-word level/lexis
L-literary/rhetorical techniques
P-phonology
T-typology

Overview-basically the meaning of all 3 texts including: content, context, audience, attitudes, purpose, text type, tone and themes.



Form & Structure-what it is and how it is laid out: genre, narrative stance, narrative voice, dialogue, verse type, order of content, development of ideas, chronology, chapters, stanza structure, rhyme scheme, meter, turn-taking, pausing, non-fluency and overlapping.

Sentence Level/Grammar-basically sentence type: sentence types, syntax, mood, tense, standard/non-standard, dialect and ellipsis.

Word Level/Lexis-the effect of individual words: modifiers, word classes, lexical sets, connotations and dialect/idioms/archaisms/standard/non-standard features.

Literary/Rhetorical Techniques-things you learnt at GCSE: metaphor, simile, imagery, symbolism, personification, anthropomorphism, pathetic fallacy, listing, antithesis, oxymoron, juxtaposition, tripling, repetition and hyperbole.

Phonology-sound: plosives, fricatives, sibilants, alliteration, assonance, rhyme, received pronunciation, regional accents, rhythm, sound effect and onomatopoeia.

Typology-what it looks like on the page: font, punctuation, pictoral elements and use of colour.

Section B of the paper is about the book you have been reading in class. There will be 8 questions, you pick 1 of them to answer. They'll each generally be something like

'Explore the author's presentation of men'
'How does the presentation of childhood differ for each text'
'Compare the presentation of beliefs and/or values' - the one I chose to answer



You MUST use other texts in your answer, not just the one you have been studying in class. When I say texts I mean literally anything, as long as it's relevant. Poems, novels and plays are all useful. Basically anything you've ever read, ever. So, my main novel was, 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte. In class this year we also looked at similar books such as, 'A Streetcar Named Desire' by Tennessee Williams, 'Hamlet' by Shakespeare and 'Carrie' by Stephen King. However, I could also have used the books I studied at AS level as well, had they been relevant to the question. Last year I studied, 'The Time Machine' by H.G Wells and, 'A Time Traveller's Wife' by Audrey Niffenegger.

There are a LOT of different topics that could come up for this question, but they are all about the way that the author has written it to show something. For example, in 'Wuthering Heights', Bronte uses narrators such as Lockwood and Nelly to remove the Victorian audience from the story. This is because the novel explores love, abuse, death, murder, the supernatural and many other topics that Victorians would NOT have approved of. In order for the book to be read, she had to tell the story through a narrator, to soften the blow on reader so as it is not so shocking. Also, Nelly is the voice of Victorian values throughout the novel, so when something happens that they wouldn't approve of, Nelly will recount the story and then add her opinion on the end (The Victorian Opinion). So, if your question was something like, 'Explore the presentation of murder in the texts' you could write that Bronte presents it to the audience through the use of narrators.

Well, I hope this has been helpful to you :) as always, I look forward to hearing from you so leave a comment or email me at loveartinwriting@gmail.com