A-Level English Literature Week 3 Exam Preparation Tips

How to use context!

Hello everyone!

Welcome back to another of my the Connect English Literature A-Level blogs! Exam season suddenly seems quite close now, but no need to worry: today’s post will hopefully prove useful as we keep cracking on our revision.

Last week I focused on Assessment Objective 1, the informed personal response, and today I’ll be talking all about a different Assessment Objective. No prizes for guessing, given the title of the post! Context (also known as Assessment Objective 3 if your exam board is AQA) makes up for roughly 20% of your mark. You’ll notice that it is less heavily weighted than AO1: it makes up a smaller proportion of your grade than the other assessment objectives, but can still make a difference to your result if you learn how to use it well.

I always found context to be quite boring and felt like it detracted from the main point of my essays: why am I talking about history when I want to be discussing this text? The reality is, context is very important when considering a writer’s intentions and the contemporary reception of a text. After all, authors tend to draw inspiration from their own experiences when writing (those of you that enjoy creative writing will know this), so it can be really useful to have at least a basic understanding of their lives and the political and social landscape of the time.

Where do I look for context?

As I’ve advised in my previous blog posts, the best place to start looking for any information is in your lesson notes. Your teachers will, I’m sure, have drawn your attention to some of the key context points that will be relevant to the texts you’re studying. The internet is also a really good resource. Start by having a look on the exam board website and go through the mark schemes: what kind of contextual points do they expect you to write about? You can also have a look on google, especially if you just want to get a bit more information on the facts you already have. Luckily all of the texts that you will be studying are canonical, meaning that they are popular, have been extensively studied and have become embedded into our culture. This means that it should be quite easy for you to find any information you might need without having to dig too deep on the internet.

Different types of context

There are three main types of context to make sure you have a good understanding of before you go into the exam:

· Social/political context

· Personal context

· Literary context

They are all equally as important as each other. Social or political context is all about what society looked like at the time in which the text was written and published. Some main points to consider here would be: what government was in power? Were there any major events at the time such as wars or revolutions? What was the life of an average person at this time like? What was the social standing of marginalised groups such as women or people of colour? All of these questions can help us understand why the writer may have portrayed certain themes and events in the ways that they did.

Personal context, as I’ve already touched on, is about the writer’s personal life and experiences. This should be relatively easy to find: their Wikipedia page should give you a good indication of any notable things they experienced. Think about their financial background, their upbringing, anything they may have experienced that seem related to the text. More often than not, you will find details in the text that have been inspired by the writer’s own life.

Literary context is probably the hardest of the three, but don’t be daunted. It is all about what English literature looked like at the time: genre, literary movements and the writer’s literary influences all come into this. For example, an essay on Jekyll and Hyde should touch on the ways in which Robert Louis Stevenson adheres to and deviates from the gothic genre, and what kind of effect this has.

How to write about context

Finally, then, let me give you my tips on how to fit context in to your essays. I always found it difficult to write about context in a way that didn’t feel stilted, but I promise it’s possible! Firstly, you don’t need to talk too much about it. As I said, it only counts for about 20% of your mark so even in the questions that do assess context, the exam board doesn’t want you to be writing pages and pages about it so that your response turns into a history essay. Go for quality, not quantity.

Context should be used to aid your response, not detract from it. Only write about context where it is truly relevant to your answer, don’t include it for no reason. Shoehorning in random ‘fun facts’ about the name of the author’s pet pony probably isn’t going to help your essay. A short sentence at the end of a paragraph about how the point you’ve just made links to context is normally a good way to go. Just make sure it’s always at the back of your mind when you’re writing. These texts don’t exist in isolation, they have been shaped by all sorts of influences so it’s important you don’t think about them as existing in a vacuum!

Have any questions about how to prepare for your A-Level exams? Having problems with any hard to understand content or tricky past exam questions? Then ask Klara. Klara will be hosting a series of Q&A webinars in the 2 weeks before final exams. Post your questions here, and Klara will answer them in these sessions.