GCSE English Literature Week 2 Exam Preparation Tips

Composing your informed personal response to texts

Hi everyone and welcome back to the second week of this blog! Hopefully you’re all getting on well with your revision, and this post should help give you some direction with your exam preparation.

You might recognise the wording in the title if you’ve been using the exam board website as a tool for your revision. That’s because today’s tips are focused on Assessment Objective 1, which for AQA is all about your critical style, use of textual references and your ‘informed personal response’. Basically, it’s about the way you respond to the question. AO1 constitutes roughly 38% of the marks in English Literature GCSE, so it’s really important you get this down. As well as being one of the most heavily weighted assessment objectives, it is also key to unlocking the other ones. After all, language analysis, context and comparison all contribute to your personal response to a text: you can’t talk about the other Assessment Objectives without relying on AO1 to do so.

What do we mean by an informed personal response?

Your personal response to a text is all about how you interpret the plot, character and themes. This is never going to be exactly the same as anyone else’s, so refining your personal response will ensure that your essay stands out to the examiner as unique in a sea of fairly generic responses. It is not about your teacher’s or your classmate’s ideas, but your own. These can be quite tricky to pin down, especially if you’re not super confident with some of your set texts.

To truly understand and solidify your response to a text, I would encourage you to think about the way you read. We all bring our own personal contexts to any book we read, such as our age, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, life experiences, reading experiences and all sorts of other things. These are the key factors that influence how we connect with a text. When reading The Lord of the Flies, for example, a child might be more likely to empathise with the characters, as they are at a similar stage in life, whereas an adult reader would be less likely to still be in touch with that childlike naivety and anger. A queer reader is more likely to pick up on queer subtext in Shakespeare than a heterosexual reader is.

Reader response theory is one way that many critics approach English Literature. In short, this theory suggests that we as readers give a text meaning based on the way we respond to it. So, although the writer’s intentions are really important and something we are often encouraged to think about at GCSE, do remember that our personal response to a text is equally worthy of attention. You don’t have to have a PhD in English for your ideas to be valid: even at GCSE level, your interpretation of the text is just as important as what the writer’s intentions were, so you can talk about these things equally in your essays.

How to refine your personal response

In order to refine your personal response, you will need to have a good understanding of what happens in the text. Make a list of the key events and characters in your texts and ask yourself the following questions:

· Which characters do I empathise with? Why?

· What does the author seem to be saying about a specific event or character? Are they making a moral judgement? Do I agree with the moral judgement they have made?

· Regardless of what the author may have intended, how does their treatment of this event or character make me feel?

Asking yourself these questions, and therefore developing your personal response, will help you become more familiar with the books you are studying and help build your confidence. Another key factor to consider, and one which often makes for an interesting essay, is time period. At least two of your texts will be written before the 20th-century, which is to say they will be texts that are not considered ‘modern’. This means that you need to think about how they are read now as opposed to how they were read when they were first written, and how this might have changed.

The meanings of texts often change over time: for example, we are going to interpret a Shakespeare play very differently to his contemporary audience because the political and social landscape is completely different now, so the play will relate to us in ways it wouldn’t have to a 16th century audience. Thinking about how these older texts relate to you in your current life is another way of informing your personal response.

This aspect of English is less about revision and more about critically engaging with what you read: constantly asking yourself, ‘how does this relate to me? How does this make me feel?”. This response will help form the basis of your essays, so when you are thinking about which direction to go in an essay, you can always fall back on your personal response. Try to be creative and not just write what your classmates are writing simply because it seems easier: pushing yourself to form your own personal response to a text will help boost your marks and your skills as an English student. Happy writing!

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