hello everybody and welcome to today's video an updated guide to AQA English literature paper 1 Section A focusing on an example based on MC Beth because I know that's the play that most of you are studying paper 1 Section A assesses your knowledge of a Shakespeare play and your teacher will select the text you're studying from the following list the total exam length is 1 hour 45 minutes and the paper is marked out of 64 34 marks are available for section A the Shakespeare section including four marks for your spelling punctuation and grammar 30 marks are available for Section B the 19th century novel question and we'll look at that in a later video you should spend around 55 minutes on the Shakespeare question including 5 minutes to check your technical accuracy at the end this is a closed book examination which means you're not allowed to take copies of your texts in with you there will however be an extract provided in the question paper for you to analyze the assessment objective in this section are ao1 read understand and respond to texts students should be able to maintain a critical style and develop an informed personal response and use textual references including quotations to support and illustrate interpretations ao2 analyze the language form and structure used by a writer to create meanings and effects using relevant subject terminology where appropriate AO3 show understanding of the relationships between texts and the contexts in which they were written and ao4 use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity purpose and effect with accurate spelling and punctuation now let's start with a quick guide to what each of these means with examples based on a McBeth question ao1 is all about response to task and text using supporting references it goes without saying that you need to know your play inside out yes you'll be provided with an extract in the exam but the question will ask you to explore how something is presented across the text in including the extract so obviously you'll need to know the text well to answer the question the most important thing about this exam and in fact both literature exams is the idea of response to task I.E answering the question this came up again in the 2023 exam report your number one priority in the literature exams is to answer the questions now that might sound obvious but time and time again in past exams what we've seen is a number of students who know something very clever about a text and want to force that into their answer no matter what the question is don't let that be you priority number one needs to be to answer the question the highest marks rewarded to students who have a conceptualized response a hypothesis a line of argument which is explored throughout your answer rather than an answer made up of random disjointed paragraphs and ideas a conceptualized response has one clear line of argument all the way through let's look at an example with a question based on M Beth and you can find this question along with a full answer in in the second edition of my guide to English literature which is linked in the description read the following extract from act 1 scene 3 of McBeth and then answer the question that follows you can pause the video if you want to read through the extract there starting with the extract explore how far Shakespeare presents the witches as powerful in the extract and the play as a whole the summer 2017 exam report for this exam stated and this is a paraphrase I'll link the original in the description there isn't a fixed format for responding to the questions however high quality answers often started by addressing the main theme of the question using the entire text and then dipped in and out of both the extract and the whole text throughout their answer this demonstrated a robust and assured understanding of the text and its Concepts now I don't know about you but if something often appears in High Mark answers I want to do that so let's think about the question in terms of the whole text however this comes with a warning you must write about the the extract and The Wider text so even though you're thinking about the whole text don't forget to include the extract in your answer so another words how far does Shakespeare present The Witches as powerful in the entire play now in some ways a question on the witches is limited because they only appear a handful of times so with these more minor characters we can actually think about every single appearance they make now firstly then there's the way the play opens with the witches finishing up their meeting on the heath in act one scene one then they meet McBeth and Banquo in act 1 scene 3 giving them both prophecies So within the first three scenes we meet the witches twice but then things change we don't see the witches again until act 3 scene 5 in a kind of bizarre scene that many experts don't even believe Shakespeare wrote and then they make their final appearance in Act 4 scene 1 when McBeth visits them one last time and when we think about the whole text then a bigger picture perhaps starts to emerge a picture where the witches seem powerful at the start of the play and certainly seem powerful to McBeth when he interacts with them but actually this sense of power is undermined by Shakespeare and diminishes as the play progresses to the point where the witches Fade Out way before the end of the text so with all that in mind I'm going to come up with my thesis statement for the answer and I think something like this would work while Shakespeare initially presents the witches as powerful ultimately this impression of power is illusory used by the playright to explore the theme of appearances versus reality and here we have a concept in this case a two-part line of argument and I'm going to perhaps spend the first half of my answer looking at the which is as powerful and the second half looking at how this is just an illusion everything in my answer then becomes part of the theory I'm exploring and whilst we're here what about this as an introduction lots of you ask me do I need to write an introduction and this point has come up in a number of past exam reports including the 2023 One start stting your answer with something like this which makes your conceptualized idea your thesis your line of argument clear is a good idea it makes it very clear right away to the examiner where you're going to go with the answer but and this is important it also helps you as a student because you can keep looking back at it to make sure you're not drifting off the question which as you remember is priority number one answer the question now the next part of A1 is about supporting references exam reports have pointed out time and time again that this can be a quote from the text but it doesn't have to be it could be a reference to something that happens a paraphrase or a direct quotation you don't have the text in the exam so you aren't expected to have memorized everything which is encouraging so for example when I write about how the audience already knew about mcbeth's promotion I don't have to give the exact quotation from Duncan I can just reference the moment and write something like the audience already know about M Beth's promotion as Duncan spoke about it in the previous scene but if I want to make a specific language analysis Point perhaps how McBeth so foul and fair a day I have not seen Echoes the witch is fair is foul and foul is fair from a couple of scenes previously then direct quotations might work better there because they're the Crux of the point now ao2 is an interesting one assessment objectives are set by ofqual and are the same across all GCSE English literature specifications no matter what exam board you're on here in the UK and the actual assessment objective is analyze language form and structure and up until the 2022 exams the AQA Mark scheme explicitly listed an analysis of language and form and structure in the top band but now there's been a helpful tweak to the mark schemes which refer more broadly to analysis of writer's methods so what's happened here well a couple of things firstly it comes back to the point I've already made that your primary objective in these exams is answering the question AQA don't want anyone to feel that they have to include let's say a paragraph on structure or a paragraph on form it's absolutely fine to do that but and here's the big important Point only if it actually adds something useful to your analysis in answering the question and that won't always be the case the expansion of the mark scheme is there to help you understand you don't have to write about any specific method it's all about bringing relevant methods into your answer of course the assessment objective remains ao2 language structure and form so it's never wrong to study these areas is but when we're in an exam we should think first and foremost about answering the question and bringing anything relevant to our answer and the key word is relevant if it's a method the writer has used and it's relevant to your answer then you can write about it if there were ever some things that you weren't Sure Fit neatly into this assessment objective like perhaps setting or characterization you don't need to worry if it's relevant to the question you can write about it so let's look at some of the things to do with ao2 but remember this is not an exhaustive list if there's a method used by Shakespeare and it's relevant to your answer you can include it in your response but with that in mind let's think about the three main parts of ao2 language is all about Shakespeare's use of words phrases and language features for effect now this includes figurative language such as similes metaphors personification onomatopeia that kind of thing but it is wider than that too one way I like to look at language analysis is to ask where has Shakespeare used a word or phrase where another one would have been fine but he seems to have chosen that one for a specific effect structure is about how the text is organized the order things take place in structure analysis is less about what's happening in a text and more about where it's happening and why in the Shakespeare question it's really useful to ask yourself where does the extract come from in the wider text and how is that relevant to the question I'm being asked now there are different ways of approaching this you might want to learn some theories on H tax structure but you don't need to at the very least you can ask yourself what happens before and after the extract and how is that important now for whole text structure I like to teach Freight TXS pyramid which can be applied to both five act plays and novels it runs from left to right starting with the exposition where we're introduced to the main characters and setting then there's the inciting incident the trigger or Catalyst which builds up to the climax the moment of greatest tension in the play and then the winding down to the end and we can apply this for example to Shakespeare's plays here's Freight tags pyramid for McBeth now how can we use this knowledge in the exam well in our question about the presentation of the witches as powerful the extract we have the First Time The Witches meet MC Beth is the inciting incident in the tragedy it's the Catalyst or trigger that makes everything else unfold and this suggests the witches are powerful as they play such a key role in the tragedy so thinking about where the extract comes from in The Wider text is one way to think about structure the 2017 Summer exam report highlighted and again this is a paraphrase the originals Linked In the description that in the Shakespeare section students who consider the positioning of the extract Within the play are inherently addressing the playwright's methods and the same report stated that higher performing students skillfully discussed the location of the extract in the text and then leveraged this to delve into character progression now as I said you don't have to do that through learning structural theories like freay tag you might just want to think about what happens before and after the extract let's look at an example in act 1 scene 3 The Witches tell MC Beth he will be among other things th of cordor moments later Ross arrives and tells McBeth he's been promoted to that very role and this astonishes McBeth now as Dr Emma Smith explains the witches seem creepily omnipotent to McBeth the gap between prophecy and enactment frighteningly slender but to us that is actually a gap between command the king's words in act 1 scene 2 and fulfillment to Smith The Witches seem to interpose in a chain of human actions rather than direct actions themselves now this is such an important point for MC Beth Ross's words are the first he's heard of his promotion to th of cordor so he's Blown Away by The Witch's apparent power however for us the audience we don't feel the same way why because of Shakespeare's use of dramatic irony that's where the audience know something the characters on stage do not in the previous scene act one scene 2 we've already seen this moment where Duncan explains he's going to promote M Beth to th of cordor saying no more that th of cordor shall deceive our bosom interest go pronounce his present death and with his former title greet MC Beth the Brilliance of Shakespeare's structural decision lies not only in the creation of dramatic irony but also impr prompting deeper questions that tie in with the major themes of the play of appearances versus reality what McBeth sees is not what we see it's very clever and we can think more about the whole Tex structure too Shakespeare decision to open the play with the witches suggests they'll take a significant role but his decision to end their role so early in the play in Act 4 scene 1 perhaps questions or undermines that another way to look at structure is within the extract itself and this is similar to the kinds of things you're looking at in paper 1 question three for English language on AQA so looking again at the extract what might we pick out the structural sequence of the witch's prophecies moving from what MC Beth and the audience knows that stain of Glamis to what the audience knows but MC Beth doesn't thing of cordor to what has not yet happened but will becoming King suggests power as it moves from what is proven to what is predicted from what is known to what is unknown but as always we only write about this if we can make it relevant to the question there's no benefit to showing off your knowledge of structure or Fray tag or anything like that unless it is relevant to your answer form means the type of text you're studying so in section A A play where we have an audience not a reader in a play you might think about the use of stage directions to suggest aspects of a character's behavior and considering how things will appear on stage paying close attention to stage directions will help here also think about how things would look and sound on the stage so the witches speak in trochaic meter where when we read the words on the page the difference perhaps doesn't stand out but the trochaic meter of the witch's speech would make them sound notably different to all of the other characters who speak in Pros or I Amit pentameter if we were watching and listening to the play so this auditory difference further sets The Witches apart and perhaps amplifies their mysterious sense of power AO3 is context the term can be understood in a variety of ways and will vary depending upon which text you're studying context can mean when the text was written when and where it's set the literary context and genre or responses from different audiences so actually by writing about MC betha's tragedy we'd be hitting AO3 in terms of genre but cont text also links to The Wider themes in a text and a helpful piece of advice from the exam board is that the questions will always be worded in such a way that they have a link to context in them once again answering the question is key if you answer the question fully you'll be addressing context to gain full marks for ao4 you should achieve consistent accuracy in spelling and punctuation and you must also use sentence structures and vocabulary to clearly Express meaning so giving yourself a few minutes at the end to check through your answer these things will be helpful that extra Mark or two could be the difference between one grade and the next so let's recap the points from this video think about the question in relation to the whole text including the extract and come up with the theory or line of argument or concept that you will explore throughout your answer bring in any methods that are relevant to your answer and keep looking back at the question and your introduction to make sure you're not drifting off topic because this is an extract based question think about where the extract is from in The Wider text and consider how that's relevant and consider if that is relevant to your question I hope you found this video useful if you'd like to read a full answer to this question you can find that in the second edition of my guide to English literature which I've just updated it's linked in the description you can get it in paperback on Amazon or instant download ebook atmr bru.com but if you found the video useful and want more in this series on the other sections of the exam then please do give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel