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Quite often, the best responses I’ve read to this kind of question come from student who realise that the best quotations to write about are those where they can reflect on more than one meaning or more than one part of the quotation. However, in order to select these quotations, I had to get through “muffled,” “faint,” “dispirited” and “obscured.” Each of these could trip up one or more of my students and either muffle their chances of picking another quotation or cause them to become dispirited themselves. Interestingly, and you may disagree, there are few words (if any) in the quotations I’ve selected which I think my Year 11 students would struggle with. For example, “the wheels of the coach creaked and groaned as they sank into the ruts on the road” is likely to remain irrelevant to the question if the student doesn’t pick up on the verb “sank,” which implies the weather has been a challenge for some time and that this has had both a damaging effect on the road and the travel conditions.Īll three of these barriers are affected by students’ vocabulary. Which would you most savour pulling apart and why: “shaking the coach” or “blew with such force that the whole body of the coach trembled and swayed?”Ĭontrastingly, there are some quotations in the list above which initially seem less relevant but which a well crafted analytical paragraph could pull round to relevancy and make far more of. Some of the quotations in the list above are pus-filled with meaning about the effects of the weather and some are not. Secondly, there are some quotations which are so obviously relevant and therefore tempting to write about, but which would not be nearly as satisfying to burst through analysis. Unless they can identify the focus of a task and recognise that one word or phrase is linked to that topic and another isn’t, then they don’t stand a chance of being successful. There are at least three ways in which the concept of relevance is a key to this task.Īt the most simple level, students need to figure out what they are being asked to focus on in the text. What, then, are the barriers to students selecting these quotations and subsequently picking the most pus-filled quotations from this list? “the wheels of the coach creaked and groaned as they sank into the ruts on the road”.“too broken by the wind and the rain to feel the whip that now and again cracked”.“faint attempt to gain shelter from his own shoulders”.“Rocking between the high wheels like a drunken man”.“Blew with such force that the whole body of the coach trembled and swayed”.Take a look at this question from the AQA specimen paper:Īs English teachers, I’d suspect as effects of the weather we’d select: You Really Got MeĪs a result, for the purposes of these questions, not all quotations are equal. To do this, they need to know where to squeeze the text and how long to squeeze it for to get maximum impact – maximum marks. They’re high challenge but low tariff questions so students need a swift, efficient approach. The first is worth 8/80 marks and the second 12/80 marks on their respective papers. Paper 1 Question 2 and Paper 2 Question 3 are the language analysis questions. There are two questions across the AQA English Language papers which are like squeezing spots. To do this, you need to know where to squeeze and how long to squeeze for to get maximum impact – maximum pus. You must destroy them and they must burst. This temptation is heightened when the spots are at their most angry, most juicy. If you’ve ever had spots, it’s probable that you’ve known, and maybe even acted on, the disturbing temptation to squeeze. However, as is invariably the case, the most furious, aggressive, humiliating visitors would arrive at the times of heightened anxiety and apprehension. Mostly, and again luckily for me, these were relatively pathetic little things. In the days of my adolescence, I was fortunate to only rarely be visited by the zits. Spots aren’t great for many things, apart from Patsy Palmer’s career and as a metaphor for quotation selection.
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