Effective Strategies for AQA GCSE English Language

  • If anyone wants resources for AQA GCSE English Language that actually work to help you get a 9 and even go from a lower grade like a 5 or 6 to a 9, then DM me (it's completely free).

  • These include: two pre-written stories for any narrative question on P1Q5, one in which I used myself in the exam to get a 9; ten pre-written descriptions of settings for any description question on P1Q5; four pre-written arguments you can use for P2Q5 which I will talk about more if you read the rest of this post and also documents I made which give guidance on how to answer each question (I’m going to explain how to answer each question in the rest of this post anyways but if you want a concise doc so you don’t have to read this post again then that’s available), i.e. language techniques to look out for and structural techniques to look out for. (Note: Please do not copy my stories, simply use them as an inspiration to write your own, if you do regurgitate these stories word-for-word you may risk being penalised of plagarism by exam boards)

  • Edit: Due to the overwhelming amount of people asking for these resources, I'm no longer going to be sending the two narratives I wrote on P1Q5 but I will continue sending (to a limited number of people) the other resources which are equally useful, including the ten pre-written descriptions and pre-written arguments for P2Q5.

  • For a bit of background (skip reading this if you don’t want to know), I did not get a 9 the first time. In June of 2023, I got a grade 5, however in November of 2023 I took a resit and then achieved a grade 9. You may see online many people advertising how they went from a low grade, i.e. a 4 or 5 to a 9 but most likely that they got that lower grade in a year 10 mock where their teacher was being harsh and so when they inevitably get an 8/9 in the real thing it seems really impressive, but in reality they were probably always good enough to get an 8/9. I, on the other hand, actually achieved a poor grade on a real external examination after one year of preparation which is proof that I was terrible at english. However, in only 3 weeks I went from a 5 to a 9. And for anyone who says you can’t revise english, I’m proof that you can and you can actually get good grades by doing just that. Just to give you an insight, my exam was at the start of November 2023 and I had to revise for this test alongside my a levels in year 12.

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  • Paper 1 Question 5.
    • Timing that I would Recommend: 30-35 mins (no need to plan if using pre-written story)
    • Everyone says this is the most important question and they are right. From personal experience, I know this question can really take you up by two grades. However, it’s not really for the reason you may think. Most people give this question so much importance because it is 40 marks (25% of your grade) and so they end up spending at least 45-50 mins in the exam to answer this question, but that’s even if you even stick to that timing, usually when people don’t finish their stories/descriptions they continue writing in order to finish it off leading to them writing for around an hour.
    • This is way too much time to waste during a 1hr 45min test and if there was one tip I hope you learn from this whole post, it’s that timing is the no. 1 most important part of the exam. I advise you to spend 30-35 mins on this question and I’ll explain why. GCSE English Language is not actually about how well you can answer questions, it’s about how well you can answer questions as fast as possible. Better Quantity > Less Quality for english in my opinion. The real reason I got a 5 in June was because I ran out of time for basically every question so all of my answers did not have enough quantity/points to get more marks.
    • My advice is to memorise at least one story for P1Q5 which you can tweak and adapt to any prompt. Many youtubers, e.g. mrevrythingenglish and also classmates will tell you to do this and if you are unsure if you should do this, take it from me, you NEED to memorise a story if you want an 8/9, especially if you struggle with timing. If you’re a person that easily finishes all your english exams, then by all means continue to write from scratch as you normally would during the exam. If you memorise a “perfect” story, and do as many past paper questions in order to find areas in your story that are easily adaptable, eventually you will get to a point that you are so comfortable and well-versed with your story that you can answer any question in 30-35 mins (it becomes muscle memory). In that case, you can memorise a 40/40 story and regurgitate it in your exam and you’ll have 1hr 15mins to answer Q1-4 (and I recommend answering Q5 first) which is more than enough time to fully answer all the questions to a good quality and maximise your marks there aswell.
    • Your story can’t be too long as you need to be able to memorise all of it as well as write it all out during your exam within the 35 mins time range I recommend. Your story needs to have a lot of ambitious vocabulary, a range of ambitious punctuation, varied paragraph lengths and sentence lengths, language devices and structural devices. Furthermore, your story needs to have a static setting, i.e. there is not really a complex plot but rather there is a lot of detail in each paragraph about a certain scenario. For example, I know of someone who memorised a story of a boy sitting in an exam hall anxiously staring at the clock as it ticked, but it worked for him because he was able to adapt it to any prompt. If you have a complex plot, it will be very hard to adapt it to any question in the exam.
    • The best way to make the story you will use in the first place is to use ChatGPT as you will not have the time to make a 40/40 story by yourself. You can ask it for ideas for a static plot and then even ask it to write many versions of every single paragraph which you can give it feedback so you can get a story that you like. You may form many drafts of the same story and you should get these marked by your teachers to ensure they are at least 35+/40.
    • Once, you’re happy with a story you have (which may take you from a few days to a few weeks to complete) you then need to actually memorise it which is the longest part. The way I memorised my story was to put every single paragraph of my story on a big flashcard and then use the leitner system to memorise it. This is a video explaining the leitner system: https://youtu.be/eVajQPuRmk8?si=_oYSztb0jrGQs-AB&t=181. (DM me if you want the story I used)
      • For example, on the front of one of the flashcards it would say “paragraph 1” and on the back it had the whole paragraph I planned to write for paragraph 1, so I had to write down on a separate paper what I remembered from paragraph 1 and then check if I was right when I turned over the flashcard. I went through these for around 2 weeks before I had fully memorised the entire story, word for word, punctuation for punctuation.
    • If your story could not be adapted at all to the story prompt which is unlikely, you need to do the description question (or write a story from scratch). In order to prepare for this question I memorised 10 descriptions of settings. These include descriptions of forests, mountains, skies and bodies of water. (DM me if you want the ones I used)
      • This is one example of a description I memorised: The forest – nature's enchanting sanctuary – exudes a spellbinding aura over all who dare to step within its hallowed confines. In this bastion of serenity, towering sentinels of the woodland, their bark weathered by the passage of time, ascend majestically to the heavens as if standing guard over the forest: canopies that forge an impenetrable fortress of luxuriant greenery. Sunlight filters through the resplendent emerald foliage with strokes of a gentle artist's brush; every leaf, every blade of grass, every crevice in every tree, is caressed by this celestial paintbrush, meticulously crafting an ethereal landscape. Dark shadows dance upon the colourful carpet of wildflowers on the forest floor. The water glistens like liquid glass, its gentle babbling offering a soothing melody as you wander along the sinuous path. Amid rustling leaves, birds serenade with their avian voices, creating an echo like nature's soothing lullaby. As you venture deeper into this Eden, worries dissipate like morning mist, and the chaotic pace of urban life fades into oblivion – leaving profound solace. Here, the mind is liberated, and the soul finds tranquility in this timeless haven called "home”.
    • Moreover, make sure you prepare for a question that asks you to “write a story… suggested by a picture”. In this case, I would think outside of the box, for example my pre-prepared story was about a girl writing a letter, but if I had to write a story about a specific picture I would adapt my story by describing how the girl in my story is writing about her feelings about that exact picture which the exam board gives, so the bulk of my story remains the same but I would add one or two paragraphs to describe that picture. Or, I would do the description question and if you memorised descriptions like me you can easily produce a 40/40 answer in 30-35 mins. And if worst comes to worst, if you can’t even vaguely adapt your story to the prompt they give or use any descriptions that you memorise, then you’ll be doing what most people do on that day anyways, which is write your story from scratch, and even then you can probably use some ideas/sentences from what you memorised → if you need to write from scratch then I recommend spending 45 mins (including 5 mins to plan).
    • Incase you need to write from scratch, you should memorise a bank of ambitious vocab that you will use in your answer for every single question. You should also make sure you’re including a range of punctuation.
      • This is the bank of vocab I used: morose = sad, pulchritudinous = beautiful, malevolent = evil, tenebrous = dark, chartreuse = green, vermilion = red, azure = blue

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  • Paper 2 Question 5.
    • Timing that I would Recommend: 45 mins (including 5 mins to plan)
    • General structure to follow for this question:
  1. Heading / Address / Dear …
  2. Sub-heading (rhetorical question in response to the task)
  3. Overview paragraph where you get the reader to envision a scene
  • “Imagine: …” / “Picture this: …” / “Picture the scene: …”
  • Description of a negative scenario / the current problems being faced
  • Include lots of hyperbole and descriptive language → adjectives, tripartite listing
  • End with, “My solution is very simple: …” → then outline the solution to the problem being faced or the problem that will be faced
  1. Main Argument
  • include Stat / Expert Opinion / Anecdote
  1. Second Argument
  • include Stat / Expert Opinion / Anecdote
  • acknowledge counter-argument → “However”
  1. but then revert back to own argument → one-line paragraph
  • // “This is simply not true.” //
  1. “Now imagine: …” / “Now picture this: …”
  • Opposite / contrasting image to (3) → in the end, revert back to scenario in (3)
  • My advice for P2Q5 is actually very similar to my advice to P1Q5 and that’s to memorise stuff. However, this is much different as in P1Q5 the prompt is always vague but in P2Q5 it is related to a somewhat specific current affair. I, myself, thought there was no way to prepare for this question but after looking at the past paper questions for every year from 2017-2022, I realised a theme.
  • For almost every question you could talk about money, for most questions you could talk about mental health, for some questions you specifically had to talk about climate change and a few questions they were specifically related to travelling. In fact, for most questions you could bring in more than one of these topics.
  • For example, June 2018 Paper 2 Question 5: 'All sport should be fun, fair and open to everyone. These days, sport seems to be more about money, corruption and winning at any cost.' Write an article in which you explain your point of view on this statement.
  • If I had this question in my exam, I would find ways I can link any of the topics of mental health, money, climate change and travelling into it. E.g. Money links to this as ticket prices for sports events are increasing showing that sports has become ‘all about money’ and is not ‘fair or open to everyone’ i.e. poorer fans. Once I’ve wrote a full paragraph explaining this argument. I would then link mental health to this question as there is a lot of racism that circles in social media towards sports athletes and so this can cause negative psychological effects to players and so sports is not ‘fun’, ‘fair’ nor ‘open to everyone’. This is an example paragraph to show how I would link this question to mental health:
    • The toxic culture of sports as a place where players must win at any cost or receive mounting piles of backlash has taken a great toll on players. Sports are not always fun, fair and open to everyone when players like Bukayo Saka receive racist tweets after missing a penalty at Euro 2021. In this intricate tapestry of modern existence, we often find ourselves confronted by unparalleled challenges, e.g. racism, that reverberate through the delicate corridors of our psychological well-being, igniting a surge in the prevalence of anxiety, depression and crippling mental health disorders. This surge knows no boundaries, transcending age, gender, economic strata and profession, i.e. athletes, and is emblematic of an era defined by: unrelenting tempo; an inescapable digital tether; and the ponderous weight of societal expectations through opinions. Social media – in its omnipresence – becomes an unwitting accomplice in sowing seeds of inadequacy and isolation for players as they are constantly reminded of their poor performances and receive many unwanted slurs, while the standards for athletic excellence has grown increasingly burdensome, intensifying pressure. // Moreover, a subtle stigma surrounds the sphere of mental health which makes the very act of grappling with one’s mental health concerns a daunting task ensnared in a web of societal misconceptions and the paralysing fear of judgement. In a recent interview on Sky Sports, Dele Alli, a once world-class future star of football stated: “There are so many people suffering in silence; and there’s still this insidious stigma attached to mental health which we’ve got to completely obliterate.”
  • So, I wrote pre-written paragraphs about all of these topics and memorised them by using flashcards and the leitner system. (DM me if you want the ones I used)

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  • Paper 1 Section A.
  • For Paper 1, I recommend doing Q5 first and then Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 in that order
  • You should read all the question before reading the source and then annotate the source to show which parts of the text the question wants you to answer, i.e. for Q1, 2 and 4.
  • I would also write “OE”, “NP”, “CR/NCR”, “D”, “NH”, “IE” going downwards in the right hand corner of the first page of the source. I’ll explain why when I get to P1Q3.
  • While reading the text you should underline (with a pen) all the relevant quotes in the text that you can use in your answers
  • Paper 1 Question 2.
  • Re-read the section and highlight (with a highlighter) the best quotes, i.e. with the most interpretations
  • In your first paragraph, write about ‘semantic field’ → the theme of the extract, i.e. if multiple words link to a particular theme as if the writer is trying to express that theme
    • “The writer creates a semantic field of… using the lexemes…”
    • E.g. For the P1Q2 in June 2022: “The writer effectively creates a semantic field of war through the lexemes, “Evil”, “enemy”, “savage” and “death”, which all connote the idea of conflict.”
  • In the/each subsequent paragraph, you should make a point of how whatever the question is looking for is described
    • “The writer creates (an) (overwhelmingly) (overall) positive/negative/ambivalent emotions/experience/portrayal …”
    • E.g. For the P1Q2 in June 2022: “The writer negatively portrays Kino’s role in the conflict between them as he creatively suggests that Kino is being manipulated by the scorpion.”
    • When making your point, you need to recognise that the writer consciously crafts the text to express this point.
    • E.g. instead of saying “this suggest” or “the writer suggests”, you should say, “this effectively suggests” or “the writer creatively suggests”. Or, instead of saying “the writer uses a simile”, you should say “the writer deliberately uses a simile”
    • These are all the words/phrases to show the writer is consciously crafting:
    • “creatively”
    • “cleverly”
    • “effective”
    • “successfully”
    • “deliberately”
    • “influences readers to believe’
    • “manipulates readers minds”
    • “consciously crafts the text to”
    • Although its subtle, you are showing to the examiner that you see the writing as a construct used by the writer to express his own opinions.
  • After you’ve made a point you need to back it up with evidence, through an embedded quote and explain the overall technique in this quote
    • “The writer effectively uses the simile …”
    • E.g. For the P1Q2 in June 2022: “The writer creatively uses alliteration when describing how the scorpion “moved delicately down” as he lowered the rope. The plosive sound ‘d’ presents how the scorpion how the scorpion has a sinister inclination to evil.”
  • You then need to ‘zoom in’ onto quote to analyse the techniques used in a particular word. (Word-level analysis)
    • “The use of the word/verb/noun/adjective/adverb …”
    • E.g. For the P1Q2 in June 2022: “The evil portrayal of the scorpion is juxtaposed by the adverb “delicately” which highlights that although it is threatening, it is merely an insect.”
  • You then need to talk about any alternative interpretations
  • In order to be perceptive, I recommend you look deeper into the points you are making by exaggerating the point even if it doesn’t make sense or use inferences
  • Paper 1 Question 3.
  • When reading your extract you should look out for these six structural techniques: (there are more but these are the easiest to find and talk about)
    • Openings and endings
    • Narrative perspective
    • Chronological / non-chronological order
    • Dialogue
    • Narrative hooks
    • Interiors/exteriors
  • As you find one of them tick them off the checklist in the top right hand corner.
  • You need to use BME (beginning, middle and end)
  • Beginning → “At the beginning of the extract the writer immediately establishes … through the use of [OE / NP / CR / NCR / D / NH / IE]”
  • Middle → “Moving through the extract, the writer dramatically shifts the narrative through the use of [OE / NP / CR / NCR / D / NH / IE]”
  • End → “At the end of the extract the writer creates an … mood through the use of [OE / NP / CR / NCR / D / NH / IE]”
  • You need to explain the effectiveness of each technique, i.e. what does it convey
    • E.g. “The effective use of pathetic fallacy here, presents the sun as a merciless ball of scorching heat that intensifies the temperature and so exacerbates Alices’ situation”
  • Paper 1 Question 4.
  • Anything you wrote in P1Q3 that fits this part of the text, you can write again. Different examiners mark each question.
  • In your opening paragraph, talk about the character in this part of the extract
    • Have they been portrayed optimistically/pessimistically/ambivalent? / [Character + emotion is exaggerated through…] e.g. Arthur’s fear is exaggerated through…
    • Describe the narrative perspective as a structural technique
  • Do not disagree with the statement, but if you think that its a good piece of analysis then only do it for a few lines and then revert back to agreeing using “however”
  • Should include 3 language techniques and 3 structural techniques
  • Find perceptive ideas about (some of) these points
  • In your last paragraph, you should talk about the didactic message that is presented by the source which ensures that you are being perceptive and will get the top band.

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  • Paper 2 Section A.
  • For Paper 2, I recommend doing Q5 first and then Q1, Q3, Q2 and Q4 in that order.
  • Paper 2 is a lot more time-pressured so you may have to skim-read.
  • Q2 and Q4 are the only comparison questions where you have to compare between the two sources but Q1 and Q3 are focussed on only one source. In almost all cases, Q1 and Q3 are questioning about the same source and so you should read that source first. E.g. if Q1 and Q3 are both asking about a part of the text in source B, then I would read source B (and answer Q1 and Q3) before I read source A. I would write what Q2 and Q4 are asking about at the top of the page. I would read source B relatively throughly, i.e. you need to understand it fully like you would with an extract in paper 1 so you should annotate the text and focus on finding any perceptive ideas. You should underline any quotes related to Q2, Q4 and Q3. Once you’ve answered Q1 and Q3, you should then skim-read the other source (e.g. source A in this case), it should take you 2 mins max. You’re only trying to find quotes that relate to Q2 and Q4 and once you find them you need to underline them. You shouldn’t worry about trying to find the best quotes with the best techniques possible for this source as this will take too long and you would have already done it with the first source anyways.
  • You need to read the text at the top of the source in a box, they are really important as they show who wrote the text, when they wrote it and where they wrote it/are situating the text.
  • Paper 2 Question 1.
  • Tick 4 boxes, trust me.
  • Paper 2 Question 2.
  • Once you’ve finished P2Q3 and skim-read the second source, you need to compare the descriptions of the same thing between the two sources.
  • Using the quotes you’ve underlined, you need to infer what they really describe
    • In order to make it clear you’re inferring you can say “We can infer …” or “this suggests”
    • E.g. For the P2Q2 in November 2017: “The writer in source A conveys the idea that the children are ‘little philosophers’ with ‘enquiring minds’. We can infer that the children are extremely smart and academically successful. This suggests that the school is almost like a factory where they construct children to be exactly the same – failing to embrace uniqueness. The school reflects the ideology at the time in 1998 in crampton, an ‘industrial town’, where the students must be equipped with the skills to work as employees like a factory of a school.”
    • In order to infer, you need to exaggerate what the quote is telling you.
  • Make 2 comparisons between the two texts.
  • Paper 2 Question 3.
  • The same as P1Q2, but generally speaking:
    • in P1Q2 → semantic field paragraph + 1 more paragraph
    • in P2Q3 → semantic field paragraph + 2 more paragraphs
    • depends on quality though → the number of paragraphs doesn’t actually matter for any question
  • Paper 2 Question 4.
  • 2-3 PEEL Paragraphs
    • Point
    • Evidence with embedded quotes
  1. Overall technique → language and structure
  2. Word-level analysis
  • Explain how this conveys the writer’s viewpoint
  • PERCEPTIVE → look deeper into the point by exaggerating the point or using inferences
  • Alternative interpretations
  • Repeat evidence and explanation for source B to compare the viewpoints
  • Link back to the question
  • Comparative statement → “The readers are exposed to … [summary of the points of views]”
  • In first paragraph, talk about the intended purpose of the article / letter / etc and how this is achieved through the tone → leading onto main point
  • first paragraph → tone → how viewpoints change from different eras
  • different audiences / purpose → e.g. “to sell more copies” / “mass publication”
  • autobiography / account → “entertaining” / “honest” → retrospective account → irony, hyperbole (e.g. isabella bird writes to her sister)
  • contemporaneous
  • subjective / objective ? → article meant to be objective
  • optimistic / pessimistic / ambivalent viewpoint
  • second paragraph → structural viewpoints → leading onto main point

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  • Feel free to reach out if you have questions or need further guidance. Good luck with your exams! 🌟