📖 Year 10 English

Paper 1 — Fiction Reading

The Paper Structure (AQA)

• Source: one literary fiction text (novel or short story extract, from the 20th or 21st century)
• Q1 (4 marks): list four things. Select and list — no analysis needed. Read carefully.
• Q2 (8 marks): language analysis. How does the writer use language to [describe/suggest/create]? Identify specific words/phrases, name technique, analyse effect. Aim for 3–4 developed points.
• Q3 (8 marks): structure analysis. How does the writer structure the text? Consider: how it opens, how it develops, focus of narrative (close-up/wider), sentence lengths, shifts in tone, the ending.
• Q4 (20 marks): evaluation. "A student says... To what extent do you agree?" Evaluate the writer's craft. Make a judgement, support with evidence, consider the whole text. Go beyond agreeing — qualify or challenge.

Language Analysis Framework

• Identify: quote the specific word, phrase, or sentence
• Technique: name it if helpful (metaphor, personification, sibilance, etc.) — don't just collect techniques
• Connotation: what does the word suggest? What associations does it carry?
• Effect: what does the reader think/feel? WHY does this word create this effect?
• Zoom in: rather than many surface-level comments, go deep on fewer quotations

Paper 2 — Non-Fiction Reading

The Paper Structure (AQA)

• Sources: two non-fiction texts from different time periods (e.g. a 19th century article and a 21st century blog)
• Q5 (10 marks): summary. Synthesise information from both sources. Infer meaning — don't just copy. Use connectives (both, whereas, similarly, unlike).
• Q6 (12 marks): language analysis from one source. Same approach as Q2 on Paper 1.
• Q7 (16 marks): comparison. Compare how both writers present their perspectives/attitudes. Use comparative language. Refer to both texts throughout. Quote from both.

Types of Non-Fiction Texts

• Broadsheet newspaper article: formal register, complex vocabulary, multiple perspectives
• Tabloid newspaper article: emotive language, colloquial vocabulary, strong viewpoint
• Travel writing: first person, vivid description, opinions, often humorous or self-deprecating
• Autobiography/memoir: first person, reflective, narrative structure, emotional
• Letter/diary: personal voice, may be intimate and candid
• Speech/polemic: direct address, rhetorical devices, strong argument

Writing Skills

Paper 1 Writing — Descriptive or Narrative

• Descriptive: paint a vivid picture using all the senses. Focus on one scene or moment. Vary perspective (close-up vs wide). Use sophisticated vocabulary and unconventional imagery.
• Narrative: tell a story with engaging characters and conflict. Show don't tell. Build tension. Use structure deliberately (non-linear, in media res, circular).
• For top marks: vary sentence types for effect, use structural techniques (flashback, cyclical narrative), demonstrate a distinctive voice

Paper 2 Writing — Argue, Persuade or Explain

• Form: letter, article, speech, essay — read the question carefully
• Audience: formal audience (headteacher, newspaper editor) requires formal register; peers requires accessible language
• Purpose: argue (present a reasoned case), persuade (change minds, appeal to emotion), advise (give guidance), inform (explain facts)
• Structure: a clear introduction, logically ordered paragraphs with a clear direction, a memorable conclusion — not just a summary
• Use: a variety of rhetorical devices (rule of three, anaphora, rhetorical questions), statistics, counter-argument and rebuttal, direct address

GCSE English: Marking Priorities

• Communication and organisation: is the writing clear, ordered, and purposeful?
• Technical accuracy: spelling, punctuation, grammar. Use a variety of punctuation deliberately (semicolons, colons, dashes, parentheses).
• Vocabulary: ambitious, precise, varied. Avoid repetition. Use subject-specific language where appropriate.
• SPaG (spelling, punctuation and grammar): worth marks in both papers — proofread

Macbeth

Context

• Written by William Shakespeare, c.1606. Performed for King James I, who was fascinated by witchcraft and had written Daemonologie (1597).
• The Gunpowder Plot (1605) — an attempted Catholic coup — made political treachery highly topical
• Elizabethan/Jacobean worldview: the Great Chain of Being (natural hierarchy from God down to the lowest creature); disrupting it (regicide — killing a king) was the greatest sin
• Setting: Scotland. The power struggle is real — Macbeth is based on a historical figure.

Key Themes

• Ambition: "vaulting ambition which o'erleaps itself." Macbeth's ambition, magnified by Lady Macbeth's, leads to his destruction. The play is a cautionary tale.
• Power and corruption: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair." Appearances deceive. Power gained through wrong means corrupts. Duncan's trust is abused.
• Guilt and conscience: the dagger hallucination (II.i), the ghost of Banquo (III.iv), Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking (V.i) — guilt destroys from within. "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?"
• The supernatural: the Witches (agents of chaos or Fate?), the dagger, Banquo's ghost, the apparitions. Do they cause events or merely predict them?
• Gender and power: Lady Macbeth "unsex me here" — she invokes masculinity to find the will to act. She is initially dominant; Macbeth's descent into violence reverses this.
• Fate vs free will: do the Witches determine Macbeth's fate, or do they merely catalyse choices he was already inclined to make?

Key Quotations

• "Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires." — Macbeth conceals his murderous intent (I.iv)
• "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here" — Lady Macbeth rejects femininity to become capable of murder (I.v)
• "Is this a dagger which I see before me?" — Macbeth's first hallucination; guilt manifesting (II.i)
• "Thou canst not say I did it: never shake / Thy gory locks at me." — Macbeth to Banquo's ghost; denial, paranoia (III.iv)
• "Out, damned spot!" — Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking; her guilt is now uncontrollable (V.i)
• "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day" — Macbeth's nihilistic speech after Lady Macbeth's death (V.v)

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Context

• Written by Robert Louis Stevenson, published 1886. Set in Victorian London.
• Victorian duality: the cult of respectability demanded suppression of impulses. The hidden life (vice, sexuality, violence) was a constant undercurrent.
• Charles Darwin's evolution (1859) had undermined the special status of humans — were we merely animals with a thin veneer of civilisation? Hyde embodies this fear.
• Sigmund Freud: id (primal desires), ego, superego (conscience). Jekyll = superego; Hyde = id — a metaphor for the divided self, perfectly aligned with emerging psychology.
• The novella is also read as exploring repressed homosexuality — Jekyll's shame, his secret life, the exclusively male world of the text.

Key Themes

• Duality: every character conceals a hidden self. Utterson, Enfield, and Jekyll all guard secrets. London itself has a respectable facade and a dark underside.
• Science and the supernatural: Jekyll uses science to transgress boundaries nature intended — like Frankenstein, he creates something he cannot control
• Reputation and social class: Victorian gentlemen valued their reputation above almost anything. Jekyll's desperation to maintain his is what dooms him.
• The repression of desires: Hyde does what Jekyll cannot: he acts on every impulse. But Hyde grows stronger with indulgence — repression and release as a vicious cycle
• Secrecy and revelation: the narrative structure (multiple perspectives, the delayed "full story" in Jekyll's confession) mirrors the theme of hidden truth

Key Quotations

• "All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil" — the central thesis
• "It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty." — Jekyll's self-deception
• Hyde's appearance: "something displeasing, something downright detestable" — others cannot articulate exactly what is wrong with Hyde, only that they feel revulsion
• "I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements" — Jekyll's original motivation was curiosity, even excitement

Power & Conflict Poetry Anthology

Key Poems (AQA)

• "Ozymandias" — Shelley: the ruins of a boastful statue in the desert. Power is temporary; nature outlasts human ambition. Irony: "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" — yet nothing remains. Sonnet form (15 lines) — a rigid form containing an ironic message about rigidity.
• "London" — Blake: a bleak portrait of the city — poverty, prostitution, war. "mind-forged manacles" — psychological oppression is internalised. The chimney sweeper and soldier as symbols of exploitation.
• "The Prelude" — Wordsworth: the narrator steals a boat; nature punishes him with a terrifying vision. Power of nature over the human ego. The sublime: beauty mixed with terror.
• "My Last Duchess" — Browning: a dramatic monologue. The Duke reveals his jealousy and control — and hints that he ordered his wife's death. Power, gender, and the male gaze. The painting as a form of control even in death.
• "Charge of the Light Brigade" — Tennyson: the suicidal cavalry charge of 1854. Glory vs futility. The repetition of "the six hundred" as elegy. Written to honour soldiers; now read more ambiguously (celebrating blind obedience?).
• "Exposure" — Owen: the real enemy in WWI is the weather, not the Germans. The soldiers are passive, frozen, waiting. "Our brains ache." Nothing happens — and nothing happening is its own horror.
• "Storm on the Island" — Heaney: islanders prepared for a storm that turns out to be more terrifying than expected. Nature's power is overwhelming — what we fear is absence, emptiness, "nothing."
• "Bayonet Charge" — Hughes: a soldier suddenly doubts the patriotic ideals that brought him here. The terror of combat reduces him to animal survival instinct. "King, honour, human dignity, etcetera / Dropped like luxuries."
• "Remains" — Armitage: a soldier haunted by his role in the shooting of a looter in Iraq. PTSD made poetic. The body's memory — the imagery of blood is indelible, like Lady Macbeth's spot.
• "Poppies" — Weir: a mother's grief as her son leaves — possibly for war, possibly for university. Ambiguity between the personal and the universal loss. Domestic detail as emotional control.
• "War Photographer" — Duffy: the gap between the photographer's trauma and the reader's comfort. Photographs of suffering "did not move" the Sunday supplement reader. Complicity and distance.
• "Tissue" — Dharker: paper as a metaphor for fragility, impermanence, and the possibility of a different kind of power — light through translucency. Human structures (cities, borders, identities) as tissue-thin and temporary.
• "The Emigrée" — Rumens: a speaker remembers a city from which they were exiled. The city of memory is always bright, even though the real city may now be dark. Identity and belonging.
• "Kamikaze" — Garland: a pilot who turned back from a suicide mission and the lifetime of silence that followed. Family and community as oppressive forces. The daughter narrates — twice removed from the story.
• "Checking Out Me History" — Agard: Caribbean dialect; anger at a colonial education that erased Black and Caribbean history. The contrast between what was taught (British history) and what was not (Toussaint L'Ouverture, Mary Seacole). Form and language as political acts.

Comparing Poems

• Always have a clear, arguable point of comparison rather than describing each poem separately
• Structure: statement of similarity/difference → evidence from Poem A → evidence from Poem B → analysis of both → link back to the overarching argument
• Common comparison angles: attitude of the speaker, the power of nature vs human power, the glorification vs the reality of war, the individual vs the state, memory and the past