This summer, I’ve spent around 70 hours marking 660 GCSE English essays.
I’d only been teaching for two years before I decided I wanted to become an examiner: I thought having a detailed understanding of what examiners are looking for would help me to support my own students to succeed in exams.
I wasn’t wrong. After two summers of marking - one marking essays with Teacher Assessed Grades for an exam board, and one marking traditional GCSE papers - I’ve learned some valuable lessons about how I approach teaching my exam classes, and which elements of exam technique to prioritise.
1. Word class adds nothing to student analysis
At GCSE level, very few students comment on the effect of word class choice or the connotations of words or phrases. Consequently, the arbitrary identification of a word’s class has little weight on the overall analysis and when assigning marks.
Students who used “word” or “phrase” were able to score just as highly as their peers who used “adjective” or “noun”.
2. Don’t teach context for the sake of it
Too often, the context of a text is taught purely to fill time or to make sure students meet assessment objective three.
When taught improperly, context becomes a clunky and disjointed element of student writing that hinders their clarity. Acknowledging it can take the form of a single sentence tagged on to the end of a paragraph, or a list of facts about the era.
Context needs to be interwoven into your teaching of a text, rather than taught as a one-off lesson. If you teach it as some disconnected component, that is how students are bound to approach it in their responses.
3. Instead, teach context in terms of themes
One tip for teaching context in a way that helps students to weave it into their analysis is to approach it in terms of themes.
When teaching social-historical context, consider what students will be able to translate into their own words and be explicit in linking the context to the play when you analyse it together.
4. Stop teaching the phrase ‘perhaps the audience/reader…’
This sentence stem is often tagged on to the end of paragraph, and leads to vague, unlinked and disjointed comments. Instead, try teaching audience reception as the product of analysis.
For example, when talking about how Shakespeare uses the character of Lady Macbeth to challenge Jacobean stereotypes about women, rather than coaching students to add something like, “This makes the Jacobean audience not like Lady Macbeth because she is different” to the end of a paragraph, teach them to incorporate the response into their character analysis.
For example: “Contemporary audiences recognise the deliberate deconstruction of regressive female stereotypes and regard the presentation as Shakespeare’s desire to destabilise the Jacobean status quo.”
5. Thesis statements are critical for higher-level responses
When done correctly, thesis statements are engaging, perceptive and thoughtful. They demonstrate to the examiner that the essay they are about to read is a detailed understanding of the text as a deliberate construct.
Essays that didn’t have a thesis (even a short one) read as disjointed paragraphs, as there was no “golden thread” linking the overall argument.
A thesis forces a student to consider the overall commentary they will make and, consciously or not, helps them to organise their thoughts to ensure coherency and a logical development of analysis.
6. Develop topic sentences
Building on the thesis idea, get students into the habit of using topic sentences: these should indicate lines of enquiry that are then further developed, and not a blunt sentence that doesn’t link to the evidence or subsequent comments made.
Frequently, students introduce a point and evidence and then shift their analysis to a completely different point. While students are still credited for this analysis, the lack of clarity hampers their overall response. Having a topic sentence at the start of a paragraph sets the scene nicely for the analysis that follows.
7. Several comments on a single moment are best
When students make several comments on a single moment, it shows a much deeper understanding of the text than when they make surface-level comments on multiple moments.
This is because it gives students the opportunity to explore various interpretations or unpick nuances in the extract.
When students wrote fleeting comments about multiple quotations or moments, it read as if they did not fully comprehend the text and wanted to say as much as they could.
Teach them to do the former, rather than the latter.
8. Literary criticism doesn’t have a place in GCSE analysis
Generally, GCSE students tend to not have read literary theory in any depth - instead, they are taught specific elements, and how these apply to the text.
In exams, this translates to bizarre, unrelated, and at times pointless, tangents where students feel the need to include several theorists purely for the sake of it.
It makes much more sense to save teaching about these theories for A level and beyond, when students are able to engage with the ideas more fully.
9. Don’t forget to teach about structure
When extracts are heavily dependent on structure, and that is the engaging point of interest, students often avoid talking about it and end up writing unusual and unclear analysis on language instead, which costs them marks. It’s worth taking the time to teach students the role structure can have in making a text impactful, and the different structures that can be used.
10. Teach students to construct a whole essay
Once students have mastered writing at paragraph level, it’s imperative that you teach them how to construct an entire essay if they are going to be able to communicate the full response they set out to.
Students end up getting tired in exams and “brain dumping” when they are nearing their writing limit. This clouds the clarity of their response. Teaching the art of the essay means students understand how they need to structure an articulate and thoughtful response - even when they can feel themselves flagging.
Chloe Bernhardt is acting assistant head of English at a secondary school in England.
