How to do Question 1, 2 and 3 of Paper 1 Edexcel IGCSE English Language

Questions 1, two, and three are your quick win marks. Together, they are worth 11 marks. And every single one of them relies on a single skill, comprehension. But too many students treat these questions like mini essays, over complicating their answers and spending too long on them. Your goal for these three questions is simple. Achieve full marks in the shortest possible time. And today, I'm going to talk you through how to do just that. Question one is the easiest two marks you will ever get. The exam board is literally asking you to look at a small section of text and pull out two basic pieces of information. Those basic pieces of information do not have to be put into a sentence. Don't overthink it. They can be implicit or explicit. If the question asks you for two words or phrases to describe the weather and the first sentence in the line range says it was a hot sunny day, the first word you write should be hot. The second should be sunny. And then you move on. Done. Write as few words as possible and as fast as possible. The only way this can go wrong is if you take your words from the wrong line range. So, you do want to take a second to double check your answers have come from the correct range. Question two steps things up slightly, offering a maximum of four marks. It will ask you to describe what happens or what we learn about a specific event or situation. If you look closely at the mark scheme rules, it says accept any reasonable description of what happens in own words where possible. That phrase in own words is the important part. If you just copy and paste massive chunks of text directly from the insert, you're not showing the examiner that you actually understand it. You're just proving you can copy things down. The good thing about the accept any reasonable description part is that it means there's a lot of flexibility in how you express the ideas in your own words. It's not like they have some set way they're expecting you to put it in your own words and you have to match it exactly. Usually, what this question means is that you're taking an implied meaning in the text and you're making it explicit. For example, let's say the question is, "What do we learn about the river?" And there is a sentence that says, "The villagers weded slowly through the river trying to evade the slippery rocks." The implied meaning that you can make explicit in your answer is, "The river is difficult to cross or you must take care when crossing the river." An important point about paraphrasing is that you don't need to twist yourself in knots trying not to reuse the words from the text. Let's say the question is asking for four things you learn about the hospital. One of the sentences in the text is that doctors save lives every day in this hospital. Some students think that paraphrasing means they can't reuse the word doctor. If the text says doctor, they think they need to change it to medical practitioners or health care professionals. And that's not right. The examiner knows what a doctor is. You don't need to twist yourself in knots trying to avoid reusing that word. The secret to paraphrasing is not about changing the words. It's about extracting the meaning from the sentence. So doctors save lives every day and this hospital could become the hospital provides life-saving medical care daily. The doctors successfully treat patients every day. I can reuse words from the original quote, but I have shown I understand the implicit meaning going on behind it. We aren't trying to end up like Joey and friends when he was writing Monica and Chandler's recommendation letter. They are human prepossessing homo sapiens with full-sized aortic pumps. The other important aspect to this question is how you set out your answer. I want you to give the examiner an easy time when marking this question. I've examined this paper multiple times and I dread when I open up the question and I see a massive block paragraph because it means I have to go hunting and counting to see if they've got four things. The answers I love are four sentences, each written out separately as their own paragraph, often numbered, so the student and I know exactly how many points they are making, and I can super easily go, "Yep, yep, yep, yep, four marks. Done." It's a super helpful layout for you to make sure you don't write more than necessary or not enough. And a very useful way for increasing the chances of this question being accurately marked by an examiner. And it's really easy to do. So question three, it's essentially the same as question two in that you need to paraphrase as I've already advised and you need to lay it out in the same way the five distinct sentences. But the two key differences, first the fact that this is worth five marks and therefore you need five points, five sentences. And it seems like such a small thing, but I cannot tell you how many students forget this and do four points again and then lose a mark unnecessarily. The second difference is that this time I want you to provide a quote. Now technically you do not have to. The wording of the question is that you may support your points with brief quotations. I have awarded five marks to students who provided no quotations when I examine this paper. But here is why I think the quotes are worth providing as a sort of security measure to ensure you don't lose a mark. Question three is usually harder than question two in terms of the comprehension that you're having to do. So often when students just paraphrase, I'll read their idea and I think, hm, is that right? And I doubt them. When they give me the quote, too, I can immediately be like, oh, I get what they mean. Yeah, they're right. The quote is sort of like your failsafe evidence that your paraphrased sentence is correct. It's the backup plan that guarantees your mark just in case you have that stingy examiner who is doubting the accuracy of your idea. It's worth spending that extra minute to give the quotes as well. The important thing here though is to keep them brief. Do not write quotes that are sentences and sentences and sentences long. Maximum of a medium length sentence. Ideally, less than a whole sentence. Sometimes even just two or three words will suffice. What this then means for how you lay out your answer is that you'll still have the five sentences set out as their own separate paragraphs, but after each one, you'll put a colon and then a quote. You don't need to do any defending or explaining of that quote. Just put the quote. Overall, I want you to practice taking an absolute maximum of 10 minutes to achieve 100% in these three questions. The biggest hurdle in you doing that is not really the questions themselves. writing speed maybe if you're a slower writer. But in my experience, the biggest hurdle students face with these questions is the actual comprehension. That ability to quickly understand the implicit meaning and turn it into your own words. The writing it out on the exam paper is the easy part. Reading comprehension is such an important skill and something that schools rarely have the time to give to. If your school makes a big deal about reading for pleasure, increasing reading comprehension is a massive reason that they do that. Reading comprehension is also going to play a big role in question five because you're dealing with an unseen text. And in the links in the video description, you can find my videos talking you through how to ace questions four and five of this paper as well.

Resources for this lesson

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