Most students who reach Question 4 have already studied the text. They have notes, they have quotations, and they may even have a paragraph prepared in advance. Then the question arrives with a specific focus they did not expect, and the prepared answer turns into a lot of correct material that does not quite answer what was asked. That gap between knowing the text and shaping what you know is where many students lose their top marks, and it is rarely about effort.
The mark scheme asks you to explain and analyse how the writer uses language and structure to achieve particular effects, and the question itself acts as a filter. Some years the wording is broad and invites almost anything. In other years it asks about interest, engagement, tension or suspense, and a generic answer will not satisfy it. The students who rise to the top bands are not the ones who know more about the text, since everyone has met it. They are the ones who can adapt quickly, choose evidence deliberately and say something insightful about how meaning is built.
In under fifteen minutes, Mrs Wear shows you how to do that. You hear how to turn your knowledge into three or four ideas that fit the exact question, how to choose evidence that lets you show a range of skills, and how much of it is enough. She explains in plain terms what the mark scheme means by perceptive understanding and perceptive analysis, then reads a model paragraph so you can hear the difference for yourself. She finishes with clear advice on timing and how much to write.
The lesson works best as a companion to your own anthology revision. The advice comes from someone who has marked a large number of these answers, and it is frank about what the exam board's wording leaves unclear. You come away with a method you can practise on past questions, along with an honest message about the practice needed to make it second nature.
Why this lesson is worth your time
- It shows how to fit your existing notes to an unexpected question.
- It explains the two ideas the top mark bands depend on in everyday language.
- It includes a model paragraph, so you can hear what high-level writing sounds like.
- It gives you clear timing guidance for a 12-mark question.
Who should watch
Anyone sitting Edexcel IGCSE English Language Paper 1 who has finished or nearly finished their anthology revision and now wants to turn knowledge into marks. It is particularly useful for students aiming for a Grade 7 to 9. Students on a 4 to 6 will gain a clearer idea of what to practise, and teachers and parents may use it to guide feedback.
Make the most of it
Pick a past Question 4 and plan an answer before you watch, then replan afterwards and compare. Use the Language Technique Bank and the Structure Technique Bank to vary the techniques you analyse. Finish by taking the quiz underneath, then redo a weak paragraph from your own practice using what you have learned.
This lesson is also on my YouTube channel. Watching it here means you can register to keep track of the lessons you have finished, bookmark lessons for later and test yourself with the quiz underneath.
Now, let's be honest. Because this question is based on the anthology texts, your teacher has already taught it to you and with thorough revision, you shouldn't find it hard to understand what's going on or to try and find techniques to analyze. But the real challenge with this question, the thing that separates a higher level grade response to a mid-grade response is knowing how to shape what you know to fit the exact question that's in front of you. selecting only what is relevant and the hardest part delivering a perceptive insight. And that's what I'm going to focus on with you today. The mark scheme explicitly demands that you explain and analyze how the writer uses language and structure to achieve specific effects. This means that the question prompt is essentially your filter. You need to come up with three to four ideas that directly answer the question and then select the best evidence to support it. Now, on plenty of occasions, that has been really easy for students to do because the question is insanely broad. For example, in June 2023, the question was, "How does the writer Benjamin Zephaniah use language and structure in text 2 to convey his experiences?" That question might as well be, "Tell us anything you know about young and dyslexic." There is no difficulty in tailoring to the question there. Just write, my friend, write everything. But in many of the years, the questions are more specific. One of these appeared in May 2024 and has been a regular question stem before that. How does the writer Emma Lavine use language and structure in text 2 to interest and engage the reader? To interest and engage the reader. What does that mean? And how do you tailor your understanding of the text to answer it? When an examiner asks how a writer uses language and structure to interest and engage the reader, what they are really asking is how does the writer grab your attention, pull you into the scene, manipulate your reactions. To tailor your existing anthology knowledge to this specific type of question, your three or four ideas need to focus on how the reader is immersed into the world and how the writer makes the reader think or feel about it. In the case of this specific question, think about how how Emma Lavine makes the donkey race come alive for people who weren't there. For example, throughout the piece, the writer plays with the reader's feelings of tension. Firstly, by creating an expectation of high tension, followed by an anti-limax. The high levels of tension are created by the imagery of the race, creating a chaotic, dangerous atmosphere. The writer then engages the reader further by subverting their expectations and highlighting the postra event as the truly dangerous moment. The worst thing you can do for a question like this is just keep repeating the phrase this interests the reader. The writer uses metaphors and this interests the reader. The writer talks about the donkey race and this interests the reader. My examples were super specific about how the reader is being engaged and that's what you need to do too. You can't just have it be a tag on at the end of your paragraph or in your topic sentence. You need to show a specific understanding. And the more specific an understanding you show, the more insightful your answer is going to be. The next type of question I want to talk about and that has also appeared more than once can be seen in the January 2022 paper. How does the writer Carrie Herbert use language and structure in text two to create tension and suspense? The creation of tension, suspense, mystery, or any other feeling that a question might come up with is one that your teacher may not have explicitly mentioned when they taught you the text. But I can guarantee that you can tailor what you know already to answer it. Tension and suspense is all about the management of threat, delay, and uncertainty. So to answer this type of question, your ideas need to track how the writer makes the reader feel nervous, curious, or apprehensive about what is coming next. So if we consider explorer's daughter, what were you taught that is relevant to the feeling of threat, uncertainty, apprehension or curiosity? Well, the way the hunt is presented is a pretty clear start. The tension of the high stakes of it in everybody watching it and the danger of it, but there's also the fact that that tension isn't there from the opening because you can look at that too. You can track how the tension or suspension varies over the text. And actually, when the text opens, she creates this really magical peaceful atmosphere when the narwhals first appear. Often when trying to adapt your knowledge to the question in front of you, you're going to have to think. Think Mark. I know that sounds obvious, but you won't believe how many students want to prememorize and regurgitate their question fours because they know the text in advance. And yes, that can work if you're lucky and get one of those softball questions that are essentially tell me anything you know. But a lot of the time that isn't the question. So you need to practice if you're aiming for the highest grades the skill of in the- moment thinking and adapting what you know to answer the question. One of my favorite things when a student genuinely does that is that they often come up with brilliant insights that I hadn't thought of before either. I love it. So let's imagine you've come up with your ideas. What's next? The evidence and analysis to prove them. When considering which quotes the best to explore, I would say there are two main criteria. Is it relevant to your point is number one. If it isn't, don't use it. The second is, does it give you the opportunity to flex your analytical muscles and show what you can do? This is something to consider across the quotes you look at. You do not want an answer that analyzes an adjective and then a verb and then a noun and then an adjective and then a verb and then a word and then a phrase and then a noun. You want an answer that analyzes an adjective, then juxtaposition, then a metaphor, then a tricolon, then direct address, then the genre, then the semantic field, then the purpose, and so on and so forth. For the highest marks in this question, you need to show off what you can do. If a quote has multiple techniques that you can relevantly analyze within it, bonus points. If you have a quote that you can combine with another quote to explore their combined effect, bonus points. The situation we want to avoid is lots of really short individual quotes being looked at on their own where you essentially zoom in on a single word on that quote, identify its word class and talk about its connotations. That's not going to hit the criteria we are looking for at the top of the mark scheme for a thorough understanding and exploration. I often get asked how many quotes for this question and in a sense that isn't the right question. The question is how much evidence? Talking about tone or genre or audience or the whole text structure won't necessarily have a quote, but it would be evidence. And my answer to how much evidence is going to be really annoying. Ready? When you have enough. I know I'm the worst. So, let me put it in a better way. You have enough evidence when you have shown that you understand how meaning is built up across a text and multiple techniques rather than trying to suggest that meaning is created by one word used one time in one spot. You have enough evidence when you've been able to leave the examiner without doubt that your idea is valid. You have enough evidence when you've been able to show you deeply understand how the writer crafts meaning. That's not going to be possible to do with one piece of evidence, but it might be possible with two or three. If you haven't achieved it by four pieces of evidence, then the evidence you chose probably wasn't strong enough in the first place, or the idea is way too complicated and multi-layered. So, if I was to be significantly less annoying, I would say that two pieces of evidence, at least one of which is a quote, is going to suffice for most scenarios. Still, even that is not a straightforward formula. There are lots of considerations and skills involved. Knowing when you have enough evidence is a skill. Knowing when you have the right evidence is a skill. Knowing when you have good evidence is a skill. Just the act of having two pieces of evidence is not going to help you if they are not the right or good choices. Skills like this are going to need practice. Which is why my advice for this paper generally is practice, practice, practice, and refine. When you get your practice back from the teacher and they've identified that this bit here wasn't analyzed in enough detail or that bit didn't have a good piece of evidence, redo it. Learn from that experience and try to improve. Now, if you feel like the bit you struggle with in question four is just how to analyze, I need you to check the links in the video description to all my videos on how to analyze, including what analysis is and how to analyze to a top grade standard. All of what I say there is exactly what you're looking for with this question, too. What I specifically want to cover here, though, is the concept of a perceptive understanding and analysis, which is what you need for the 11 or 12 out of 12. And what does that mean? First of all, it is a frustratingly subjective concept and in my view, the exam board have not been clear and have often been contradictory when they try to explain what they mean by that. So here's my interpretation based on my experience of marking hundreds of these this question. For perceptive understanding, it's about the extent to which students show they understand why a writer is making a particular writing choice. You need to show how a choice is directly driven by the bigger picture, the text, genre, purpose, audience, and the writer's core viewpoint. If you want to see my videos where I talk you through how to analyze genre, purpose, and audience, see the links in the video description. I'm going to show you a model perceptive understanding in a minute, but first, I want to explain what perceptive analysis looks like because the model has that, too. Perceptive analysis is about tracking patterns. It means you stop looking at individual words on their own and instead look at the interreationship of multiple techniques to show how they work together to create a combined effect. Think about it this way. Let's say you're analyzing explorers or boys and trying to prove that they are presented as reckless. And to do that, you analyze the word boys. Fine. But are you really suggesting that just that one word is able to create all of that meaning? Of course not. That's why you also analyze the quote about the experts who question the wisdom. But here's the thing. Most students will analyze the two quotes while in no way acknowledging their relationship with each other. This makes them reckless. This also makes them reckless. There is a complete disconnect between the quotes. A perceptive analysis is when a student looks at how the impact of one quote reinforces or creates a nuance, a balance, a contrast, or builds on the effect of another quote. They look at the inter relationship of the meaning. Let me put this all in context now by actually showing you a model of perceptive analysis and understanding. This paragraph is for the question about tension in Explorer's Daughter that we looked at earlier. Herbert uses dynamic verbs such as clustered and spinning round and the audiary imagery of a small gasp or jump to show how nervous the women are while they watch. This creates a tense atmosphere around the hunt. She then uses a simile to describe the whole scene as a vast waterborn game. The adjective vast conotes a high scale which juxtaposes with the high stakes symbolized by game to suggest that the intense challenge they face in the hunt and thus create a sense of tension. This sense of high stakes is further reinforced by Herbert's explanation that the outcome of the hunt will bring much needed income. In this sense, Herbert blends a literary imagery of the hunt with practical facts about their need for survival to help her audience who are not familiar with Inuit hunting culture understand why there is so much tension around the hunt. Now, some of that perceptive understanding can be learned in advance. you can make sure your notes cover the genre, the audience, the purpose and the links between those things. But a lot of the perceptive understanding is also coming back to the question. So it's a skill of being adapt what you know to also think about that unique question you're being asked. As for the perceptive analysis, that is pretty much all skill because you cannot in advance learn all the different ways to combine different quotes and what combined effect they have. So I'll say it again for the people at the back who may not have heard me the first time. The first step is having thorough quality notes on the 10 texts and revising them. The second step that cannot be skipped or glossed over is practicing the highlevel skills like perceptive analysis and understanding and tailoring your answer to the question. Think about it this way. 100% of the people sitting the exam will know that text. Okay? Yes, some people haven't revised, but let's imagine a world where everyone paid attention in their English lessons. Therefore, there is not much to differentiate candidates when it comes to what they know about the text. What differentiates candidates for this question is the skill they have to adapt their understanding to a question and to break that understanding down in a way that someone else can read and understand. That's difference for questions 1 to 3 and five where you have an unseen text and part of what you're being assessed on is your ability to understand something you've not seen before. Now, the final question that I'm sure you want to ask is how much do I write? Well, I've advised three to four ideas and each one can vary in its length depending on the uh the evidence that you have. But I would honestly say that I don't really like saying have three to four ideas because it feels really formulaic. Instead, I prefer to say plan for three to four, but just keep writing until you run out of time, ideas, writing space, or a combination of the three. The time you should spend on this question is about 30 minutes. If you want to know the timings for the other questions, see the links in the video description for my videos on those. Of that 30 minutes, you want to take at least five, maximum 10 for planning, coming up with your ideas, choosing the quotes. That then leaves you with 20 to 25 minutes for the writing and write, write, write for that whole time if you can. The space they give you in the exam is about three pages. Uh, not like typical A4 lined pages, just exam pages. And I do not recommend sticking your hand in the air and asking for more paper. When you hit the end of that space, unless you wasted loads of space on a plan or an answer that you started and then crossed out, just end there. Typically, I find that when a student has reached the end of that writing space and they've been consistently analytical, they've written a really strong answer.
