How to succeed in your ‘Of Mice and Men’ examination
ASSESSMENT OBJECTIVES
 AO2 Explain how language, structure and form contribute to writers’
presentation of ideas, themes and settings.
 AO4 Relate texts to their social, cultural and historical contexts; explain
how texts have been influential and significant to self and other readers
in different contexts and at different times.
AO4
 Because the text you are studying is a text from a ‘different culture’ you have to relate to the
context in your response.
 You must therefore write about the context of the text making sure that what you write is
relevant to text and task.
 It is not enough to show that you know about the setting of the novel – you must relate what
you know to the task.
WHAT IS ‘CONTEXT’?
 Context = the SETTING of the text i.e. where and when the action is set.
 How is the setting significant in the narrative of the text?
 How does the setting relate to the ‘real world’?
 How do these things influence the way we respond to the text?
SETTING AND THE NARRATIVE
 How is the setting significant to the narrative of the text?
or
 In the text, to what extent do things happen as they do because of when/ where the story
takes place?
 In the text, to what extent are the characters like they are because of when/where the story
takes place?
SETTING AND THE ‘READ WORLD’
 Setting becomes ‘context’ when you link the setting in the text and the setting of the ‘real
world’.
 Setting becomes ‘context’ when you start to explore the relationship between them.
EXPLORING CONTEXT
 Exploring context helps us to understand/ think more carefully about/ alter our view of
characters and their relationships.
 It also helps us to understand more about what happens in the novella.
THE CONTEXT OF THE READER
You may also like to consider:
 How or why responses to a text may change over time
 How or why a text may provoke different reactions in different readers
LINKING TEXT AND CONTEXT
 Select from your contextual knowledge what is relevant
 Explain how the contextual material helps to shape the text itself
 Explore how the contextual material helps to shape the way we respond to the text
 Integrate all this into a response to the task set
 Bolt-on background’ will not get you any marks