OCR English Literature Examination Information
This paper assesses AOs 1 and 2.
A01 Respond to texts; select and evaluate details from texts.
A02 Explain how language, structure and form contribute to the
presentation of the writer’s ideas.
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A02 is the key to success here. You need to write about language,
structure and form. In fact, writing about language will be the
easiest and most obvious way forward for the poetry section of the
paper. The OCR paper features a reminder to write about language
with each question.
Alongside language points, you could consider the structure of the poems.
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Points about form would probably be covered by anything said
about language and structure. In general, if you are referring to
well-known poetic techniques, you can be said to be covering form.
If you want to highlight this, you could use a phrase like ‘In terms
of poetic form…’ or ‘Duffy uses devices associated with poetry…’
She does not employ specific types of poem here such as the
sonnet.
The English Literature examination lasts 1 hour and 30 minutes in
total. In that time, you must answer two questions – one on a work
of classic prose – such as Animal Farm or Lord of the Flies – and
one on a poet, i.e. Duffy.
The prose question is worth 24 marks and the poetry 16 marks on
the Tier H paper. The prose is worth 16 marks and the poetry 11
marks on the Tier F paper. This would suggest that you should
spend more time on the prose section in the examination.
Each poetry question asks you to write about ONE poem only. You
do not have to do any comparison in this examination.
There are three possible questions. You choose one.
The first question prints a poem on the paper. The other two
questions five you a choice of two poems in each. This means that
five of the 15 poems will be named on each paper. So, in theory,
you could afford to revise 11 poems and still be guaranteed at least
one question that you could do. In practice, it is probably best to
be confident about all the poems, then you will certainly have a
choice of questions on the paper.