GCSE English Literature Question

[Meredith12]

Do you have to do the books being covered by your school or can you pick any queston if you know another book better?

It would be risky to do another question as they will cover themes, characterisation, language etc in preparation.

A candidate can choose to answer a question on any of the texts. DS1's class studied two different texts for one section of a GCSE paper, so could have chosen either to answer a question on.

For the text studied in class, they will have learned about all the main characters and themes and analysed how the author presents these, including memorising quotes to use as evidence to back up the points they make in their essay. It would be risky to answer a question on a text they haven't studied in class, even if they've read it at home in their own time.

Haha op my dd loves Prude and Prejudice so much, but she did Frankenstein in school. She certainly eyed up the P&P question but of course did the F one, bound to do better on a book you have actually analysed 😁😁

PRIDE not Prude lol

How could you know another book better if you’ve been taught the other one for 2 years?

I would love to study Prude and Prejudice

nagaram 😂😂😂

There's a massive difference between reading a book and studying it. Even if you have memorised every single word of a book, you may still not "understand" it in the way you need to get decent marks in an Eng Lit exam.

My son had really excellent general English/literacy skills from an early age, had a big vocabulary and would read book after book after book, and could usually remember most of it. But he didn't really "understand" them in the way of identifying plots and sub plots, identifying character traits, etc. He just couldn't "do" the subtle nuances, inferences, etc. He basically just read and remembered the words. That meant he suffered a kind of artificial limit to the number of marks he could get on the questions - he'd never "get" the points to access the top marks.

When it came to GCSEs, he actually didn't read the set texts at all. To aim for the top marks, he just read the study guides (CGP and York) for each. Not the right way by any means, but it worked and he now has a GCSE grade far better than he would have done.

There's a big difference between "reading" a book and "studying" a book.