GCSE English Language - Student Example Answers for Question 5 Paper 1

Are you wondering how to pass GCSE English 9-1? Then look towards the end of the exam papers. For example, question 5 of Paper 1 of the AQA GCSE is worth half the marks for that paper.  So it’s one of the questions that you seriously cannot afford to get wrong.  Sometimes it is good not only to practice writing stories or descriptions yourself but to take a close look at what others have written too.   In fact you can do a million GCSE English past papers and still get everything wrong if you do not look at exemplars - these are good examples of what the answer could look like.  Markers know this as indicative content and use it to measure the quality of your responses, so even they use this method! So in this video we take a look at narratives – that is short stories.

This video contains two stories written by real students.  They were written in exam conditions and took 45 minutes from start to finish.  This video takes you through both the vital planning stage and shows you what the students actually wrote afterward.

There is also a commentary from world-famous exam marker Lavinia Shufflebottom (OK, she is fictional but what she says is worth listening to!).  The key to this question, really, is planning – ensuring that you include everything that the examiner wants to see.  Take a read of these and see what you think.  Why not give them a mark yourself?

The two stories are also available - free - on the TES website.  Plus if you would like to see more from the shop, please visit the Teaching and Learning Resources for Me shop.

For those of you who are wondering what this is doing on Kuriositas, I am a teacher in the ‘real world’ and make the occasional video to help my students along.  I hope that by putting it up on the site it will help a few more too!