Approaching GCSE English Paper 1 Question 3 STRUCTURE: a “bottom up” approach

Please note: the original short story in this resource contains references to drugs and knives. The short story also contains “arse” and “f—”. Please do not purchase this if you have students or parents super-easily offended by this kind of thing. I would rate the story at certificate 12A but you may wish to err on the side of caution and assume 15.

AO2: Explain, comment on and analyse how writers use structure to achieve effects and influence readers, using relevant subject terminology to support their views.

Paper 1 Question 3 is the structure questions where learners are asked how a writer has structured a text to interest them as a reader. The class is designed to build concepts from the students’ level of understanding.

As such, this lesson teaches structure by building up complexity gradually. The first part of the lesson will simply be reading a very short story for pleasure and discussing what was good (or not) about it. The story is set in an FE college so includes people of students’ own age bracket.

The next step is to continue with an activity that does not reflect exam content but draws on the students’ own media savviness. The assumption is that they watch TV and films – and so can make comments about how these are “shot”. So their second task will be to show how the story could be visually represented on screen. This will involve discussion and other collaborative activities.

The third task will be to match up straightforward textual structural features with those that happened in the text and describe them briefly. This is then turned in to an exam-style response.

There is also an additional language task which follows the layout of a P1Q2 exam question.

This resource contains 4 files as Word documents. These are reproduced as PDFs to ensure that compatability is not an issue.