2026 Ultimate Guide to AQA English Literature Paper 1 Section B

hello everybody and welcome to today's video on AQA English literature paper 1 Section B there are 30 marks available for Section B the 19th century novel section and you should spend around 50 minutes on this question the assessment objectives are ao1 2 and three and I went through those in detail in the first video in this series but I'll recap them here for those who haven't watched that and I'll give specific examples related to the 19th century novel so ao1 is all about response to task and text using supporting references now it goes without saying that you need to know your texts inside out yes you'll be provided with an extract from your 19th century novel in the exam but the question will ask you to explore how something is presented across the text including the extract so obviously you'll need to know the text really well to answer the question the most important thing about this exam and in fact both literature exams is the idea of response to task I.E answering everything else your number one priority in the literature exams is to answer the questions and that might sound obvious but time and time again in past exams what we've seen is a number of students text and want to force that into their answer no matter what the question is don't let that be you priority number one needs to be to answer the question the 2023 exam report pointed out and this is a paraphrase that you should carefully examine the question it guides you towards a specific theme or idea within the text and grasping this is crucial now the highest Mark band refers to answers which have a conceptualized response and a well structured line of argument which is explored throughout the answer rather than an answer made up of disjointed paragraphs a conceptualized response has one clear line of argument all the way through so let's look at an example Based On A Christmas Carol this question and a full answer to it is taken from my second edition guide to English literature which is linked in the description and 2 of A Christmas Carol then answer the question that follows in this extract the Ghost of Christmas Past appears to Scrooge you can pause the video if you want to read the extract and the