GCSE English Literature: Can you give me some advice on Paper 1, Modern texts where the part b question asks students to ‘Explore another moment where…’?

The part b) task provides an opportunity for students to reflect critically and evaluatively on their reading of whole texts; the scope of the question is linked to the part a) comparative task. Students need to pay attention to the specific task and select (bearing in mind it's a closed text exam) a suitable moment (or moments) to illustrate the particular theme, relationship, character development etc. that the question is focused on.

We always seek to mark positively what a student has written. With this in mind, we need to ensure that a student who focuses on one moment in detail and a student who looks at more than one moment both have access to the full range of marks.

To prepare for this part of the question students will need to have prepared several key moments from the text. Please do take a look at the candidate exemplars published on the website (it's useful to look at ones for other set texts in a particular section, too, to get a sense of how students have tackled this two-part question).

As mentioned above, given this is a closed text exam students do need to spend time preparing key moments from the text to build up secure content knowledge upon which to base their responses. They could build up a series of revision notes focusing on development of themes, characters, relationships etc. in different parts of the text. These notes can be mind-maps, offering a clear visual path of a theme, character or relationship.